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Implementing Transformational Change through a Line of Sight

Fri, 11 May 2012 19:53:44 +1000

Implementing a strategic vision does not have a high success rate. Surveys by McKinsey and Co. have revealed over many years that the success rate rarely exceeds forty percent*. Kotter published his findings in 1995 showing transformation success rates at only 30%. Other studies confirm that over twenty years, transformational change enjoys success rates of approximately 30-40%.

And yet, this is a period where transformational change as a topic has received much attention, with many new models for change postulated, with seemingly little difference made to the actual success rate over that time. The question that goes begging therefore is: why? Why has the high level of thinking by some of the better thinkers available not translated to an improvement in the results of transformational change?

Without wanting to postulate yet another theory of managing change, it is evident to us through experience that there is many a slip twixt cup and lip, as the proverb goes, in executing transformational change. We are clear advocates for creating the right environment for change rather than slavishly following a model. One of the ‘environmental factors’ we often find missing at an executive level is a clear line of sight between the top-down vision of what the changed organisation looks and feels like, and the personal responsibility of the employee.

A line of sight

Figure One demonstrates what I mean. We start with a corporate view of the world and create a line of sight from the corporate view to the personal view needed to drive personal adoption. Whilst we have applied labels to each of these sections of the line of sight, the labels themselves are unimportant; it is their attributed value or meaning which is important. So when reading this article concentrate on the meaning we attach to the words rather than any values you attribute to them.

Figure 1 - Line of Sight from Vision to Individual Adoption.

Where we are going?

Vision

The starting point of understanding the line of sight between what you want to achieve out of a transformational change is what we call a Vision. When we say ‘Vision’, we mean some words that can describe in present tense what this organisation is like after the transformational change. We do not mean an endless paragraph word-smithed until it becomes devoid of meaning. To learn more about what we mean by the term ‘Vision’, click here.

Often we find this is the first hurdle that organisations fall at: they cannot clearly express their vision. One potential client wanted to “Make people more proactive to government changes impacting the vocational education sector.” When asked for examples in behaviour that would change when going from reactive to proactive he struggled to articulate what the changes were.

Another client had a vision “to be the leading provider of customer focused credit solutions”. This had obviously been word-smithed over a long period of time to get the maximum combination of objectives into as few words as possible, which is the end result I see from most “Vision workshops”. When challenged to state who “a credit customer” was, the senior management team could not agree on a definition. When asked what a credit solution was they similarly could not agree. Asking how they measured the word ‘leading’ brought a similar outcome.

One can have the most formidable coalition of the willing behind a transformational change but when you cannot define the end result, failure beckons.

Mission

We define Mission as the ‘how’ of getting to the Vision. It is the high-level view of where we will focus our attention to achieve our vision. It is a precursor to Strategy.

One client has a Vision which, in part, sees them as the largest supplier of their goods and services in their geographical region, and having expanded geographically and vertically, and to have returned profits in excess of that necessary to fund operations and their strategy to their customers by way of lower prices.

The company is small and as such started their Mission Statement with a commitment to ‘train our people to be the best at what they do in the region’. Also, in part, their Mission Statement committed them on their planning windows, their attention to Health, Safety and Environment and, because of their dispersed operations, a commitment to use technology to reduce operating costs and reduce risk. They were also clear that ”We will research any market we enter into and our preferred mode of entry into markets for which there is a gap in our capability is by partnership”.

By the time they had completed their Vision and Mission Statements they were clear on what the organisation looked like after their transformational change and the major levers they were going to use to get there.

In instances where an organisation’s Vision and Mission Statement are little more than a collection of meaningless platitudes and motherhood statements about excellence and teamwork, it is very difficult to manage risk and frame a strategy that is coherent and congruent with the Vision. The boundaries of what we will and will not do to achieve our vision need to be set.

Corporate Governance

Corporate Governance is "the system by which companies are directed and controlled"**. Of importance to us when it comes to creating the line of sight between the Vision and personal adoption are three elements of Corporate Governance:

The division of responsibilities between the board and the management team in the implementation of the transformational change.
Policies which must be reviewed or developed to frame the boundaries of the transformational change and its implementation.
The risk management system and its parameters, which are necessary to manage the boundaries of the transformational change and its implementation.

We too often find in transformational change that even if the board and the management team are on the same page when it comes to the Vision and Mission, that confusion exists about who is responsible for what. Overreaching by the management team and interference by the board are, in our experience, common elements of a derailed transformational change. Sometimes we see this confusion over roles pushed down all through the line of management. The resultant internal discussions focus on individual positions with regard to actions being taken rather than the interest of the organisation in actually promulgating the change, and end up becoming bunfights instead of meaningful discussions.

Major changes in the culture, organisation structure, strategy and key performance measures which often accompany transformational change will almost always push against existing policies and high level processes. Those policies and high level processes must, therefore, be reviewed to determine if they are congruent with the stated Vision and Mission associated with the change. Policy areas which usually need revision include but are not limited to:

Recruitment
Performance management
Succession planning
Authorities and delegation
Customer interaction
Risk management

The existing risk management system will face major challenges to its capacity to constrain risk in organisations facing transformational change. The challenges come from two areas:

The acceptance of and reaction to external and internal pressures which may change the vision and mission of the organisation thereby changing the context in which risk is measured and the level of risk considered acceptable. To learn more about the context of risk, click here.
The introduction of one-off project-based risk events that originate from activities required to implement the transformational change. For example, communication activities during transformational change create a large range of risk events.

