Why doesn't change work?

I came across the Towers Watson Change and Communication ROI study via The Street, with a quote from Kathryn Yates, global leader of communication consulting at Towers Watson, saying “less than half [of major organizational changes] stay on schedule, come in at — or under — budget or hold people accountable for deadlines... The average survey respondent went through three major changes in the past two years.” This set me thinking about some of the change programmes I’ve worked on and the things I’ve learned.

In my experience the challenges lie in four key areas: leadership, culture, engagement/ownership and management.

Leadership

Senior people sponsor all sorts of initiatives and there is always something new around the corner that will distract their attention. I think this is one of the reasons why there is often a fanfare at the beginning of a change programme – because the people managing it want to show the senior folk that they are getting on with it. However, the next change team will be doing the same thing, and the next, and so it goes on.  The ideal here is to try and link all the changes together, somehow, so that the leadership team don’t feel that they are sponsoring lots of simultaneous programmes, and lose focus or interest.

It’s easier to achieve change if people know that the senior leadership team want it but it’s not enough on its own. One place where I worked I countered some resistance with the immortal phrase “The Managing Director is really keen for this to happen” to which the response was, “Oh he’s always going on about that.”

Culture

Some cultures are just more willing to accept change than others. Some of it may be down to industry – where they are fleet of foot they may be more prepared to (and used to) change. Perhaps it’s more to do with longevity – the longer something has been the same the more difficult it is to change it. But I have also seen the other side of the coin – change had happened so often that people were fed up with it. The lesson here might be to let change settle in and learn from it before going on to change it again.

Engagement/ownership

These are not exactly the same thing, but the problems are the same so that’s why I’ve lumped them together.  For me, ownership is about taking something on, moulding it for that particular purpose or function and being accountable for it. Engagement (in change terms) is more about being willing to change behaviour so that the end result can be achieved. Either way, lack of it is the kiss of death.

The key is to get past the intellectual agreement to a change to it being embraced in practice. An early lesson I learned – just because somebody agrees that something needs to be done doesn’t necessarily mean that they will actually do something different when it comes to it.  Don’t walk away thinking, “I can tick that off my list now, they understand why change needs to happen.”

Avoiding the feeling of change being ‘done to’ people is also preferable. To help with this, I still like William Bridges' work on change/transition best (search for it if you don't know it, there's loads of references). 

Management

Well of course there are vast quantities of resources dedicated to the successful management of change so I’m not going to encapsulate this in a paragraph. I think the key problem is that there is a tendency to plan too far in advance. I can honestly say I have never worked on a programme where the original milestones were met. Something unexpected always happens. So plans need to be flexible enough to accommodate this.

I also think that many programmes are overly ambitious in their timescales and their budget (the latter often dependent upon the former, of course).  You can see why – you need to sell it to the leadership team and they want lots quickly for not much money.

And so?

Some things I’ve learned:

• Small steps are better – easier to sell to the leadership team (they don’t need to worry about a massive impact on their people); easier to plan; easier to achieve and quicker to get on with. Just make sure that the small steps are all going towards the right point on the horizon.
• Pilots are great – in line with the above, people will buy a pilot more than a wodge of change in one go. You also learn more, you’ll engage more people who will own it (champions!) as they have been involved in it and that will make the full change more effective.
• Keep everyone informed on progress – yes, they may think “not that programme again” but that’s better than them thinking “whatever happened to that – did it fail?” The right level of detail is important – keep it high, maybe even just a few bullet points with more information available for those that want it.

Anybody got experiences to share?

Managers – the squeezed middle

I see the poor old managers are getting it in the neck again about their failure to manage (article in Friday’s Guardian). The raft of comments underneath this article are generally very negative (perhaps not surprising from Guardian readers) and I thought I might stick up for today’s manager.

In our field of internal comms, we deal a lot with the line managers. They are in every stakeholder map you’ll ever do, if you’re working with/in a company that’s bigger than about 12 people. Over time you come across the whole managerial range from brilliant to hopeless. Which does make it tricky when you want them to support your comms implementation, but more on that later.

First, aside from Gary Hamel’s interesting analysis, here are my thoughts on why managers don’t manage well.

Not the right people

The person appointing into the role chooses someone like them – why pick someone who thinks differently from you when that will make life more difficult? I think it’s still rare for someone to think, “I value your different way of looking at things and will employ you for your interesting and new perspective.” Companies don’t have time for different perspectives, they just want you to get on with it. So any ‘faults’ get replicated.

Not enough training

A squeeze on budget usually means a cut in the training budget. Faced with a choice between cutting money from the operational part of the business (where your product or service will suffer) versus training, who would favour the latter? Most budget-holders will acknowledge that people development is important but when it comes to a trade-off you can see which case is more easily made.

