Transcript
[00:00:06.270] - Imogen
Hello and welcome to Dear Comms, the coffee break podcast where we tackle your biggest corporate comms challenges. I'm Imogen.
[00:00:13.490] - Amanda
And I'm Amanda. We're here to give you practical, no-nonsense advice so you can focus on the things that will really drive influence, engagement, and impact.
[00:00:24.010] - Imogen
So we have finally come to the end of our series on leading change. We've covered the the before and the during, I guess, of change.
[00:00:33.380] - Amanda
Indeed.
[00:00:33.610] - Imogen
But now we're going to, we're now going to look at the end, the after change, how we make change stick in the long term.
[00:00:41.110] - Amanda
And honestly, this is the point where it all goes wrong. The launch has happened, the energy is high, everyone's talking about the change, and then slowly and over 3 to 6 months, people are drifting back to what's familiar. Not because they're trying to sabotage the change, it's usually because the day-to-day grind and work takes over again. And if nothing is reinforcing a new way of working, then old habits creep back in very quickly.
[00:01:13.200] - Imogen
Yeah, everyone gets tired, don't they?
[00:01:15.370] - Amanda
They do.
[00:01:15.630] - Imogen
The CEO moves to whatever their next priority is, the comms team moves to the next fire that they're being asked to put out, leadership, stops talking about change. And it's because of that lack of reinforcement, that lack of repetition, that causes people to go back to the way things were.
[00:01:38.400] - Amanda
Do you know what? You really gotta persevere with change, and it takes more discipline than people expect. You know, it's a real deliberate, sustained effort. It's repetition, it's consistency. So, we're going to go through the top 5 things you can do at the end of your immediate change campaign to make it stick.
[00:02:01.120] - Imogen
Firstly, and I think this is the most, probably most important, one of the most important, certainly the top 5 most important.
[00:02:08.860] - Amanda
It's all important.
[00:02:11.020] - Imogen
But it needs to be default. So, whatever the change is, it needs to be baked into everything. If it's a new system, or a new strategy, or a new structure, it doesn't really matter. It needs to be part of the day-to-day. So, make it part of your processes, your hiring, your onboarding. Ensure that it's reflected in performance reviews, promotion criteria. So, everything that is being done in the business needs to reinforce the new behaviors, mindsets, or ways of working.
[00:02:43.380] - Amanda
And if you're bold enough, we once worked with a client where they tied a part of people's bonuses to the success of the new long-term plan. And yeah, it felt quite harsh and direct, but it sent a very clear message about priorities. Because people watch what you reward. And if all your systems favor the old way of working, people will naturally drift back there, even though the messaging says otherwise. So you have to look at the practical side too. How decisions get made, how performance gets recognized, What barriers get rewarded? What barriers need removing? And I think one of the smartest things you could do here is asking employees to take the lead. Ask them to identify the challenges and suggest solutions.
[00:03:31.720] - Imogen
Yeah, we did this, we did this in operations once, we were working for a client. They had brought in a new ESG, environmental social governance program, and they were looking to reach net zero. And what we did is we created a competition, an innovation competition whereby the teams actually working in the factories, we asked them to give us their best suggestions on how we could reach net zero. And the things that they found were things that would never have been thought of by anyone in HQ. It was the smallest things like changing the type of light bulb and when they came on, You know, that came together to make a really big impact.
[00:04:18.390] - Amanda
And because we asked the question, the change felt co-owned. It stopped feeling like something being done to them or a target it needed to be hit, but it started to feel more shared.
[00:04:31.310] - Imogen
So, secondly, I think to help change stick is you need to model the behavior. I read a story recently about Sylvan Goldman, who, believe it or not, was the inventor of the shopping trolley. American man. He invented it to help his customers get more groceries and move them around, which makes sense. And he then introduced them into his brilliantly named Humpty Dumpty supermarket chain. Love that. And shopping trolleys did not take off. Men thought they were effeminate, And women thought they were too much like a baby carriage. So Goldman decided that he would hire models, both men and women, to push the trolleys around the store and show other people how they could be used. And people saw these models using them, and so they started using them themselves. And obviously he went on to become a multimillionaire, and now I have to remember to take a coin with me every time I go shopping. So thanks a lot, Sylvain.
