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Change Management and Employee Communication Strategies

If your employee communication strategy to communicate change focuses on stakeholder communication plans, an intranet site, CEO forums and Staff Information Bulletins via email stop right there.  Your efforts are focused on information, not communication and the likelihood of engaging employees in change is remote.

My interest in employee communication is to distinguish between the tools communicators use that inform and those strategies that engage employees and therefore impact business outcomes. The concern is that there seems to be confusion in the market place where roles are advertised for “Change Managers” when the organization is really looking for an internal communication professional not a change practitioner.

So what’s the difference?

Well clearly both information and engagement tools are important.  An internal communication professional focuses on tools to impart information and in some cases create dialogue including:

• the corporate intranet
• staff information bulletins
• emails
• providing information for managers to brief their teams face to face
• organizing staff forums for the CEO
• briefing kits for supervisors and team leaders

Whilst all of this activity is important and provides the support that employees need to find out what is happening.  But, and it is an important distinction, so what if you tell people what is happening, will it change their attitude and therefore change their behaviour? In my experience which is across many sectors, industries, professional roles and all types of change programs I have to say no.  And this is the problem, when a CEO and senior executive team think “change” will happen because they have hired someone to communicate the changes taking place and then when there is no impact on the business or the outcomes they were looking for they are disappointed.

Think of it this way. Smokers buy a packet of cigarettes, the health warnings are featured on the packet and yet we see intelligent, literate people continue to smoke, packet after packet. The only time they truly become engaged in changing their attitude toward smoking and therefore behaviour is when they are in the doctors office and are personally facing a health risk. And then Aha! they finally get it.

So how do we use this analogy when we are tying to communicate change? Let’s look at this example. An organization wants to communicate the financial results to employees and the usual approach is to post the employee annual report on the intranet. But this time they need to do something different, they want employees to understand why the company needs to improve and what shareholders base their decisions on. So they decided to run free lunchtime information sessions for their employees on how to invest in the share market and held them for one hour each week for four weeks. The topics progressed from understanding the share market, categories of companies listed etc till the final week they examined annual reports. So in this final session they were reviewing annual reports and came to the last one for the session and after reading through the data the question was asked of employees, so who would invest in this company, few put their hands up. And you guessed it, the company was their company and with a collective Aha! the employees finally got the message.

As in this instance, a large transformation program including HR, training and operational initiatives was developed to build on this.

So here is the important message for any change program.  Information is important, employees need to know what is happening, when, why, who, what and by whom.  However, equally as important when it comes to organizational change, employees need to be involved in the process to be truly engaged.  This is where change professionals need to focus on the Aha! moments and engage their employees in the process of change.

About The Author

Marcia Xenitelis is a recognized authority on the subject on employee communication and business transformation and has spoken at conferences around the world.  For access to case studies and more information on the types of strategies you can implement to engage employees visit http://www.changemanagementtips.com for a wealth of free informative articles and resources.

How I Learned to Twitter in 7 Weeks

I stumbled onto Twitter as a marketing tool completely by accident. I was looking for a way to promote a book I’m working on, and a friend suggested that I do two things: Start a blog and get on Twitter.

“What is Twitter? I don’t get how will it help me promote my book to tell people what I am having for breakfast,” I replied. “It would take me too long to explain, just try it out,” he said.

What follows here is a week-by-week review of how I learned that Twitter can be an important business-development tool for lawyers and law firms.

Week 1: Signing up The sign-up at Twitter. com was just like everything else. I needed to add a picture but luckily, I was still holding on to the picture used for my attorney bio, so I uploaded that. A bio. Usually I leave them blank, but this one was limited to 150 characters, so I wrote: “Father, husband, attorney, and aspiring author. Follow me as I work to get published.” I was pretty happy with myself, it was a perfect bio for someone trying to get published. After I finished my profile, Twitter suggested that I start following a bunch of famous people like Ashton Kutcher and Shaquille O’Neal. Was it the real Shaq? Turns out it was. These famous people have almost 80,000 people following them, and the truth is I just didn’t get it.