How are we going to get there?

Strategy

If we create Vision, Mission and Governance structures for our transformational change, we have by then at least constructed a platform for where we are going, with a high level view of what we need to construct to get there. What is needed next to continue the line of sight is the development of Strategy. The formulation of a Strategy, for us, must involve a choice between two or more good things; choosing between ‘what we’re doing now’ and some nebulous ‘other’ option is not formulating strategy. Neither is a choice between one good idea and a lot of bad ones.

What we often see at this stage of implementing transformational change is insufficient thinking about the alternative ways to reach the vision within the boundaries set by the mission and the governance structures. Too much energy is focused on a favoured way of a business unit or an individual, or a pre-existing way of doing business, instead of developing real alternatives which have pros and cons to be analysed and evaluated against the risk context agreed for the change. This lack of innovative thinking often leaves organisations with no alternatives when the expectations of the favoured way are not met due to unforeseen circumstances or unintended consequences.

A further issue in developing Strategy that breaks the link between vision and personal adoption is the failure to get engagement in the development and implementation of the Strategy. To learn more about getting engagement in implementing Strategy, click here.

Key Result Areas

Breaking down Strategy into the Key Result Areas (KRAs) is where the crossover from corporate view to individual view is made. KRAs can be set at a high level and cascaded down to the level of individual roles. At the high level, KRAs reflect both the Strategy and Mission and embody the boundaries imposed by the risk management system.

For example, one client included the following in their Mission Statement:

We will train our people to be the best at what they do in the region.
Employees proactively use technology and their personal skills and knowledge to reduce supply and operating unit costs for customers.
Employees want to work for us because of the development opportunities it provides.
Customers buying from us always receive polite, friendly service.

It is self-evident that a high level KRA for this business is about Managing People.

We often see transformational change break down at this juncture. There is no link provided between Strategy and what people should be concerned about. When that occurs what tends to happen is that the drive for change meets the inertia of the existing focus of the organisation. Little change occurs as informal and formal views of what is presently important conflict with what is important for the change to occur.

When I was in a role as Marketing Manager for Shell, we wanted to improve profitability dramatically and had several good strategies to do so. What was necessary, though, was to change the focus from sales volume and gross margin to profit. The KRA had to change from sales to profit. Without that change, we would not have been successful, despite the good strategies.

At the role level, KRAs are cascaded down from the high level KRAs to enable people in specific roles to understand how they contribute to delivering the vision. To learn more about Key Result Areas at the level of organisational roles, click here.

Process and Procedure

KRAs may be cascaded down to roles informally in one-on-one sessions with individuals or may be put on a formal footing by spelling out clearly the processes and procedures to be followed with the KRA. The advantage of cascading the KRAs formally is threefold:

Consistency of the intent and method to be followed within a KRA is easier to achieve between different people undertaking the same role.
Key Performance Indicators are easier to define and set when a process and/or procedure is formally documented, so measurement of what works and does not work can drive continuous improvement and manage personal performance.
Training of people is much easier and more effective when there is a consistent base from which to build learning outcomes.

By this stage, a large majority of organisations undergoing a transformational change have broken the link between Vision and Individual Adoption. They break it either by ignoring the need to reframe the Vision, Mission and Strategy into Policy, Process and Procedure, or by writing such turgid processes and procedures that no one can understand them, let alone follow them. Processes and procedures should be considered as part of a collection of learning collateral more than as a part of a Governance structure. It is our experience that processes and procedures written with Governance as the prime aim generally have a low success rate at transferring the learning necessary to implement the process or procedure back to the workplace.

Who is going to help us?

Training

If you’re reading this and thinking it feels like a really big effort is required to implement transformational change, then I’m sorry, but the job just got bigger. We now have to enlist the help of our people to actually implement the changes. People will only implement change at the individual level*** if they:

believe the change will be good for them and better than other options they consider good for them at the time; and
believe that the change is the subjective norm—that is, there is perceived social pressure to engage in the changed behaviours required to implement the change; and
perceive they have the ability to perform a given behaviour; and
have the actual level of control required—authority and availability of data to make decisions all form part of the actual level of control

Building learning, performance management and communication strategies that reinforce each other maximising the transference of learning back to the workplace is what is needed here. Training and change management plans and tools must be integrated into a whole congruent programme. Our observations are that this is often beyond most organisations as the Learning and Development and Project Management—or in some cases, Change Management—departments do not share the same perspective on what is required to make the change happen. When that difference remains unchallenged and unresolved, the impact on people’s behaviours is lessened dramatically.

For example, one client undertaking an Electronic Document and Records Management system rollout had a change in project manager when the project was about seventy percent complete. This change resulted indirectly in a change in the way the concept of a Business Classification System (BCS) was taught: the training experience went from experiential learning to a lecture, making it difficult for learners to perceive they could work with the BCS, as they no longer had the same level of comfort in understanding what a BCS actually was. The subsequent training on how to use the BCS then had to make up for the shortfall in understanding the concept.

Assessment

Training individuals in new processes and procedures, or in new skills, is adequate to provide them with the perception that they have the ability to complete the processes and procedures required to help implement the transformational change, but it does not, in and of itself, provide the organisation (or the individuals being trained) with any confidence that the learning from the training is being transferred to the workplace.

The training itself should use formative assessments to enhance the learning. Formative assessments are those that are conducted during the learning to enable the teacher to see how well students understand and remember the information being imparted, and are primarily useful in assisting teachers with adapting the training material to suit the learners.