Some people are naturally gifted as managers – the rest of us need help. And if training isn’t provided people just copy what they see other managers do (including doing as little as possible)

Not enough time

Decreased budgets also have an impact on the role of the manager. I don’t hold generally with the view that managers in the past were better, but I do think that today with flatter org charts and those vexatious matrix management structures, managers are not allowed just to manage, they also have to deliver stuff. And again, when push comes to shove and you are pressed for time which route would you take? Spend time nurturing your staff and helping them to deliver more effectively in their own way or make sure your boss is happy that you have delivered your own work?

It’s easy to say that it starts from the most senior level and all managers should put people management towards the top of their agenda but (rightly or wrongly) this needs the company to feel it’s in a strong enough financial position to support the time it takes to do this.

What can be done from an internal comms perspective?

Ever the pragmatist, I think you have to work with what you’ve got. (If you’re not working with a culture that encourages good people management, changing it will take a long time.)

The biggest challenge is probably when you have the whole range of managers to support. Good managers will pick it up quickly and do it well; poor managers will do it if it’s easy and if they know they’ll get into deep poo if they don’t.

Therefore my suggestion is:

• Provide a high-level view of what needs to be done – good managers will use it and poor managers will know the extent of the work they are required to do
• Get buy-in from the top down, which means each layer of management needs to demonstrate that they are behind what needs to be done. They need to mention it at their departmental briefings, in their blogs, in their one-to-ones with their people. If it’s not mentioned again, the poor manager will see that s/he can get away with stalling on it
• Provide a toolkit focused on making the manager’s life easier. Provide a range of comms at different levels and put it online if possible as they can select the parts they will find most useful – manager Q&As are always useful

Thoughts/experiences anyone?

Successful stakeholder engagement – you’ve planned it; how do you achieve it?

Identifying key stakeholders and stakeholder groups is one thing – in some ways that’s the easy part. What’s much harder is successfully engaging them on a continuing basis.  I think stakeholder work is similar to doing strategy – breathe a big sigh of relief once the plan has been done and then get on with the day job…

But nasty things happen if we lose sight of stakeholders. What’s that stat about how many programmes are regarded as being successfully completed? I’ve seen a few estimates over the years but all of them say the percentage is pretty low. I’d bet that a lot of it is due to losing track of where the stakeholders are at.

So what can we do about it? Here are some things:

• Treat stakeholder groups and individual stakeholders differently. Since we can’t communicate with everyone individually we can gather some people into a group and work out how best to keep them informed – and maintain a dialogue if necessary. This is not going to be the one-on-one relationship that you need for the really important stakeholders (the ones whose individual support you really need for success)
• Use a range of channels for your stakeholder groups – a mixture of one-way comms that provide the consistency of message and two-way so that they get tailored messages that are specific to their situation (answering the ‘what-does-it-mean-for-me’ question)
• Enlist the experts to maintain the one-on-one relationships. This can be easier said than done, since both parties are likely to be busy. You can facilitate it by seeing if you can provide them with a good reason (latest update?) to maintain that contact – and it can be just a short phone call, it doesn’t need to be a big briefing session or anything time-consuming
• You can also use this call to ask your stakeholders what’s new at their end. They may not be aware that something changing in their world will have an impact on yours
• Match people up – for example, marketing people tend to have a different focus than the techies. And also, if there are technical changes, a techy is more likely to spot if there will be an impact on you (or vice versa)
• If your work is not already on the agenda of senior level meetings see if you can get a short update on there – even a half-pager that can be handed out if not read out. It’s better if you can have someone in there face-to-face but that’s not always possible
• Don’t rely on the fact that having stuff on the intranet or Sharepoint or whatever will keep everyone up to speed with progress. It won’t
• Keep re-visiting your stakeholder map to make sure that programme changes haven’t shifted where people sit on it. It’s often the case that things don’t quite go as expected, however much you try and manage risks or anticipate problems (sorry, challenges). You might find somebody has become more influential than you expected (e.g., there will be more of an impact in their area), and that’s dangerous to ignore. I’ve never worked on a programme that went from beginning to end as we expected it to, not ever ever
• Remember that it’s easier to get people’s attention at the beginning than some weeks down the line, when something else new and shiny has come along that may seem to be more interesting. That’s just human nature. See if you can find a different angle to bring something fresh (do an interview with one of the team?) – and this is where social media can help as well…

Anyway, hope some of that helps. As always, I’d be interested to know what you have found that works well – or didn’t if you’re happy to share!

Measuring and managing

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” they say. Generally speaking, I think most of us would agree with that. Maybe you have sat down with the senior management team while they go through their Key Performance Indicators and tut over a failing sales campaign or rejoice in a customer satisfaction survey. They need to know what’s going well and what not so well in order to fix it. Obvious.