Week 2: I start following people I needed help finding some publishers to submit my manuscript to, so I used the Twitter search function. I searched using the term “publisher” and turned up about 50 results. So I started following all 50 of them. Some were small publishers, some were big, but the cool part was that they were all posting stories and links all about writing and publishing, one of the articles was “10 Things Every Author Should Do Before Submitting a Manuscript.” This was good stuff, exactly the types of things I needed to learn in my situation. I also realized that, as I started following people, the majority of them followed me back. Now I had more than 30 followers. I was feeling pretty good.

Week 3: A fortuitous connection Some total stranger was asking about my book, this was great. So I explained my book to him, and we chatted back and forth using Twitter’s Direct Messages, which are kind of like an e-mail message or private messages on Facebook. He was an author who has self-published in the past, and he gave me the phone number of one of the gurus of self-publishing. Out of the blue, I call this guy up, and he takes an hour and talks to me. He gives me advice and shares a few contacts with me.

Week 4: Spreading the message When someone shares an interesting link to an article on Twitter or shares a good quote, it gets repeated. This is called a “retweet.” I noticed that whenever I posted articles, they never got retweeted. Why not? Because they weren’t interesting enough. So I started paying attention to the types of articles that were retweeted. Usually they announced breaking news or shared really interesting content on blogs, so I started trying to think of something to post on my blog that might garner some interest. I posted a satirical response to an article one of my buddies from law school posted, and it spread like wildfire, or at least like a small brush fire. I had 170 unique visitors to my blog in just an hour or two in response to that one post. That was fun but, more importantly, it made me realize the power of Twitter. Here I was with fewer than 100 followers, and my message spread well beyond that circle.

Week 5: My first corporate client “Does anybody know an attorney that practices contract law?” “Yeah, that’s actually what I do, what do you need?” I replied suspiciously. “My friend needs some legal advice about a contract, could you talk to her?” “Sure, send me a direct message with her contact into.” After exchanging e-mail addresses and a few phone conversations, my firm had a new client. All our communication was exchanged over the phone and e-mail, and the retainer and payment were paid by credit card. It was so easy, it made me realize that maybe there was more to Twitter than just promoting books. Maybe I could use Twitter to find clients. You see, Twitter functions like a giant cocktail party where thousands of conversations are going on simultaneously. You can listen in on any conversation you please, you just simply need to “follow” the individuals having the conversation. Unlike two other social networking sites, Facebook and Myspace,you don’t need to be accepted as someone’s “friend” to listen in on their conversation. For example, if MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice (both of whom are on Twitter) are having a Twitter conversation, then you may listen in if you have a Twitter account- you can even try to add your own clever enough comment or question to be included in their discussion.

Week 6: Automated searches Using the free program Tweetdeck, I set up searches so that every time someone mentioned “contract law” on Twitter, from anywhere in the world, their post was filtered through a search that arrived instantly on my computer. I soon learned how to create an alert that would send me an e-mail or text message any time the term “contract law” was mentioned in a Twitter post. That allowed me to respond in real time. Return for a second to our cocktail-party analogy. Here you are at this gigantic cocktail party, and you overhear a conversation about contract law. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but overhear you are looking for a corporate attorney. Could I recommend someone? And like that, a new relationship is created that is specifically targeted. Here are a few of the comments I saw posted on Twitter after setting up my search: “I urgently need an immigration attorney, can anybody recommend one?” “My friend is getting a divorce, can anybody recommend an attorney?” “Does anybody know a NY attorney I can ask a malpractice question to?”

Week 7 and beyond: A world of opportunity I have been on Twitter for 14 weeks. I have a large following now, but more importantly, I have learned some amazing tools that are helping me to expand my zone of influence beyond just Western New York. Every day I see potential leads- some of which I pass on or have to ignore because they are outside of my area of expertise. There are some 12 million users of Twitter now, mostly highly educated people in urban centers, and they are talking about every single legal topic imaginable. My recommendation for any lawyer? You just need to jump in and give it a try.

About the Author

Adrian Dayton is an attorney who was recently admitted to practice law in the state of New York. He is also an author awaiting publication of his first book “The Year of 12 Virtues.” He can be found on Twitter @adriandayton or at his website http://adriandayton.com/blog/