Summative assessments—those conducted at the end of the training process to assess the transfer of learning—should also be used to ensure that people have learned what the training set out to teach them. Transformational change is not a short journey and training design needs to continuously improve to ensure that the design is effective.

Making changes to processes and procedures without checking whether the training is effectively embedding the changes in the way people work is a recipe for something we see often with processes and procedures which are three years or more old. That is the formal process written down has no resemblance to the informal processes and procedure workarounds that actually occur in the business.

In our view, summative assessments should test for:

knowledge of the process or procedure by means of a quiz; and
application of the process or procedure at the workplace by way of a checklist of observed actions and behaviours repeated a set number of times.

Quiz-style summative assessments allow us to establish a degree of certainty at Kirkpatrick’s Second Level of Training Evaluation: the increase in knowledge or capability of the student that occurs as a result of the training. Observational checklists go a long way to establishing certainty at the Third Level: the extent to which that transferred knowledge is then implemented in terms of improved behaviours or capability improvements on the job.

Many organisations do not use formative assessments in their training and even more refrain from using summative assessments to their detriment in day-to-day business operations and to their peril during transformational change.

Competence Development

Training, assessments and actions back in the workplace to further develop skills and knowledge should form part of a competence development framework where the following items are clearly identified for each role within the organisation:

The KRAs, processes and procedures that apply to the role.
The accompanying cascaded Key Performance Indicators for the role.
The competencies required to execute the role.

This is the last leg in drilling down from the Vision to what is required in terms of human resources to achieve the Vision. It provides people with:

an indication that the change will be good for them by identifying where they can improve;
a platform from which social pressure to be competent can grow; and
a perception that they have the capability to change their behaviours and an indication that it is important to actually have the capability.

Personal Rewards

The issue of personal rewards is the subject of much discourse in the literature. In our experience, monetary rewards are short-lived as an incentive unless they are tied to increasing competence and career opportunities. It is our view that increasing competence that is essential to reach the Vision—if it is to be rewarded monetarily—should be rewarded by increased gross pay. We have seen this work in roles as diverse as research scientists and truck drivers. The use of bonuses for performance—unless strictly tied to the individual’s impact within a team on a few key performance indicators—can have a negative impact over time. This is difficult to do even in the world of Sales. Bonuses linked generally to organisational performance become a ritual and routine and when the general performance does not live up to expectation because of a negative change in the external environment, people are disappointed, and those who have adjusted their living patterns to rely on receiving a bonus suffer real pain.

Non-monetary rewards, in general, have better long lasting outcomes. Rewards which target career and personal development go beyond the hygiene factors as described by Herzberg and impact the motivational factors.

Most organisations have a rewards and recognition scheme. It is necessary when undergoing transformational change to link that rewards and recognition scheme to the Vision and Mission in a granular way to individuals.

Individual Adoption

Aside from the training aspects already mentioned it is important to create the performance management environment that reinforces the precursors to individual adoption. That includes both the formal processes and development of KPIs, and the informal processes which supervisors and managers carry out in their day-to-day management and coaching of people.

It is advisable in most instances of transformational change to include a learning pathway for supervisors and managers to improve their coaching skills. In most organisations we observe that these skills are poor. The problem is that the informal processes adopted by managers and supervisors are often at odds with the intent of the change. Given that one-up managers have closer relationships with people than two-up and three-up managers, they have much greater influence over the authority people perceive they have to make the changes in behaviour that are required to implement the Vision. Managers and supervisors also have a great influence over who goes to training when and the level of effort put into transferring the learning back to the workplace.

Personal Leadership

Lastly but by no means least, individuals need to show personal leadership to make the changes necessary in their behaviour to implement a transformational change Vision. Creating a learning environment where people are able to evaluate their capability to actually change their behaviour in a non-threatening environment, and develop personal development plans supported by their business unit and the wider organisation, in our observation, takes some pressure off managers and supervisors up the line who themselves are having to change their behaviours.

The learning environment may consist of but not be limited to:

An organisation-wide workshop where all people are given equal training to help them develop a personal development plan that will help ensure the strategies are implemented to reach the vision in line with the mission and within the boundaries set by corporate governance structures.
Frequent mini-training opportunities e.g. toolbox meetings to emphasise a particular policy, process or procedure.
Skill development programs to improve assertiveness skills, problem definition skills, communication channel selection and use skills team work skills etc..
Performance management training for managers and supervisors.
Coaching skills.
Feedback sessions on progress of the transformational change.
Training on the use of Key Performance Indicators.
Training on how to map processes and write procedures.

Summary

Implementing change is difficult; the statistics tell us so. There are many good models about that show the environment required for creating a desire to change across a broad enough spectrum of the organisation to have critical mass.

We argue that in addition to having that environment, a line of sight between the vision of the transformed organisation and personal adoption is necessary to drive change that lasts through the organisation.

Unfortunately it is not a simple task and requires skill and knowledge to carry out effectively. We can help to ensure that you are making the right connections at each juncture and create the documentation, performance and learning environments necessary. Change Factory can help you create your line of sight in detail, making change easy.