Not quite so easy with internal comms, however. I’ve included measurement in every single comms strategy I’ve ever written but (don’t tell anyone) I don’t think I’ve ever completely cracked it. Of course, you seek feedback from people and measure site hits on the relevant intranet pages, but all it takes is someone with an axe to grind and they will be able to pick holes in your findings (I do love a good mixed metaphor). If they challenge your findings you need to be able to justify them.

Measuring what you have communicated is not much use as what’s important is not what you’ve communicated but whether the message has landed as you intended it to. We may communicate perfectly what we would like people to do and they may understand it. If they then carry on regardless and go on doing what they always did it doesn’t matter how much you have communicated or how beautiful it looks – it’s essentially a waste of money. We can say we have communicated x key messages in line with the comms plan, but it’s whether behaviour or attitudes have changed and whether the outcome is different that’s important.

Another reason that communications efforts are notoriously difficult to measure is that absorption of the information we are trying to share is subjective and influenced by how negative or positive the message is.  If you’re telling people that they have a pay rise you get their attention immediately and, if it’s equal to or (less likely these days) more than they expected, they are likely to be happy with this communication. We need to consider carefully what we ask people and be specific on the topic.

It also depends what we are measuring for: the successful communication of a programme or an activity, or the performance of the communications department?  You’d ask different questions, I think.

So we have a good reason to be selective about what we measure and what conclusions we draw from it. By all means measure site hits, but don’t conclude from that the higher the hit rate the better. There are a number of reasons people might return to it – not always different people checking it out because they have been told it’s so good (unfortunately).

Where appropriate, it’s a good idea to focus on whether the outcome matches expectations. To what extent are people following the new process (as an example)? Focus groups or other F2F stuff help with digging below the surface to find out what could have been better. Both qualitative and quantitative methods have their place.

I’m a bit suspicious of hanging too much on surveys from the time that I ran two versions of a survey across matched samples and found that the results were quite different: where I had asked a number of questions leading up to the final ‘overall what do you think?’ question the results were much more positive than where I had asked this question first, and then gone through the separate components afterwards. The questions were the same; they were just in a different order. My conclusion? Asking the question up front gave an instant reaction, a reflex. Asking it last, after people had been reminded about all aspects, seemed to have made them think that overall the change had been positive. Further exploration was needed.

The result is that it seems to be wise to (a) be clear why you are measuring things, (b) be selective and focused on a few important things (unless you’re doing a simple comms audit), (c) use a wide range of methods to help you cross-check your findings and (d) be careful in your conclusions, taking account of other factors that might skew the results.

Social media (again) – cart before the horse needed?

I was re-reading Elizabeth Lupfer’s interesting article on building a roadmap for internal social media (re-posted on ragan.com) and a thought struck me. Her approach is eminently sensible and follows the straightforward comms approach of identifying the need and then working out the best solution (i.e., channels) that meet the requirements.

However, it did make me wonder if there is enough experience of and familiarity with the wide range of available SM channels and their pros & cons to enable us to decide which would be best. We all know when a newsletter fits the bill, or an intranet article, or a workshop, or a presentation. That’s because, like all old friends, we know their foibles, when they are right and when they are best left alone.

But we have a load of new guys on the block all wanting to be our new friends. The list of social media products grows every day. Some, like Yammer, seem to be gaining broader acceptance and we are getting to know them better. Others, like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are perhaps more familiar outside of the business context. One client of mine swore by HootSuite; another liked Storify. There are tons of them, and no doubt there will be more. How to choose the right ones? If I identify that an organisation could do with a more collaborative environment – and let’s face it, which doesn’t – how can I arrive at the best solution when I haven’t experienced them all?

Now I know these all do something different, and this leads me to another thing.  I’m wondering if some of these new-fangled tools fit needs I didn’t even know I had.  Like the iPod when it was first introduced. Or, I daresay, the intranet. I don’t think we started with a bunch of requirements and then thought, ‘what we need is an intranet to sort this out’. I think we learned it was possible and thought ‘what a great tool this could be if we use it right!’

This makes me wonder whether there’s a case for introducing some of these tools on a small-scale basis and seeing how they get on. Then we can work out if we need them or not. Or is that just heresy?

That’s what happened to me with Yammer. One of my clients used it, and it was growing like mad because people liked it. So I hopped on board to see what it was all about. Now I would recommend it I think fairly widely because it has potentially such a broad reach if used the right way.

Perhaps we should we acquire a few carts and see if the horse likes pulling them…

Social media – what you can and can’t manage…

The best thing about internal social media is its ‘by-the-people-for-the-people’ nature.  As communications managers this can go against the grain somewhat – it’s much more comfortable to have channels that we can control, where we know what’s going to be said because we are the ones saying it. But recent studies (for example, ACPO, Gagen MacDonald and a piece in the HBR that I talked about below) show that social media is increasingly expected by the younger workforce to be available within their workplace and it’s getting to be a differentiating factor for them when choosing an employer (US-based but the rest of the world will follow if not already there). It’s not going to go away.