[00:05:36.800] - Amanda
Was he the one that also invented the wobbly wheel? Yes. Always a shopping trolley that goes in the wrong direction.
[00:05:44.000] - Imogen
Yep, that was part of the prototype.
[00:05:48.110] - Amanda
But your leaders could be and should be those models.
[00:05:52.470] - Imogen
Yes.
[00:05:52.860] - Amanda
People pay far more attention to leadership behavior than leadership messaging. They have to show how they're doing the change, not just talking about it. So, as an example, if your new strategy has moved to a customer-first mentality, you can say customer-first all day long, but if leaders make decisions that clearly ignore customers, everyone notices immediately. Same with culture shifts, values, same with new priorities. If your leadership isn't modeling the behavior you want, it's never gonna stick.
[00:06:29.400] - Imogen
And this is where those informal leaders come in. We talked about them in a previous episode. They really are your ambassadors and your trailblazers. But you can't just leave them to their own devices, though. You need to help them be ambassadors and trailblazers. When we set up an ambassador program for a client, one thing we were very clear on is you can't force people to be an ambassador. They have to actually care enough to want to do it, and it can't be a mandated position. And one of the best ways of getting people interested and excited enough to put themselves forward is to make being an ambassador worth their while. So, we offered our ambassadors additional training, we gave them information before anyone else, and made that role feel kind of exclusive and special. Playing into that kind of need-to-know element of people's personality.
[00:07:30.320] - Amanda
Yeah, and I think informal leaders aren't necessarily motivated by money or incentives.
[00:07:43.490] - Imogen
I mean, it helps.
[00:07:44.860] - Amanda
Well, yeah, it does, but quite often you can't do that, right? So, particularly if you're doing a restructure, it sends entirely the wrong message. So, you've got to find other ways to make them feel exclusive and special. Our third tip is you need to keep talking about the change. And this is the bit organizations often stop doing too early, because even if you think it's embedded and you assume the message has landed and you move on, quite often it hasn't. You need to continue to share stories about where it's working, Because people connect with stories more than slogans. And I think we probably had a storytelling episode that talks about why. So celebrate the people who are living the change. We, as humans, we like to hear stories about other humans. We want to see and hear from people like us. You need to keep the change at the forefront of people's minds. Because once that initial excitement fades, you've got to keep talking about why it matters to them, to the business, to your customers. It occurred to me that, and I'm not a big fan of logos for logo's sake, but if you're doing updates and you're telling stories, think about how you budget, think about how you talk about it, you know, had that Project, got particular project name.
[00:09:16.630]
So you're signposting, you know, signposting can be really helpful, I think, in this, in this respect.
[00:09:22.740] - Imogen
Yeah, it goes back to what the key messages of the campaign were and how do you infiltrate them into the sort of regular cadence of communications. Yeah, because what we, what we need people to understand is that a change is not just a singular moment in time, you know, it's not are just a one-off thing that people can just say, "It's changed," and then forget about it. You need to have a momentum and a forward movement, and that change needs to continue, not just be, you know, once. So, talk about successes, talk about milestones, have case studies, and you'll build energy and enthusiasm through that.
[00:10:06.540] - Amanda
A little bit of a watch out, of course, is be aware of the way in which you communicate. Gonna make it relatable, make it real, make it human. You know, honestly, people can spot self-congratulation communications a mile off. If your story, and I'm laughing as I'm saying this, sounds like a leadership self-congratulating, you're gonna lose people very quickly. So, you know, make sure you're reading the room.