*For example, see “Organizing for successful change management: A McKinsey Global Survey,” July 2006; and “Creating organizational transformations: McKinsey Global Survey Results,” mckinseyquarterly.com, August 2008

**Cadbury Committee report on Corporate Governance viewed 05/08/2012 http://www.ecgi.org/codes/documents/hampel23.pdf

***Viewed 05/08/2012 Theory of planned behaviour http://people.umass.edu/aizen/tpb.html

Communicating during Revolutionary Change

Fri, 11 May 2012 14:13:45 +1000

In an organisational context, revolutionary change is often about getting an organisation 'back on the straight and narrow'. The goal of the change can manifest in many different ways, from a focus on cutting costs to 'right-sizing' a workforce, or entirely changing the space in which an organisation operates. Whatever the goal, revolutionary change involves a fundamental shift in the structure of the organisation, or the way in which it does business. Commonly, revolutionary change is thought of as being driven by external circumstances, but in my experience it is just as frequently driven by inadequate ongoing responses to emergent internal circumstances.

When revolutionary change is measured, many organisations believe that measuring whether or not the change has occurred is sufficient. My observation is that even when the change has occurred—as measured by an often-opaque set of performance indicators—the collateral damage caused by unintended consequences far outweighs the benefit gained from implementing the change in the first place. A significant cause of those unintended consequences during revolutionary change is limited and/or poor communication. This article seeks to give you a toolbox of communication channels for revolutionary change.

It is axiomatic that revolutionary change results in a majority of people going through the classic psychological reactions to change (see below).

The key objective, then, in communicating during revolutionary change is to provide certainty. Most people can cope with disappointment; what they cannot cope with is ambiguity.

It’s not uncommon for project teams and change leaders to want to withhold information during revolutionary change. Questions about what the workforce will think or how the unions or media might react lead the decision-makers to keep things to themselves, and this is prudent while the goals and nature of the change are being debated and decided. However, when it’s time for the rubber to hit the road and implement the change, withholding information only adds to the anxiety people feel.

This manifests in two ways:

After communication begins, whatever residual trust remains withers even amongst the supporters of the change, as they feel they are not being trusted with the full information.
A rush of misinformation and rumour swamps the vacuum formed by the absence of official information.

In evolutionary change, the objective is to engage people through the phases of:

Understanding
Belief and acceptance
Caring
Planning
Implementing.

In revolutionary change, we concentrate on the first two phases and drive through the last three phases top-down, taking as many people with us as we can, but not relying on people being truly engaged to complete the change. Revolutionary change is best done the same way you take off a band-aid—quickly, and with determination. Doing so any other way permits the agenda of the change to be subverted by interest groups with their own view of ‘how things should be done’.

In the second stage, the belief and acceptance we seek from employees is that the change will happen, rather than that the change is good for them. Of course, we want as many people as possible to believe in the change, but as time is of the essence, this is not necessarily the priority; managing revolutionary change over a too-long time period does not turn it into evolutionary change, it simply intensifies and prolongs the anxiety experienced by those whom the change affects.

Communication Channels

Any communications strategy developed to help managers and team leaders through these stages of engagement should consider the channels to be used in communicating the content.

For the purposes of this article, I have broken these channels down into four broad groups:

Face to face, where individuals or groups assemble in the same place at the same time to have a one-way conversation (e.g. a presentation) or a two-way conversation (e.g. a workshop).
Audio-visual, where individuals need not be in the same place at the same time, but a combination of video or sound is used.
Social media, channels designed to promote highly accessible interactive dialogue on a topic.
Text-based, where communication is chiefly performed by the written word (whether or not accompanied by pictures, diagrams etc.)

Face-to-Face Channels

Presentations
In revolutionary change, it is mandatory that the most senior person in the organisation be present to communicate the change to staff. The people most affected by the change must be able to see and hear the genuine need for this change by being able to observe the body language and tone and pace of voice of the most senior person driving this change.

Here is a simple tip: if you are ever in that situation—where you are the most senior person in the organisation—and you do not actually believe in the change, get out of that metaphorical kitchen. The incongruence between your body language, tone and pace of voice and your words will be palpable and your words will sound like weasel words.

When creating the presentation, keep three things in mind:

Use a symbol to communicate the change
Use data to back your words
Speak with passion.

A symbol may be a logo, a catchphrase, an image or a range of modelled behaviours and actions. When John Fletcher took over as CEO of Coles Myer—as it was then—he turned over space on the top floor of the building at Tooronga, which his predecessor kept as his fiefdom, to general office space leaving himself a good working space and saving the company hundreds of thousands of dollars per annum in rental at other buildings. That move was a powerful symbol that life had changed at Coles Myer. The nickname of 'Battlestar Galactica' for the head office building soon disappeared.

It is fine to make assertions about the problems your organisation faces but if they are not backed up by data, they become less believable. Clearly, you will not have embarked upon revolutionary change without good data to support your decisions. Trust your people—all of your people—to understand and interpret the data. Providing people with the data upfront helps them both understand and believe in the change and provides a benchmark upon which to report on the success or otherwise of the change as time goes by.

Nothing, and I do repeat, nothing trumps speaking with passion to get people to believe. It has been the hallmark of despots and evangelicals alike in getting their followers to believe. It is important that you, as a leader, learn to reframe your messages of change into something that you do believe in and that your audience will understand so that your passion will be natural, not forced.

Speaking with passion invokes all three communication cues taken by people to determine if are genuine; your words (the least important), your tone and pace of voice, and your body language (the most important).

Think of some of the poor communicators we have in our political world now.

Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott both lack passion when they talk although Julia does slip up occasionally and speak with passion, particularly if it is about education. Both of our political leaders rely too heavily on phrases word-smithed until devoid of all meaning, chanted like some mantra to the waiting 24-hour news cycle. Barack Obama, on the other hand, can often reframe even the most mundane topic into something he is passionate about, and consequently comes across as more believable than if he stuck with the monotone catch-phrases and bureaucratic doublespeak of his Australian counterparts.

