Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Donna Griggs and today we're going to talk about secrets for communicating change So I got a 9-eleven call from a client of mine at about 9 o'clock one night And he said okay look I I sent this email out I need you to talk to me about this because I think you're gonna have to come in tomorrow The email was to announce our new organization. It should have been so simple I wanted everybody to have all the information and when I sent it out I sent it out at four o'clock and Everybody is going nuts. You should see everything that I'm getting in email and phone calls and text It's ridiculous So I started asking him some questions about this surprise email that I didn't even know about And what I learned was he emailed an organization chart to all of the company the entire company Many locations and when he did the funny part was there's this brand new layer in that organization chart That brand new layer reports to him So when I started asking him questions, I said this is this brand new layer made up of anybody That was one of your existing employees Mmm. No, we decided we needed to bring fresh blood in so we have all new people from the outside with oh Their experience is fabulous. And so that's why we did that. Did anybody have any inkling of this? No, we thought we would just spring it on them all at once So what's really interesting about this group is this is a very very family oriented Organization and he was shocked that people were so up in arms It's like your dad just said hey, here's a big deal right now But you know We're gonna bring in a new wife and maybe some new kids and everything else and you're gonna be just fine I mean these people were livid So the most fun part about the whole thing was he said, you know I really don't understand why they don't like change change is fun. Everybody should like change So I'm gonna talk to you about how you actually communicate it and make it work There's two different people that anyone wants to know What's going on? What's new and different? The first person they want to hear from is their CEO or the very top person in the organization what they want to know from them is Tell me what we're doing differently and tell me why we're doing it and how it's helping the organization The second person that they want to hear from is their direct supervisor because what they want to know there is Well, how's this affecting me? What what about my job? I mean, am I gonna be downsized? Is somebody gonna replace me? Am I gonna have more work to do? What's really happening? So if you can explain those things to them You can also talk about the benefits of this is what this change is gonna actually do for you those two pieces are incredibly critical and Whenever you're actually communicating that information what we believe a lot of times is hey, I told him about it. So I'm done actually people need to hear information five to seven times in order to really get it to absorb it and That means hearing it five to seven times in different ways be creative about it It's not five emails. It might be a whole town hall meeting It might be making sure that you had a whole group in the department together talking about it It might be an email. It might be a video there's a lot of ways that you can explain things because people do not hear what you want them to hear the first time more than likely and Every time you have the opportunity to give them a message you can make sure you're putting the benefits in there Why are we doing this? What is this doing for our our organization? So think about it the next time you're communicating any message that is gonna be received as yeah I'm not really liking this and decide am I gonna give it to them five to seven times? And how am I gonna communicate that am I giving them the right information are the right people? Communicating it if you can do these things you can guarantee that your changes are gonna be much more successfully communicated and much more easy to accept For more topics like this and to learn more about how we help our clients visit our website We love your feedback and we're getting lots of great feedback So if you have a topic you'd like us to discuss, please send an email or just comment on LinkedIn