Change

People rarely use tools which they don’t believe offer personal benefits, much less ones they don’t understand or know about. Raising awareness and educating colleagues – activities communicators are ideally placed to do – are vital to building adoption; but they aren’t enough.

Recently, we’ve been looking at collaboration readiness in organisations. As usual, quantitative research was followed by conversations with employees, many of which reminded us that metrics only ever tell part of the story.

One way we look at collaboration readiness is to consider three dimensions:

• The ability the individual has for using collaboration tools (as determined by their current use outside work via social media sites like Facebook)
• The appetite the individual has for using collaboration tools at work
• The perceived availability of the collaboration tools in their organisation today

In some organisations we’ve seen figures which suggest low levels of perceived availability and appetite – regardless of actual availability. For those which have already deployed collaboration tools, an instinctive reaction is to focus on raising awareness, a challenge which falls to communicators.

In truth, we’re often being asked to create appetite. Viewed from that perspective, awareness and education are only steps in a journey to the moment when a colleague decides to invest their time and faith in migrating to a new way of working (or at least investigating it).

Today, most communicators contend that we need to move from a broadcast model to one of dialogue, and I believe this to be particularly true when driving adoption of Enterprise 2.0.

In conversations with employees who claimed to be sceptics, it was frequently possible to make them concede at least an interest – once the discussion had moved beyond education and become a personalised case for adoption. Many such conversations followed a similar pattern, and eventually I modelled it:

For me, it’s interesting how many different areas one must draw upon to respond to each question or statement convincingly:

Just glancing at this list, I suspect most communicators would agree that whilst we might take a lead on several activities, others will require expertise and action from a diverse range of stakeholders: leaders, managers, HR specialists, business analysts, trainers. Whilst the principle objective of adoption may be better communication (and performance), accomplishing it requires us to employ a broader range of capabilities than communication alone. That shouldn’t be a surprise, since ambitious change is often cross-functional. Neither does it mean communicators cannot – or indeed should not – take the lead in building a coalition of capabilities.

However, for me the paramount principle is that to gain real traction the proposition has to be made personal: and that means starting – and sustaining – a genuine conversation; and that’s where communicators can really make the difference.

Arguably the worst part of the professional communicator’s role is the need to communicate bad news, or more specifically redundancies. It’s a role many of us have had to fulfil in recent months and given the range of approaches taken, begs the question as to whether there is a ‘right way’.

To start with, let’s clarify precisely why the communication component of any announcement is important. First, with redundancy high on any list of stressful experiences, behaving and being seen to behave with common decency is important. After all, brand is what brand does. Second, a majority of staff will ‘survive’ and making sure we support and continue to engage this group is equally important. And third there is still a business to run and a brand identity to uphold so if nothing else the communication process must do all it can minimise the damage done to business as usual.

Moving to the debate, is there a right way to structure the overall process? Employee consultation is a legal requirement in the UK and across the EU which means an announcement stating intention to proceed followed by the consultation period itself is a mandatory component. So little room for manoeuvre here. (Go to http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Employeeinformationandconsultation/DG_10028095 for more details). Choices though arise once the consultation is complete and the outcome known and this in my experience is where division of opinion is most likely.

One coherent argument is that once ‘the list’ of affected employees is finalised, we should simply notify those colleagues of their fate and not involve anyone unaffected. Assuming notification happens face to face (and thankfully in my experience no organisation has sought to do it any other way), the issue is efficiently dealt with and broadly speaking achieves each of the objectives set out above. There is though a very obvious counter-argument that such an approach pre-announces the news (face to face meetings need to be scheduled so if you have one, you know what’s coming) and makes the process much harder to implement. Much better therefore to give everyone a slot regardless of their fate and work it through properly. That way everyone has the chance to talk through what it means for them. So plenty of scope for discussion here!

Another area for debate is around the ‘who’. Whose voice should be heard at what stage in the process? There should be little dispute that the most senior voice should be heard at the beginning (any other trivialises the news) but what about the act of notification. The line manager is the obvious choice though s/he may lack the skills. HR is an alternative as it is their specialism though this absolves managers of their responsibilities. There is also the local senior manager/director though the numbers involved may make this logistically challenging.

Then there is the discussion about ownership. Is a redundancy announcement a communication process requiring HR input or the other way around? This is very likely to depend upon the complexity of the announcement and factors such as numbers involved, variation in redundancy terms being offered and union involvement. The more complex the situation, the more significant the role of HR becomes.

If isn’t already obvious, the answer is almost certainly that there is no ‘right way’. I’ve yet to be involved in two processes that were the same or where the post-announcement debrief didn’t identify things we would have done differently. Core principles yes, but rigid process absolutely not. All of which underlines the importance of giving the communication side of any redundancy announcement the attention it deserves so that those all important objectives can be achieved.

