Effective Change Communication Strategy to Ensure Successful Transformation (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Do you know 60% of change projects fail and the common denominator is poor change communication strategy, which often leads to low employee morale, undue stress in the company, relational breakdown between the employer and the employee, and also sometimes losing critical employees during this journey. While working with CXOs from global companies who are taking on the journey of engineering transformation, one of the common concerns we see on their mind is, how do I communicate change to my wider audience, my employees in this company? Working with them through all these years, we have developed a strong change communication strategy and I would like to walk you through the stepwise approach. Step one of the approach is to understand the criticality of all your employees, which means the value that each employee is driving for the company, the niche skill sets they possess, which are critical to the company's regular functioning. Once you've made that understanding, you need to categorize each employee from highly critical to not so critical. This analysis is going to be extremely important and we're going to revisit at a later step. Step two of this approach is what we call the first communication. The change leader, the CXO needs to identify key members from his organization. These we call the change managers and they will be the frontline messengers of the change. But before they can do that, the CXO or the change leader needs to convince them of his or her vision of the change and the strategic approach of the change. Also clearly define if this doesn't happen, how will it negatively impact the company and their careers? Once he or she has done that, he needs to also demand commitment and accountability from them while they walk with him or her on this journey. The third step is now that the change leader is ready with the change manager team, he can move to a bigger platform and address his entire team about the change initiative. The critical elements of this conversation will be, of course, a passion for that vision that he lays out and the logical approach to get to that goal. But the most important element will be the ethos, which is the ethical appeal, which connects him to his team members. This appeal will then add to the credibility and transparency of the approach the change leader is taking. The fourth step is important because when you're talking in a larger audience, all information is not absorbed at all levels, only it is disseminated partially. So at the fourth step, the change manager team needs to go and talk to a wider audience in smaller groups or one on one meetings to allay their fears. This is where your analysis of critical to not so critical employee comes in play. Because when you're talking to a very critical employees, you need to talk to them and say that they have a place in the future of this organization along with a clear career development path. However, when you're talking to your not so critical employees, it is important to not make any promises to them. But at the same time, allay their fears that the company will not take any unjust action against them. All these four steps are going to be very important. But once this first set of communication goes out, office grapevine and fear is going to take over because the problem with communication is the illusion that it's already taken place. Hence, throughout the change journey, it will be important for the change leader and the change managers to connect with the team. Hence, this should be done as a cyclical process. When there is an early success, the leader should go out there and celebrate and share with the team because it also establishes the credibility of their approach. The change managers need to keep connected with the smaller groups one-on-one so that this entire group, this community can walk hand-in-hand towards a common goal.