It’s time to bring some marketing magic to your change communications
One thing I’ve never been able to get my head around is why companies take a completely different approach to internal communication than they do to its external equivalent, marketing.
When a business needs to communicate with its prospects and customers it entrusts the work to a creative power-house. Either an in-house team or an agency, sometimes both. They’re armed with a wealth of data to help with targeting and evaluation. Research, insights, reports. All used to carefully segment the target audience and craft compelling messages tailored to their needs. Storytelling techniques from the movies and beautiful visuals help bring their words to life, before they’re broadcast through multiple channels, making sure the campaign is heard loud and clear.
They don’t make this kind of investment just for fun. They do it because it gets results.
Marketing raises awareness and understanding with the target audience, piques interest, conveys the benefits of products and services, influences behaviour, reduces uncertainty, removes barriers, inspires them to take action and reinforces what a great decision they made.
These are the same results we desperately want to achieve when we’re communicating changes to our teams and colleagues internally. So why don’t companies apply these techniques to engage and mobilise people on the inside?
Perhaps it’s because marketing is more directly linked to increasing revenue, profits or market share. That might make a bigger budget easier to justify. But internal communication is important too. After all, the promises marketing makes to customers will come to nothing if colleagues aren’t willing or able to deliver.
And what about the cost of failed projects? The huge investments made in new CRM/HR/Finance systems, software, process improvements, recruitment, product development, market expansion. None of these will be successfully adopted, or deliver the expected benefits and ROI, without effective communication and support.
If internal comms are the poor relation to marketing, where does that leave change communications?
This article is absolutely not a criticism of internal comms teams. I’ve worked with some amazing communicators, brilliant at what they do, but almost all are woefully under-appreciated and under-resourced. They do their best with what they have and generally have their hands full cascading messages from the leadership team.
Change comms are often left to project managers or SMEs, usually 1-way updates on how the project implementation is going, rather than the conversations people really need to support them through the change.
In a survey carried out in 2019 by Prosci, 82% of respondents said they would prefer to hear about organisation-level changes from the CEO or Executive/Senior Managers. And 70% said they’d prefer to hear personal messages about the change from their supervisor/manager.
Less than 3% wanted to hear these messages from comms, HR, change management or project representatives. That’s a pretty clear message, but is anyone listening?
It’s also a huge responsibility to put on the shoulders of managers with no training or resources to support. Here are some basics to think about to help you get started:
Communication is a key skill in every manager’s toolkit
Here are 5 simple steps to help you communicate change with confidence.
Decide who needs to receive the message
Make a list of everyone impacted by or involved in the change and segment them into groups based on how the change will affect them and what they need to know. Get in touch with me to find out how to create a Change Community map if you need help with this.
2. Create the message
Start with your communication objective: what do you want the Receiver to know, feel and do as a result of this message? Make it about them and what they need, not you or the project.
Then write a concise draft in plain english, with clear actions or next steps. Use bullet points and make it easy to scan-read for people with limited time and add links or more info below, for those who want the detail.
Consider how the Receiver might want to respond, provide feedback or ask questions. Make it a 2-way conversation if you can.
3. Decide who will send the message
This depends on the message and who’s receiving it. The person who sends the message might be different to the person who created it. Choose someone with the influence needed to achieve your communication objective (step 2).
4. Choose which channel(s) to use
Consider which channels are available to the Receiver and link in to ones that already work well. There are lots to choose from, so get feedback from your audience on their preferences and experiment to find out what works best.
Email has its place, but don’t make it the default. Inboxes are usually full, so consider what would be most effective to achieve your communication objective. Other options include team meetings, 121s, conferences and events, newsletters, intranet, webinars, videos, posters, banners, screensavers etc.
Don’t be afraid to borrow tricks from marketing and use influencers/champions to spread the word, or multiple channels combined as a campaign.
5. Evaluate if the comms were successful
Be clear from the start what you want to measure and why. Do you need to know if the comms were received and understood? Do you need a record of actions completed, or queries raised? Will you ask for feedback or carry out surveys, or check-ins? Keep it simple and avoid tech barriers.