Presentations are useful in the following stages of engagement:

Understanding: a presentation by senior management is mandatory in revolutionary change. The key task is to get people to understand that the change is going to happen and what the timeline of events is. It is important to communicate the ‘why’ of change, but do not expect to convince all people on that count. Senior executives must be seen to be willing to look people in the eye with what most will see as bad news.
Belief & Acceptance: follow up the initial presentation with regular appearances updating the progress and plans. It is important that the chief executive is supported by the rest of the executive team in being consistent, insistent and persistent about the messages of change and progress. Create presentation packs for all executives to use to ensure a consistent message. Due to the speed and scope of revolutionary change, it is difficult recover from a communication misstep, so do not leave gaps in the information flow, as they will quickly be filled by rumours. It is important that senior managers, when they do not know the actual future timeline of change, talk about the process to determine the exact changes required. In revolutionary change there is less scope to involve people in the ‘how’ of the change, but the more that this can be done within the timeframes necessary, the more likely the change is to be accepted. However, be aware that many people will see being told they have no choice over the change but can determine how to implement the change as being disingenuous. In some cases it may be better to direct the how of change too.

Implementation: presentations by executives throughout the implementation phase can help people to understand that executive determination extends into driving the implementation itself.

Feedback and support
Alongside the structured aspects of a communications strategy, more fluid elements can serve an important role in filling gaps and embedding change into the day-to-day activities of the business. Feedback and support can be used in the following ways:

Understanding: provide trained people—preferably supervisors—to collect and give feedback to people on the change. When a revolutionary change is announced, the senior executives making the announcements can quickly become targets of ire and derision for many people; which means they stop listening to what the executives have to say and rely instead on their own preconceived notions of what the change is about. People need someone they can turn to correct misconceptions and answer questions away from the glare of public presentations.
Belief & Acceptance: don’t be surprised if revolutionary change causes grieving similar to that experienced with a bereavement. Expect the need to provide counselling on different levels. At one level, counselling comprises pragmatic help such as how to find a new job, how to manage the financial windfall of a redundancy to reap the maximum benefit, or how to learn new skills to aspire to new jobs within the organisation. On another level, counselling can comprise helping people over their particular grief about a specific and personal impact of the change. Do not discount these actions as not being relevant to communication. To the individuals involved, they communicate something quite personal, but to the masses they communicate that you care and, in doing so, help embed belief in the change.

Workshops
Workshops—as distinct from meetings, seminars and presentations—are designed to promote the free exchange of ideas and two-way communication between individuals and groups. Some may not regard workshops of this kind as part of a communication strategy. They are working from far too narrow a definition of what to include in a communication strategy and may be missing a very important planning and design activity in designing the workshops to achieve maximum understanding of the goal of the change.

Workshops, in revolutionary change, are useful in the following stages of engagement:

Understanding: conduct Analytical Workshops involving managers, team leaders and subject matter experts across business units in your organisation to analyse the impact of the change on their business units and the necessary actions to be taken. This provides an active learning experience which will provide a good understanding of what needs to happen and will surface risks which may create unintended consequences. It also serves to create an environment of being involved in doing something about the change rather than being always subject to the change. Some people, hopefully a large minority, will feel that they have some power and control back, which they tend to lose after the announcement.
Caring: provide team support to those having difficulty with the change to get them to focus on what they can influence during the change. Run coping with change workshops which cover:
- The nature of change (theory of change applied to their personal experiences of change)
- How change affects individuals
- Strategies for coping with the change they are undergoing
- Developing resilience to the change they are undergoing
Helping people cope with change in this practical way will help them through their phases of reaction to change faster and will allow them to more positively care about the change faster. Provide leaders with a similar workshop but with an emphasis on leading change. Content may include:
- Theory of change
- Leading yourself through change with particular emphasis on this change
- Leading others through change with particular emphasis on this change
- Practicing change conversations for this change

Running both workshops will give leaders and their direct reports the same lexicon in which to discuss the change. A common language to discuss analysing how the change impacts on people, the skills necessary to work with the change, and the actions which can be taken, reduces angst by making people feel they are part of a team undergoing change rather than an individual.

Planning: hold Planning Workshops with managers and their teams to plan how to implement the change in their business unit. Your role here is to be more directional than in the case of evolutionary change. Give the team the milestones and outcomes required but allow them to work out dependencies and resource requirements. It may be the case in some examples of revolutionary change that you will need to form a tight knit group of managers and senior supervisors and analysts to complete the planning without involvement of the broader workforce. This is undesirable but sometimes necessary in revolutionary change when time is short and the broader workforce is still dealing with grief. In this case, plan using a smaller team and give the broader workforce an opportunity to comment on the plan.
Planning: use Risk Management Workshops to flush out hitherto unforeseen risk events, the consequences of which if the event is realised, could derail the change. Assist the business unit planning teams by facilitating the workshop providing insights into risk events they may not have thought of. Allow them to determine the likelihood and consequence using facilitative questioning to test their assumptions. Decide, based on the nature of the risk and the urgency of the planning whether to allow them to also determine whether they accept or reject the likelihood and consequence of the risk events unless the risk is beyond what the project or organisation is willing to generally bear.
Planning: use Stakeholder Management Workshops at the organisational level—and at the business unit level if required—helping you determine who you need to influence. You will need to identify those individuals with high power to affect the outcome or direction of the change programme, and determine how to move those who exhibit active or passive resistance to at least a neutral stance, and passive supporters to active supporters.

