Communicating Organisational Change
Open and honest communication is essential in your business in order to keep staff engaged. When your business is about to implement some substantial change such as significant expansion, changing procedures, building a new team, changing business models like going from bricks and mortar to online, communication becomes even more critical.
When you want to open communications channels about organisational change, you need to send the right message to the right people at the right time. These messages need to be custom-built to the audience and the stage of progress, they need to address fear, they need to deal with natural resistance to change, and they need to use different media.
The key is – what is appropriate to the specific stakeholder?
The importance of communication in organisational change cannot be over-stated. Handled badly and you could end up with a vision that is misunderstood, as against all stakeholders involved attaining a common understanding of the goals and direction of change. It can be the difference between fear and resistance versus motivation and co-ordination.
However, the enormity of the task cannot be under-stated.
A management school study found that the total amount of information given to an employee in three months averaged 2.3 million words and numbers. A typical communication about change within those three months involved a 30 minute speech plus a one-hour meeting plus one memo and one internal news article that included 13,400 words and numbers. So the typical communication about change consisted of 0.58% of total communication!
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