How does your company handle change communication?

#1

Last night, we interviewed @jasonlittle, Author of Lean Change Management (podcast to be released next week). One of the topics we discussed was effective change communication. Typically this is an area of contention in organizations of all size. I am curious, how does your organization usually handle change communication? Please select from the poll - but in the comments feel free to discuss how you would like your organization to handle change communication

  • Typically email - text only
  • Typically email - with attachments (PDF, PPT, Word Doc, etc)
  • Town Hall Meetings
  • Lean Coffee style meetings
  • Communication?! We just find out after the fact
  • Other - please explain in comments

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#2

I mentioned town halls but my company is so big and spread out the town halls usually sometimes are reflected in office-sized (50-400) or account-sized (5-50). We meet often so things come in little drips and drabs as opposed to big bang (ugh who wants that?!?).

#3

I’m in corporate/fortune 500 type environment at the moment.

Unsurprising that, currently, change communication is entirely isolated to email, with the big build-up grandiose all-staff meetings that contain far too much information, far too late.

No biggie; pretty typical place to start.

#4

“far too much information, far too late” totally resonates with me- it seems like we spend too much time trying to get the messaging “right” and not enough on getting it out.

#5

They completely suck ! Communication are basically small network (grape vine) so there is 88 versions of the truth and all of it wrong. When they do send a communication it is on a Friday late in the day or Monday am.

The messages are vague and not informative and have been sensitized by all levels up to the Local COO.

I am not sure how this company stays in business most days.

#6

Friday late in the day? That’s an old government trick, bury the bad news on a Friday so the weekend cleans it out of the system before Monday. See: BLS numbers or the Federal reserve announcements. As someone wise once told me “bad news doesn’t get better with age.”

#7

And Hope is not a Strategy !

#8

The company I’m with currently does their best to get us information as transparently (and as early) as possible, so a few methods are used. There are emails with and without attachments, meetings (and announcements in other meetings), wall displays that get updated, informal chats, Slack posts. I suspect we might be toeing the line between an overwhelming amount that the team doesn’t always know how to interpret and just enough for people to pick their preferred communication method and just run with it.

#9

I have suffered through all of the experiences mentioned above; emails, staff meetings, town halls, etc…

Luckily, at my latest engagement, I have some influence. True story; a client that somewhat listens…go figure. Notice I said “somewhat.” Anyway, we utilize many of the techniques that I learned in @jasonlittle Lean Change Management book to help promote bidirectional communication and transparency.

The first step was a creation of a mashup canvas, combining ideas from the Jeff Patton’s Opportunity Canvas and Jason’s Change Canvas for the Agile Transformation. I inherited a 42 page report from the company that hired me as a sub- contractor. This exercise enabled me to get my head around the challenges of the client, and serves as a visual for guiding the transformation.

We have a “steering” committee that consists of representation of all business units. I know; the name sucks, but I was voted down when I requested we re-brand to “change coalition.” This is the squad tasked with overseeing and guiding the Agile transformation. We sprint (adopted recently) on the same cadence as the teams. tackling small chunks of large change initiatives around the Agile Transformation such as standing up new teams,revising the performance review process, and re-engineering the governance process. Our board is big and visible, located in in the elevator area. We also have a monthly bulletin but that is mostly for PR purpose.

We (the coaches) push this group to get input from those doing the work before pulling the trigger, but occasionally we are overruled because management knows best:) We have had more success lately; being a coach on the ground floor for 9 months, I am able to provide a a realistic lens on whether or not an approach is feasible or not. However, sad truth is not all leadership wants to hear the reality, so we fall back on plan B which is to just let them fail.

We run a lean coffee once every two weeks. They were widely attended initially, and feedback was positive. Attendance has since tailed off, so we are looking for options to rejuvenate them.

Of course we had our failures as well. Our biggest problem was reliance on middle managers to disseminate info throughout the organization. Simply put, that didn’t work. The info was either not distributed or watered down.

To address this we have launched a new experiment in which we are leveraging our COPs as a forum to gather feedback on a proposed change before we roll it out. We are three weeks into this experiment, and everyone is very appreciative of the new approach.

#10

The trickle down via official hierarchies is the most common one I’ve seen. Of course, that ‘official’ communication is typically different from the reality. There’s always the informal networks that spread information as well, like the folks that carpool together, the folks that play hockey together on weekends, the folks that eat lunch together because they were once in the same department, but got moved due to a re-org last year…

A friend of mine works at an organization that has a ‘Snopes’ channel in Slack so people can anonymously post rumours they hear and management can stop them dead…or reinforce them!

#11

I work within a remote organisation so good comms around change, is always essential but equally difficult. After many, many different ideas, we are now finding a weekly video broadcast works well for Senior managers to get across “why” we are doing this work or this project and what it translates to for the business. As part of the tool we use (Zoom) we can have anonymous questions posted, but find most people are happy to ask any follow up questions in the main “company news” channel in Slack.

We are also in the process of making better use of Confluence to provide more detailed info per project and want to encourage decisions to be documented by each project / platform team. We’ve found the Decision Log confluence template really useful, especially when on-boarding new team members onto a project which has already begun.

Lean Coffee sessions also work well, but we only do these a few times a year when all face to face.

I’ve not had the opportunity to try this (as we are remote) but would like to try the Fishbowl discussion with a large department or even the whole company to talk through important changes. I’ve seen it run well at conferences, to facilitate various Agile discussions, but never tried it within a company, perhaps someone else has?

#12

I concur with @mccallam2 that the lean coffees can be an effective way for people to learn about the changes being made and it’s impact on them as well.

My main wish is that the Agile steering committee would include all (or at least some) scrum masters since they are responsible for not only working with the team but the org as well and they are the ones who are on the team level while the managers are not.