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Snap – Internal Communications Solutions.
4
Hot Tips for Internal Communicators
Think strategically and clarify your messages
Why are we changing?
Even when you have the trust of your employees, they won’t get alongside and make changes unless you
provide a compelling and logical reason to change. Your strategy should be to motivate staff through
inspiration, not desperation.
Having a structured process is only part of your strategic communications planning. An iterative process
that allows you to make continual improvements depending on the feedback you receive is an excellent
approach. Acting on employee feedback demonstrates that you are not only listening to your employees
but taking note of them too. This can be a powerful way of engaging staff and moving them through to
the Exploration stage of the Change Curve.
Part of a successful change management process must include communicating strategically. This
includes ensuring that your management team communicate effectively. A strategic move might be to
measure how effective managers are at communicating key messages and to provide some training for
those who perform poorly. Roger D’Aprix comments that as soon as some leaders meet resistance they
either ignore it or want to squash it. He suggests a more strategic communications approach; one that
builds staff engagement through:
Trust
Compelling logic
A match of actions and words
Involvement of those who are affected
Communicating a sense of confidence and minimizing fear
Repetition of the primary themes.
Think about these building blocks when you are crafting key internal messages to support the change
communication process.
To build on trust, you need to be honest. Miss the chance to make a compelling case for change, and
you will find that employees will concoct their own, usually less flattering, reasons for change. Don’t
assume that the negative people will necessarily sabotage your project. They will if you let them, but it is
your job to win them over. Converts can become your greatest allies.
‘Walk the talk’, since actions speak louder than words. Engage employees who are directly affected. You
may not like some of the messages you hear, especially during the Denial and Resistance stages.
However, acknowledging people’s fears is one way of minimizing anxiety, especially if you work in an
environment of trust and honesty. Your internal messages need to accentuate the positive and eliminate
(or at last minimize) the negative. Repetition is a powerful tool. People only hear the message when
they are ready to hear it. Those of us who are constantly bombarded with information have got really
good at screening out noise. So, repeat your key messages until everyone gets it. Customize and target
messages to each your key stakeholder groups. Don’t forget to massage your messages to take into
account staff mindset at each stage of the project.
Make sure you see the project through to the end. If this means giving extra support to some groups, or
providing additional training, do it. The behaviors need to become embedded.
Sun Microsystems’ ‘Knowledge, Attitude, Action’ model (Ref 8) provides a tactical approach based on
moving staff from an existing position to a desired one. For example, seek to move:
Current employee knowledge from ‘I don’t know our strategy’ to ‘I know where we are going’
Current employee attitude from ‘I’m scared I’ll lose my job’ to ‘I’m excited about my future’
Current employee action from ‘I just do what I’m told’ to ‘I proactively shape my work to help the
company meet its goals.’
Clear, positive messages give a clear and positive direction.