Communicating the need for change – engaging the workforce
From the workforce’s viewpoint, the first step of their engagement in the change program is when they hear the messaging around the ‘need for change’. What they hear, how they understand the message and their support of this message will define if and how they embrace the need for change and if they become fully committed and supportive of the change – or not…
From a strategic viewpoint, you may have defined the organization’s need for change and what exactly needs to be done but getting the workforce to support that change is a challenge. Success of the overall improvement program (whether a major Transformation or a Continuous Improvement program) is dependent on your workforce supporting and embracing the change.
This post is a guide to help you through communicating the need for change!
We’ll run through some detailed steps that we’ve seen over the years that help in communicating the need for change.
Be authentic
If you are telling your team what the organization’s ‘need for change’ is – internalise it in your own words.
There will be multiple official communications that the workforce will hear – and they can likely simply read these themselves.
Add your own views when communicating the ‘need for change’. Your team will want to hear what your personally think, what you personally believe in and what it means to you. It shouldn’t simply be repeated parrot fashion but rather what you believe is the ‘need for change’.
Use story telling
Make the ‘need for change’ more concrete by illustrating with an example so that people can see how the ‘need for change’ relates to something tangible. Up to this point, some of the change messaging may have been quite abstract making it difficult for the audience to understand the relevance and immediacy of the ‘need for change’.
Create your own change story to personalise your take on the ‘need for change’. Share with your team what you understand the need for change is and how changing will ultimately result in something better for the organization – despite the challenges. Include any relevant previous personal experiences – for example a previous major change and the end result.
Read more about creating your own change story in our post (link xxx).
Explain the roadmap
At some point in communicating the ‘need for change’, the workforce will want to understand how the change will actually happen. This will, naturally, be where they fully understand the likely impact on them and what they will be asked to do.
Initial communications will have made a strong point for the ‘need for change’ and likely, also, what will happen if no change is made. This messaging is likely to have heavy implications of how the change will be made, but the actual ‘how’ needs to be included in the overall communications.
Define how the organization will get there:
- What will happen ?
- What timing ?
- Expected outcome ?
- What’s needed from the workforce ?
Its better for the workforce to understand upfront what needs to be done and, importantly, what they will need to do.
Repeat often
Advertising research says that it takes anywhere from 7 to 20 times before someone really hears a message. You will need to repeat your message at regular intervals. Communicating the message once is not going to be sufficient!
Naturally, in your role as a change leader – potentially as a change lead or a Chief Transformation Officer or Head of Continuous Improvement – its not all on you to communicate the need for change. All leadership should be involved in delivering the need for change.
Employees should be hearing the need for change from Senior leadership all the way down to their own leaders. And the messaging should be consistent (although the change stories will naturally vary by leader).
However, you will also need to communicate directly yourself multiple times so that the target audience really hears the messaging and internalizes the messaging for themselves i.e., they really hear the message.
Use multiple channels
Use multiple channels to communicate the ‘need for change’. Don’t rely on a single communications mode or channel – else you will miss some people entirely.
Use face-to-face communications to first establish the importance and priority of the Improvement program. This can obviously be done easily in small groups but for large groups use townhalls or state of the nation session to really establish your message at the start and to give regular updates (e.g., quarterly).
Use newsletters, regular emails and other online tools if available to constantly reinforce your messaging.
With today’s technology we have so many channels to choose from and they each have their advantages and disadvantages – read more in our post on using multiple channels for communicating your own ‘need for change’. (xxx link)
Check your audience’s understanding
When communicating your ‘need for change’ in face to face sessions, check your audience’s understanding.
It’s a chance for you to know what the audience is hearing and how they perceive the message. You’ll better understand what they have heard (and not just from you or senior leadership but also from their colleagues), what they have understood and taken on board. It might be completely different from the intended messaging you are trying to convey and also represents a chance to give your audience more insights about the Improvement program.
Checking your audience’s understanding also allows whoever is responding to internalise for themselves what the message is before they restate back to you.
When listening to your audience’s understanding, it’s really useful to remember the pithy adage that “perception is reality” (credited to American political strategist Lee Atwater in the 1980’s). You’ll only really understand what the workforce is internalised for themselves about the Improvement program when you ask them what they’ve heard about the program and what they understand is the ‘need for change’.
Lead by example
Lastly – lead by example – your actions will be judged on the basis of the message you’re communicating. Your workforce will be looking at leadership and checking if their actions and behaviours are consistent with the ‘need for change’ being communicated.
Back to the first point – if you’re not consistent and authentic yourself to the message you send out – its unlikely people listening to your message will strongly support the message.
As discussed earlier, creating your own change story is great way for you to be authentic. Personalising the need for change to what you think will enable you to lead in a way consistent with that messaging.
Example - ‘Landing a man on the moon’
Ideally, everyone in the organisation understands the ‘need for change’ and the role they play in getting there.
A famous example that illustrates many of the points in our guide and both the challenges of communicating the need for change and also what that looks like when successful – is the 1960’s space race culminating in NASA’s successful 1969 Apollo mission of putting a man on the moon when Neil Armstrong took “one giant leap for mankind”.
Multiple reasons have been cited for the need for the US and NASA to put a man on the moon – some driven primarily by the Space Race between the US and the Soviet Union and the need for technological supremacy in this ‘new frontier’.
President Kennedy officially announced the mission in Congress on May 25, 1961, and proposed that the US “should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”
Initially there was quite widespread resistance to the need for this program vision. There was public disquiet over the sheer cost involved in the Apollo program; in the run-up to the official announcement, an April 1961 Gallup Poll indicated that 58 percent of Americans were opposed to it.
The ‘need for change’ had to be communicated many times by President Kennedy. One of the most famous of these communications was over a year after the official announcement in Congress. On September 12, 1962, President Kenney gave his famous ‘we choose to go to the moon’ speech to a large crowd at Rice University Stadium in Houston, Texas. The main aim of the speech was to bolster public support for his proposal. This is one of the most famous speeches given by President Kennedy and was a pivotal moment in the NASA space program during this time.
This communications example illustrates that the ‘need for change’ needs to be communicated again and again and using different channels or outlets/formats – it’s definitely not one and done…
The Apollo program was an incredible achievement that required enormous resources and was a hugely complex program to manage. At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities.
Getting those 400,000 people fully supporting the program and unified behind the purpose of ‘putting a man on the moon’ was pivotal to the success of the program.
There is also an apocryphal story illustrating what it really means when the workforce is committed to supporting the ‘need for change’.
According to the story, during a tour of NASA headquarters in 1961 soon after the announcement of the program, John F. Kennedy encountered a janitor mopping the floors at night.
“Why are you working so late?” Kennedy asked.
“Mr President,” the janitor responded,
….“I’m helping put a man on the moon…”
The story illustrated that everyone – from astronauts and engineers to support staff were singularly focused on the mission – and ultimately successful!
Read more about this amazing program here – Wiki link
Conclusion
Successfully communicating the need for change is not easy but its absolutely the first step seen by the workforce and ultimately defines the success of your change program as seen by your organization’s people.
President Kennedy’s continuous vocal support of putting a man on the moon was a defining factor in Apollo successfully completing the mission in 1969 before the end of the decade.
Hopefully this guide has been able to point you in the right direction on how to successfully communicate your organization’s need for change.
Read further for more information on how to use good comms in your Improvement Program:
- Creating a good change story
- Five classic mistakes commonly made when communicating the need for change
- Using technology for your improvement programs comms needs