Audio-Visual Channels

Video
There is little substitute for a personal appearance to announce what is taken as bad news. People must be able to not only here and see the whole message, they must be able to have a two way communication lest they misinterpret, distort and replace your messages. So, video is not really a suitable communication channel, it being preferable to use web conferencing as it enables that two-way communication.

Web Conferences
A web conference—or related technology like video conferencing—enables face-to-face-like interactions over distance, and is especially useful for organisations with a geographically dispersed workforce. It is generally insufficient, however, to use web conferencing and similar technologies as a means to deliver a one-way lecture.

Ways in which this technology can be used to gain engagement are as follows:

Understanding: if your workforce can’t be gathered in one place, you can use video conferencing and on-camera webinars to make a simultaneous announcement about change across several locations. This Is not, however, a substitute for a personal appearance; ensure that dates for follow-up personal visits are known and are communicated as part of the web conference. Ensure also that the agenda is set and agreed to well before beginning the conference/webinar.
Further web conferences may be used as follow-up meetings to clarify misunderstandings and communicate progress on issues. In follow up meetings create activities that are designed to engage the audience to ensure they understand by making use of the functionality of web conferencing software including but not limited to:
- Slide show presentations
- Live or Streaming video
- Meeting Recording for later viewing and/or distribution.
- Whiteboard with annotation allowing the presenter and/or attendees to highlight or mark items on the slide presentation
- Text chat for live question and answer session
- Polls and surveys
- Screen sharing/desktop sharing/application sharing
Caring: use web conferences for updates and making sure people are aware who is making progress and who needs help and potentially connecting those people together. Use project team members, human resources and executive management for question and answer questions around the need for the change and the commitment of the organisation to make it happen.
Implementation: use web conferences to help create a positive environment for lessons learned across the organisation.

Social Media Channels

Applications like Yammer, Telligent Enterprise and Chatter have been slowly reconfiguring corporate expectations since not long after the turn of the millennium. Nowadays, with more than 80 percent of the Fortune 500 using Yammer alone, enterprise social networks are no longer a new-fangled idea—indeed, they can be powerful communication tools when used effectively, being great for both synchronous and asynchronous engagement. They also allow unfiltered feedback to be gathered, with analysis of that feedback then being used to inform any redesign of communications tactics or content.

This is not to say that older technologies, such as the corporate intranet, blogs, wikis, discussion forums and the like can’t still be useful.

Social media channels are best used in revolutionary change as a means of getting feedback and broadcasting what the timeline of activities and milestones are and to provide ready answers to people’s questions. Ways to use social media channels to gain engagement in a revolutionary change include:

Understanding:
- Use your intranet as a broadcast medium for developing understanding of a change—as long as it is informative and capable of a degree of interactivity. Using the intranet as a one-way channel to help improve understanding is to underutilise the medium. Means of making the intranet more interactive include:
  - Frequently asked questions
  - Downloadable checklists
  - Where to go to get help or counselling
  - Where to go to apply for redundancy, if this is applicable
- Use enterprise social networks to get feedback on the change through all stages of engagement. Ensure that you have staff available to monitor and reply to threads of conversation as they develop
- Discussion forums or "bulletin boards" are among the oldest collaborative tools, and still very useful for sharing and discussing ideas around a particular topic.
Belief & Acceptance: social media channels, where they already exist in your organisation, will be used to form beliefs, regardless of whether you are involved or not. It is better that you provide information and insight into those channels by way of constant updates on progress, asking opinions and answering questions—preferably before they have been asked—by means of constantly updated frequently asked questions. Delegate leadership of discussions and activities to people in the organisation who “get” the change, but have an independent mind and status within the organisation. This is so that discussions are not seen to be propaganda.
Caring: social media channels may be either a driver of increased caring or a rapid means of spreading negative feelings and ambiguity about the change. Their use will magnify the impact of your change management efforts. Controlling them heavily has a negative impact. They are unlikely to be suitable for getting people to care about a revolutionary change because of the risk.
Planning: Use enterprise social networks to get quick feedback on plans. Feedback may be sought from within a team or across business units. Use wikis to create planning documents, but use a moderator well versed in the project and with good project management skills to oversee the content build up.
Implementation: Use enterprise social networks to get quick feedback on implementation successes and issues. As a discussion leader, use a person who believes in the change and is experienced in all aspects of the engagement process to date, from understanding to planning.

Text-Based Channels

There is a wide variety of text-based channels available, with each serving a specific purpose:

One-way emails are great for quick, simple communication that is not liable to be misunderstood.
Two-way emails are a cheap and quick means of holding an asynchronous discussion where deep understanding and questioning is not required.
Brochures are good for providing a brief overview of a topic using pictures or diagrams.
Newsletters are one-way static communications that could be either paper- or electronically-based. Only newsletters with a high circulation and readership are useful as communication tools.
Desktop guides—being typically a more in-depth, lengthier and more structured view of a topic than a brochure—are good for relaying complex information that is easily organised into sections.
How-to guides are similar to desktop guides but tend to give more direct instruction.

With the object of communication in revolutionary change being to generate certainty instead of ambiguity, the next best thing to a personal appearance by senior management for a two way conversation for people undergoing the change is to get something in writing.

