As the new year dawns, it is becoming more and more apparent that things are not going to run the same way they did last year. Whether you are forced to make cuts to track with the recession, or you feel that a recession is simply a chance to pick up more market share, one of the greatest challenges for a company is communicating those changes within your company before you attempt to communicate it with your customers.
There are ways that smart companies communicate change (the best practice theories are actually studied quite seriously) and I’ve included a few key points below.
1. Don’t rely on senior management to say what needs to be said. Employees may not get the right message if your senior management is the sole channel used to share the organization’s changes. Too much can be diluted, misinterpreted, and just plain shared wrongly. If you are using senior management to communicate upcoming changes, you must consider other ways as well.
2. Don’t rely on company publications or company-wide meetings to get your viewpoint across. Adding to senior management as a channel to communicate, you might consider company publications and company-wide meetings as a great way to accentuate the senior management message. Doing both of these is not enough. Employees can easily disregard senior management, refuse to read the publications, and skip or ignore the meeting.
3. Attempt to reach the employee within the realm of his or her work area. Instead of coming at the employee from a macro focus (company-wide, company publication), attempt to communicate within the employee’s realm. First, use a publication or employee work area-specific meeting, and then move on to in-person communication to further cement the change your communicating.
4. Rely on face-to-face communication within an employee’s work department. Employees need to talk about the upcoming changes and their immediate supervisors need to be ready to discuss the new focus in person and on multiple occasions. The discussion among a department must not be curtailed, but encouraged.
5. Support supervisors who will be responsible to keep the conversation going among their employees. Supervisors carry the full burden of responsibility to support the ongoing conversation about upcoming organizational and departmental changes, thus a company must provide as much information, explanation, and upper management support as possible.
Companies who understand how best to communicate will be the most supportive of the front-line employees who are the ones attempting to make the changes.