Internal Communications can’t and shouldn’t have control over social media content – this takes away the whole point of having it. A bit like your mother checking your Facebook updates before they go up – who wants that! But we should review it and take action if necessary to keep it a resource for people to use freely without fear of castigation.

So we’ll be in the situation where we manage channels used to convey messages and tell our stories, while participating in and accounting for (but not directly managing) social media channels where our people will talk about our messages and stories, sharing their views and opinions.

How comfortable will we be with this free-for-all? Depends on the culture and maturity of the organisation in question. Where this is positive there will be self-regulation and it’s less likely that something unsuitable will go up there. (Trolls will stay under their bridges.)  

Of course in an unhappy organisation there is more risk. Here’s a vicious circle: senior leadership doesn’t trust its people, which leads to employee dissatisfaction, which would lead to negative comments on open communications channels, which would prevent leaders from allowing these channels, which leads to more dissatisfaction and even more distrust.

How to break this? Well, you need to sort out the source of the problem.

Sometimes it’s due to where the organisation is at: major transformation programmes often lead to nervousness within both management and their people and so not the best time to introduce ISM. But if it’s already there you can’t quash it.

Another stumbling block is with those in management who see social media as a time-waster. (The same used to be said about the intranet.)

A key part of the solution is implementing a policy. I know that sounds really dull and boring (that well known double act) but at least everyone knows what the rules are and it’s easier to redress things that go wrong if you can show that the policy hasn’t been met. If you haven’t already got one, it’s a good idea to ask for people’s help in setting one up – particularly those who are really interested in social media. This gets them on your side of the fence and their knowledge will help you get it right!

The challenge (as with all policies) is to keep it comprehensive, short and clear. Make sure that you say something about removing offensive content and perhaps try and keep it on a positive footing by suggesting all the things social media is good for. That might help the senior doubting Thomases as well as dissuade people from posting what they are going to have for lunch that day…

Channel selection: the three-way view

I recently added a comment on a forum that asked the following: “You have some urgent news to share with a large group of employees. What's your preferred communication medium?”

Your first thoughts might be the same as mine: (1) it depends and (b) you likely need more than one.

Depends on whether the news is just urgent, or urgent and important, or urgent and important and complex. And depending on the answer to that tells you what channels you need to use.

I’ve used these three dimensions for a number of things – not just to help with channels but also to help with allocating projects to people within internal comms departments. I thought I’d share it with you as you might find it useful.

It works best if you consider each of the three dimensions and decide which is driving the need to communicate. The other two may or may not be relevant – this is your secondary consideration.

Urgency first

Clearly you need something that’s immediate and ‘push’ – email, voice (voicemail or phone blast), text, or intranet if you can be sure that people will have it open and will see it. In extreme cases you need the comms equivalent of pushing the fire alarm button!

It is worth differentiating between what’s really urgent and what isn’t. Many customers seem automatically to say that their stuff is urgent (particularly those who are rubbish at planning).

Importance first

Here you need a range of channels that build on each other. Follow-through is important – the effort is often put into the launch of something important but maintaining the momentum can be difficult, particularly if other new shiny things come along to take its place. Leaving our people saying in a few months’ time “whatever happened to that project?” You need to keep the interest alive so it retains its importance.

Complexity first

Although it’s nice to simplify, some things are just complex either because of the subject matter or because of the number of strands that need to be fitted together. Here you might need to undertake some additional stakeholder analysis – what’s complex to one lot of people may not be to another. Technology and financial projects often fall into this category.

The ‘what-does-it-mean-to-me’ question is always important, but is particularly so here. One of the most complex communications I worked on was required to explain to senior management how their bonus was constructed. It was fiendishly complicated and they were understandably anxious to be able to work it out for themselves. It needed a 17-page PDF to build up the picture of four different elements each with different weighting.  But at least they understood it…Nobody else (apart from HR) needed to.

What does it mean for channel selection and management?

The impact of these on your channel selection depends on a number of factors amongst which are:

·       the extent to which you need both one- and two-way communication (just urgent may need only one-way unless you want to know how well it worked)

·       leadership visibility after the initial communication (really useful for strategic stuff)

·       continuing support for line managers (like when you have widely different audiences – managers can tell you what else their people need to know)

I’m a great advocate of using a number of different channels to reinforce and support the message. More on this in a future post...

One last thought: I read this in a report on the 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer: “the average person needs to hear a story three to five times from different sources before they believe it”.  So there is an additional challenge in repeating the message but in interesting ways so that people are not bored by it. A difference between repeating and reinforcing...

Any views?