Our recommendations on the use of text-based channels in engaging the workforce during revolutionary change are:

Understanding: to understand a change, people need to be able to question, paraphrase and summarise. For this reason, text-based channels—especially those that are one-way—tend to be less suitable. Emails are suitable for confirming when a face-to-face communication is about to occur. They are not suitable for announcing revolutionary change. Emails may be suitable for confirming what is intended and what the process is for progressing the change, although please remember that people have different communication preferences and other text based channels should be used concurrently. For example, use message boards, printed hand-outs and personal letters to confirm what is happening and what is going to happen. Brochures can be effective because they are in a different form to most corporate communications and they stand out from the daily clutter. However, it is our recommendation not to use brochures during revolutionary change. They have a tendency to look too slick, too corporate and too impersonal. Internal newsletters are effective means of improving understanding if they have a wide circulation and are widely read; survey the distribution and readership of your internal newsletter to comprehend how useful it may be. Newsletters with high readership levels are better though, for gaining belief.
Belief & Acceptance: internal newsletters, especially if articles are written either by senior management or by people being affected by the change, can be very useful for developing belief. Try to avoid articles written by the project team, as they are always seen as having a vested interest. The best subject-matter for text-based channels at this stage of engagement is the case study, showing how the change has been beneficial in other contexts.
Caring: use emails to give feedback and to advise of timelines. Use them also to announce the help that will be available in terms of counselling and outplacement (if necessary) and for planning and implementation to make the activities required to action the change appear less involved and time-consuming. Internal newsletters are quite useful in getting people to care enough to prioritise. Use internal newsletters to spread stories of early adoption and success. Provide public praise especially for teams rather than individuals.
Planning: Use emails only for communicating simple information including known timelines, risk events, resource constraints. If planning is reasonably complex consider creating some how-to guides with the negotiable and non-negotiable clearly identified. Also consider how-to guides on completing process analysis and re-engineering processes if these activities are involved in the change.
Implementation: Use emails only for communicating simple information including implementation timelines, resource availability and templated feedback. Typically, any implemented change will generate a number of new process and procedure documents that explain the details of the change and how it is meant to work. If you want your workforce to really be engaged with the implementation, though, consider the use of desktop guides or how-to guides as an expansion on that material that is not restricted by the template requirements of formal procedure documentation.

Choosing the appropriate mix of communication channels for your change programme environment and your organisation’s culture is obviously not a simple task. Designing the content also takes skill and experience. We can help to reduce the unintended consequences of revolutionary change by helping you to avoid communications that don’t have the desired impact. Change Factory can help you make those choices and design the content, making change easy.

You may also be interested in the article: Communication choices during Evolutionary Change

Communication choices during Evolutionary Change

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 08:39:10 +1000

Change may be the only constant, but it’s my observation that over more than a decade of leading change programmes around the world, there is little constant about change.

At Change Factory, while we don’t believe in silver bullet solutions to complex change management problems, there are a few self-evident truths that we have collected, largely via observation. One of those concerns communication, and its importance in the success of any change programme.

This article concerns itself with communication during evolutionary change. Evolutionary change is aimed at improving an aspect or aspects of the business (e.g. existing processes; workforce skills; organisational culture) over time, without the severe physical and/or psychological dislocation of the workforce that tends to occur during revolutionary change. Radical change—that is, change with significant scope or goals—may be effected through evolutionary change with thorough planning, but in evolutionary change, the workforce does not feel that they have been placed in the way of revolutionary change and rarely undergo the classic psychological reactions to revolutionary change (see below). Evolutionary change may be planned or emergent.

In contrast, whether internally designed or externally inflicted, revolutionary change is always planned. Revolutionary change seeks to change the fabric of the organisation by changing one or more of its goal, strategy, culture and structure. Revolutionary change, by its nature, causes members of the workforce to undergo the classic psychological reactions to change to one degree or another.

Goals of Communication during Evolutionary Change

The key communication consideration in evolutionary change is engagement. The goal of the communication strategy and tactics is to get engagement in the change from all stakeholders with significant power to influence its outcomes and direction.

A second important consideration, alongside engagement, is creating the environment for individuals to adopt and adapt to the change. This is partially the remit of a communication strategy, but not wholly, as performance management and training both have a large contribution to make in creating that environment.

Engagement of an organisation goes through five phases and the communication tactics must help managers and team leaders—those with the power to influence the outcomes and directions of the change—to move through each phase:

Understanding
Belief & Acceptance
Caring
Planning, and
Implementation.

An in-depth description of the phases of engagement is provided in http://www.changefactory.com.au/articles/change-management/implementing-a-change-strategy-getting-engagement/.A brief description of each stage is provided below.

Understanding

Understanding the change is about more than being able to repeat the mantra from the CEO’s presentation on the topic—it’s about understanding the context of the change in terms of what the drivers of change are, what the intended outcomes are, and the impact of the change on the business.

In evolutionary change it is not essential that all people understand the change at the same time, or to the same degree in a short space of time. There usually is time to build understanding of both the goal of the change and the means of getting there.

Belief & Acceptance

Creating an environment where people understand the goal you wish to achieve is a necessary first step but is insufficient if you want to have people contribute to the continued evolutionary changes required to achieve the goal. People need to believe in the goal and in the first steps to achieve the goal.

Communicating with individuals, with the goal of getting them to believe in and accept the change, will vastly improve your chances of getting a critical mass of people to act as supporters of the change programme.

Caring

This is the pivotal part of engaging people in an evolutionary change. You need to be able to get a critical mass of people to care enough about the change or changes to prioritise time in their day and give mind-space to the change.