[00:10:35.580] - Imogen
It goes back to tenets of storytelling, you know, who is the hero of the story? And in any change situation, your audience needs to be the hero of their own story.
[00:10:44.640] - Amanda
Yeah. Yeah.
[00:10:45.670] - Imogen
You need to make it easy for people to make the change as well in order to sustain it. So you need to be really honest with yourself. And this comes a little bit back to what we were saying in preparing for the change, but figure out where the gaps are. Is there a gap between what your team needs to be doing to make the change stick and what they actually can do? Because if the skills aren't there to make that change, you're kind of feeding into the employee fear and sort of heightening their flight instinct and their need to run away from things.
[00:11:22.650] - Amanda
Yeah, you can be resistant, aren't you? Yeah. Yeah.
[00:11:25.170] - Imogen
So, think about the gaps, think about the skills and competencies. And as well as formal training programs, look at how you can bring in micro-training sessions. We did a series of 3 Minutes On. Videos, meaning people around the business did short videos of 3 minutes, um, talking about a problem, a challenge, a way of working, and explaining how they did it. And that was a really powerful way of bringing in sort of micro-training to the everyday.
[00:11:58.120] - Amanda
And I, I think this is not just about competencies, um, in implementing the change It's also about your leaders and managers having the competencies. Do they have the skills to lead and manage that change? Can they stay calm when people are frustrated? Can they be transparent when the answers are incomplete? And we know they quite often are. Have they got enough patience to repeat things again and again without sounding irritated? One for me, I think. So, supporting them matters, not just formal training, As you said, small practical help that people can actually use in the moment. And that's what employees remember during change is how leadership made them feel.
[00:12:45.350] - Imogen
So, soft skills that we forget about. Finally, we talked about this a little bit in a previous episode, but we know how important it is that when it comes to measuring the success and adoption of change, that we're measuring the right thing. Not did we have enough emails? Did we do— town halls. We don't want to track output stuff. We want to track outcomes. We need to measure whether people are actually doing what we need them to do. So, if it's a new system, are they using it? Or are they relying on workarounds? If it's culture change, are people making decisions differently? If it's a process, is that being followed? You know, your vanity metrics will look really good on paper, on your PowerPoint presentation, but it really means bugger all in real life.
[00:13:38.490] - Amanda
I think just don't be fooled easily. It's important to use metrics and data in the right way. Going back to what I said before, it's not about patting yourself on the back. You need to learn from what went right and what went wrong. You know, take a look at your wins, why were they successful? What can you replicate next time there's a change? Because there'll be one. If something isn't working, figure out the reason and how you can shift and turn it round. And keep asking and talking to employees, not in surveys, just get your leaders out there in listening sessions. We did a lot of that in COVID, actually, do you remember? Where, you know, yes, we had a whole communications plan and cadence, but the most effective things were the sessions where we had leadership with no agenda doing some Zoom calls and getting, you know, just talking and listening. You know, 'cause people need to hear not just the polished version of things, but the real version. So find out what's going on, not what you think is going on.
[00:14:50.880] - Imogen
I mean, writing the case for change is really the easy bit. Sustaining that change is much, much harder. And whether or not your change sticks is really determined not only at those early stages when your leaders agree what success looks like, but then as you move through the change, it really falls back on your culture to be able to sustain it.
[00:15:14.680] - Amanda
You know, these days we talk a lot about change being a constant, and that's absolutely right. But it can't be solved by an off-the-shelf solution. Each change is completely different. And by the way, there's no perfect formula. I think every organization is different, every culture is different, every group of employees reacts differently. So as communicators, you know, yes, you can rely on your toolkit, but use your judgment, be flexible, and respond to what's in in front of you. And remember, you are there as the voice of every employee in the business. So speak up before problems become bigger later on. Use your instincts. Now, if you'd like further support in navigating change or anything else, quite frankly, comms-wise, do get in touch. But until the next time, see you soon.
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