One night in my late teens me and my best friend from university plugged a 14.4 modem into a wall socket and uploaded our first website (technically it was his second). 14 years later I found it again, completely intact, in an Internet archive. That should make you stop and think for a moment.

Beneath every social media website or collaborative tool is a database, and truly deleting content from a database is considered to be a bad idea. Asking for it to happen usually makes engineers wince and mutter about ‘referential integrity’. Much better, they’ll argue, to label the content as obsolete and stop displaying it. Storage is now so cheap that it’s usually commercially preferable to hide the data than work to remove it.

All of which assumes one is actively considering the question of what to do with old content. Increasingly, at least on a personal level, we don’t. Social media and collaborative tools are inherently conversational, and the natural tendency of most individuals (once they’re comfortable with online discussion) is to treat their contributions as they might their words in a face-to-face dialogue. Once said, or typed, it’s history. Unless you’re a public figure you don’t expect to be quoted back to yourself later, and the rate of technological change has rendered most of what we typed barely years ago inaccessible (just how would you read documents stored on floppy disks today?). So the persistence of our comments and postings is rarely front of mind when we make them.

That’s not to say we are unthinking contributors. Thanks to some painful lessons learned about indiscretions posted to Facebook, most people are also conscious of the need to exercise common sense when participating in online discussions. That applies even more for internal spaces, where it is usual for employees’ contributions to be attributed. But what if even the good things we write (or perhaps the ‘good at the time of writing’ things) have the capacity to cause us problems in the future?

A decade ago a multi-national I knew decided to create a database of every key promise or commitment made by its senior leaders in the previous 5 years. In the then largely un-digitised world that task was laborious enough to warrant a sizable team of researchers, despite the relatively small amount of data that had to be located and sifted. Digitisation and the evolution of search technologies mean that even with the explosion of content in the 2.0 era, a contemporary exercise would not only be easier, but yield richer data.

What that multi-national was interested in was transparency and accountability, words very much beloved of the social media scene. To be clear, this was a defensive action: the company knew external special interest groups were effectively performing the same exercise and it wanted to understand its exposure. The important aspect for us now is that the level of granularity was at the corporate level: this was about what a company had said (albeit through the mouths of its people), not an individual. At that time the only individuals who could reasonably expect to invite that level of scrutiny (and indeed generate that much easily-accessed content) would be public figures.

A decade later, within organisations the capacity for ordinary employees to publish and navigate the published content of colleagues has changed completely. If your organisation is investing heavily in collaborative platforms today, think ahead to 2015 and imagine the body of searchable, attributable content that will attach to any future member of middle or senior management who has risen through the ranks. It will be non-trivial. It’s tempting to think that because common sense will have been exercised throughout, we have nothing to worry about; but think about three practical aspects of communicating as a leader:

• Often you must speak or write on behalf of your role or organisation, not as a private individual reflecting her/his own views
• It’s not uncommon for a business to change direction, rendering obsolete what was said or promised before
• It’s also not uncommon to be plain wrong

None of these make you a liar or inauthentic, but in many disputes advantage is gained by pointing to opponents’ documented mistakes and changes-of-heart. It’s almost a rule that candidates in any US election will have a charge of ‘flip-flopping’ levelled against them, and the commentariat will mysteriously forget that good decision making often means knowing when to change direction. By comparison, corporate leaders have historically had an easier ride: beyond heavily unionised environments the degree to which leadership cadres could control the internal news agenda and re-position issues has been significant. As organisations move towards giving everyone a voice, as well as the tools to search the past, change is unavoidable.

When the controversy first raged about drunken pictures posted to Facebook and how this might affect an individual’s future career prospects, many advanced the argument that changing social attitudes would quickly negate the risk. I’d like to think that will happen, but I’m mindful that forty years on from the 1960s politicians still break into a sweat when asked about smoking dope at university.

The smart Gen Y individual already knows how to manage her/his profile, and will leverage that advantage over less discreet peers in coming years. Moreover, the emergence of sites like the (quickly suppressed) Web 2.0 Suicide Machine suggests that, at least in the public sphere, some have new misgivings about their digital footprints.

If attitudinal change is required for organisations to live comfortably with the legacy of long term (digital) transparency, it probably begins with the collaboration cultures many of us are trying to build today. It probably requires us to work with IT and KM specialists to look critically at issues of content curation, the longevity of systems, and what we really mean – and want – when we use words like ‘transparency’ (and whether the answers hold true at all levels of the organisation).

It would be a shame if we rushed headlong into the next level of collaboration (which I believe offers us many benefits), only to later recoil at the thought of accidentally building our own Panopticon from the inside.

Change as we all know is the one constant in any organisation. And the effective communication of change remains one of the core roles of any communicator. So as a new year, indeed decade begins and my focus set firmly on a couple of change projects, what better time to reflect on some of the main priorities when communicating change. What’s really interesting is how little the list has changed in 10 years.

