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Internal Communication of Change

By Dagmar Recklies

Much has been written about the why and how of internal communication in the context of change. There is no doubt that the reasons, the content and the objective of a change initiative have to be understood by all affected employees in order to

- raise awareness
- get acceptance
- get their full support
- avoid resistance.

The more complex the issue to be communicated, the more difficult it gets to get the message across – and the more problems for the success of the initiative can arise when employees don’t understand the issue in total. Experience shows that in particular those more complex initiatives tend to face enormous difficulties reach everybody in the company.

In this paper I will discuss one specific reason for failure of effective change communication. My hypotheses is that change is communicated by the wrong people. It is not that these people are unwilling or not experienced enough but that they are too deeply into the issue and simply don’t know how to explain it in an understandable way.

Let me start with two examples from companies I had worked for or still work for: 

Two large companies, both leaders of their industry, had merged and hence had to give themselves a new joint organisational structure. A bunch of consultants had helped to develop this structure and had produced a new org chart, accompanied by some more PowerPoint slides. For a global organisation with more than 50.000 employees, lots of products and industries served it was no surprise that this structure was everything but simple. It was a matrix structure with many overlapping responsibilities which aimed to foster cross-departmental communication and reconciliation. The charts and the slides were approved by top management and the board. After that they were presented to the managers at several occasions and those were expected to spread the word within their departments. The problem was that the org chart was a clear candidate for the title of ‘most complex and incomprehensible chart I have ever seen’. And so it was for all the others, even for the managers who were supposed to act as multipliers. How should they explain the new structure to their people? During the first three months in which the company was supposed to work in the new structure, most people in the organisation were in fact busy finding out what their new role and responsibilities were, with whom to discuss particular questions, who was entitled to decide what and so on. 

A company that went through a major crisis had finally developed a new business model. This new model really required the whole organisation to get rid of some of the old common understanding on how business is done and to develop some new thinking. Top management was closely involved in the development of this business model. Again, charts were presented to and approved by the board and the shareholders. After that, the same charts presented to the employees on Metaplan boards during a big gathering. During the following transformation phase it turned out that even some of the managers had not really understood the new way of doing business. Vital functions of the organisation constantly tended to fall back into the old thinking.

What went wrong?

In both cases the new structure / business model was explained to the whole company by those people who had developed it. They were a natural first choice, because nobody knows more about it. But that is actually the problem. These people had spent weeks and months with this project. For them every single detail is so logic and obvious. And of course, these people will naturally use the slides and charts they had prepared during this process. They had spent much time thinking about these charts and optimising them in every detail. But everything that was prepared and presented so far was initially meant for top management – people that had closely followed the whole process and that are used to comprehend complex and new information.

During the rollout phase, this whole bundle of information is than presented to people for whom it is entirely new. These people have very different backgrounds and different levels of knowledge about industry structures, strategy processes and management science. They lack the background knowledge from the process during which the new model / structure evolved gradually. Instead, they are expected to understand the whole result at once. Nobody checked if the complex charts would make sense to somebody who had never heard about that topic before. 

Solution

I propose not to let those people who had developed the new model or structure prepare the presentation on their own. They tend to take too much background knowledge for granted. Instead, the new things to be communicated should be explained first to a few people that were not involved in their development. These should not (only) be the people from the communications department but somebody who really is affected by the changes and has to make them come alive. This is the first test of reality – is the planned way of presentation suitable and understandable? In the next step, these new people should help to prepare the communication process and ideally take part in it. Such people will know best which details need more explanation, what additional questions might arise and so on. They speak the language of their colleagues.

This will have several positive effects:

- If those people not involved in the development of the change initiative can understand it, they can also make the communication understandable.

- They are very close to their colleagues. So they can answer questions and discuss particular points in more detail later on. The inhibition threshold to ask a colleague for details will be much lower than to admit to top management that one hasn’t understood their presentation.

- Such multipliers can give the initiative more credibility and acceptance within the organisation than external consultants ever can. 

So, depending from the size of the organisation, internal communication of major change initiatives should best be prepared and executed by a joint team in which its members take on different roles:

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More Information on Change Management

A list of links to external articles is available in our
Knowledgebase - Management - Change

(c) Dagmar Recklies, 2006