• Clarify the objective. One area of change management I believe organisations have improved in is the clarification of programme goals and success factors. I absolutely believe communicators should follow this lead and be very clear about their objectives if only to demonstrate that their role on the project has been a success. And in an age when survey and polling tools sit on most Intranets, ongoing measurement is a must.
• Consult, consult, consult. How often have you heard people ask who exactly was consulted? It is of course code for this doesn’t work for me (or something like that) and is often a consequence of the late introduction of the professional communicator to the process. A key priority for any change communicator is to grab the ongoing consultation and testing so dialogue is constant, professionally managed and received in time to be of value.
• Experiential, peer to peer communication. This strictly is two points but between them, sum up by far the most effective way of getting change messages across. First, don’t just talk about it, show people how it works. There really is no substitute for demonstrating the new system or procedure in action. And second, enrol people whose opinion is valued by your audience to do the talking. Any other way simply smacks of unwanted imposition.
• Manage the whole brand experience. Change teams are often disparate combinations of contractors, subject matter specialists and enthusiastic in-housers. They are often transitory and have a tendency to ignore the truism that a brand communicates in many ways. Many people come into contact with a change brand long before it is introduced and ensuring that all interactions with that brand are everything they need to be (responsive, speedy etc) is for me another big priority.
• Get the product right. This one goes well beyond the compass of the communicator but it is fair to say that a bad product will undermine, if not totally negate the very best communication. Clearly it is our job to make the change owners aware of any potential issue and if we’ve done each of the four earlier steps, the chances of this happening are greatly reduced. But we must always be prepared to cope with a crisis and ensure that the damage is limited.

The list could of course go on. But there is a wealth of knowledge and experience to tap into out there. And a good place to start is probably http://www.melcrum.com/topics/change.shtml.  Good luck!

For many knowledge workers a popular unit of exchange when collaborating is an MS Word document, with discussion occurring via tracked edits and comments.

As an approach to collaboration this has drawbacks: even if people use the reviewing features properly it scales poorly. Discussions bleed into emails (which not everyone is copied on), versions fall out of sync, and often someone has to resolve it all manually. Document management helps, but the collaborative aspects remain clunky because the conversation is still tacked on like a collection of Post-It Notes.

However, as an approach to creating an information product it’s great. One might lose version and discussion data, but a standalone information container remains, often in a form that’s easy for newcomers to consume.

So as a unit of information exchange the document is king; but that may be changing.

If you’ve been following the development of applications like Google Wave then you may have noticed the document-centric paradigm being eroded. Words, images and video are all just information assets which pepper the new unit of exchange: the conversation; and I mean conversation not as an abstract concept, but as a thing that can be accessed and manipulated by people and software.

Google Wave makes this shift obvious, but for heavy users of tools like Skype IM and forums this is a change that’s been happening quietly for some time.

Last week, after a long discussion with friends via Skype IM, we realised that since our conversation had not been centred on a document we had two choices for capturing our outcomes: author a memo, or paste the whole chat log into a forum thread. We chose the latter, and I doubt we’re unique – but are we short-sighted or efficient?

A key feature of Google Wave is ‘Playback’, which allows you to re-run an entire conversation (potentially even if you weren’t an original participant). As an approach to collaboration this is superb.

So is the conversation the future king?

Possibly; but if so then it raises questions about how we communicate beyond the original participants in any discussion. Reading the so-called ’scroll-back’ from a conversation may offer rich content, but as an information product it’s vulnerable to bloat, and in the broader context it may scale poorly.

To use a practical example, recall any first day you’ve had in a new job. In the near future will it be a case of reading through a collection of key documents, or scanning an equivalent collection of digital transcripts; and which would you and your colleagues prefer?

There’s nothing quite like a recession to prompt some fairly heavy duty introspection and our world of internal communication is certainly no exception. IC functions everywhere are assessing and refining their role, mainly to operate within narrower financial constraints but also to take more control over their destiny. Introspection is also de rigueur amongst consultants and I’ve been fortunate enough to participate in some fascinating discussions of late about the next big thing.

Contrast this though with the reality of what those outside our world expect. Ask your average leader or employee and news and channel management, communication of key ‘top down messages’ and a bit of two way comms thrown in for good measure remain the priority. In other words, getting the basics right and not pushing new frontiers.

So what is next? More of the same to keep our customers happy or a new world in which IC embraces the communication revolution happening outside the organisation? The answer of course is both. There will always be news and channels to manage, a ‘top down message’ to communicate and feedback to obtain and IC will continue to do all those things. But like it or not, a new world is emerging, one in which everyone has a voice and, crucially, the platform to make that voice heard. I believe our challenge is to create, promote and manage that environment so that information can flow wherever it is needed.

This is a new blog, launched to coincide with our new look and feel. Our aim is to provide our own personal views and stimulate discussion about how this new world is shaping up by sharing insights from our clients and other organisations. Enjoy!