What makes people care about a change varies significantly. There will be some managers and team leaders who intrinsically believe in the goal and the first steps postulated by the leader of the organisation. They will immediately begin to prioritise activities which make the achievement of the goal probable.

Some managers and team leaders will not believe in the goal and the change and will not, independent of persuasive instruction, prioritise any activities to do with the goal or the change initiatives involved with it.

The remainder are in a no-man’s land not sure whether to prioritise the change or not. This group is usually a large majority.

The content and channels used in transitioning people from understanding to belief will have had a positive impact on this group. In significant change programmes, however, more must be done.

“What’s in it for me?” remains the most significant motivator of individual managers and team leaders. Communication tactics must be designed that tap into their needs.

The key needs to be addressed include but are not limited to:

Recognition: praise managers and team leaders for their accomplishments.
Sense of achievement: instil a sense of achievement by regular feedback sessions.
Growth and promotional opportunities- demonstrate how the change creates growth and advancement opportunities.
Responsibility: Give mangers and team leaders’ responsibility for the work. Minimize your control but retain accountability.
Meaningfulness of the work: Ensure the work involved in the change and or the work resulting after the change should be meaningful, interesting and challenging for managers and team leaders.

In addition, for those unlikely to be motivated by recognition or growth opportunities etc., advise them of the help available to make their job easy.

Planning

The objective of communication at this stage is to make planning into a task where the steps are very clear and the process as a simple as can be.

Setting up a system for planning approval that—for example—requires multiple approval steps, each of which collects multiple signatures, communicates quite clearly that there is not a lot of heart in the organisation for the change, whether that is true from an executive manager’s perspective or not.

Implementation

The objective of communication at this stage is to reinforce the goal and the plan for implementation, providing support and encouragement to managers and team leaders to follow a continuous improvement process of Plan, Do, Check, Act.

At this stage some teams will have few if any issues to deal with and some teams will have some clear issues to deal with. The majority of teams will have small problems which the proactive will deal with quickly and the reactive will at best allow to continue unchecked, and at worst will allow to blow out of all proportion.

Communication Channels

Any communications strategy developed to help managers and team leaders through these stages of engagement should consider the channels to be used in communicating the content.

For the purposes of this article, I have broken these channels down into four broad groups:

Face to face, where individuals or groups assemble in the same place at the same time to have a one-way conversation (e.g. a presentation) or a two-way conversation (e.g. a workshop).
Audio-visual, where individuals need not be in the same place at the same time, but a combination of video or sound is used.
Social media, channels designed to promote highly accessible interactive dialogue on a topic.
Text-based, where communication is chiefly performed by the written word (whether or not accompanied by pictures, diagrams etc.).

Our recommendations on using each channel are summarised in the table below.

Face-to-Face Channels

Workshops are particularly useful in the following stages of engagement:

Understanding: conduct Analytical Workshops involve managers, team leaders and subject matter experts across divisions in your organisation in workshops to analyse the problem which needs to be solved by the change. This provides an active learning experience which is more likely to provide deep understanding of the rationale for change than even the most engaging PowerPoint design.
Belief & Acceptance: use Challenge Workshops to ensure that all negative thoughts about a strategy or a change have been articulated and properly dealt with, including all genuine known or perceived risks. The result of a well-organised and well-facilitated Challenge Workshop will be a single agreed set of actions, and a better understanding for all participants of the detailed risks and contingencies pertaining to those actions. After completing a Challenge Workshop, staff involved are almost always more committed to seeing the strategy or course of action succeed as a direct result of being consulted for their opinions and expertise. Efficiency and effectiveness is improved, especially in teams. Challenge Workshops also lead to a more stable and structured workplace where there is less uncertainty about what people are doing and why during the evolutionary change. There are also far fewer opportunities for “corridor whispers” to derail a course of action for the change programme after objections have been flushed out.
Planning: hold Planning Workshops with managers and their teams to plan how to implement the change in their business unit. Your role here is to be facilitative, not directional. By all means provide the planning team from the business unit with templates and processes, but have them work out the specifics of the activities, timing and resources required to effect the desired change.
Planning: use Risk Management Workshops to flush out hitherto unforeseen risk events, the consequences of which if the event is realised, could derail the change. Assist the business unit planning teams by facilitating the workshop providing insights into risk events they may not have thought of. Allow them to determine the likelihood and consequence using facilitative questioning to test their assumptions. Allow them to also determine whether they accept or reject the likelihood and consequence of the risk events unless the risk is beyond what the project or organisation is willing to generally bear.
Planning: use Stakeholder Management Workshops at the organisational level—and at the business unit level if required—to help you determine who you need to influence. You will need to identify those individuals with high power to affect the outcome or direction of the change programme, and determine how to move those who exhibit active or passive resistance to at least a neutral stance, and passive supporters to active supporters.

Presentations
Presentations are a mainstay of many communications strategies, and it’s easy to see why: they are cheap, easy to organise, and require little in the way of effort. However, in our experience, if used in isolation, they deliver similarly little in the way of results.

Having said that, there is almost an inbuilt expectation that management will, at some point, make a presentation to staff on any change topic, and so they have become a hygiene factor.

Presentations are useful in the following stages of engagement:

Belief & Acceptance: a presentation by senior management followed up by regular appearance updating the progress and plans is the simplest way of getting people to believe that the organisation is serious about the change. It is important that the chief executive is supported by the rest of the executive team in being consistent, insistent and persistent about the messages of change and progress. Create presentation packs for all executives to use to ensure a consistent message. In evolutionary change it is easier to recover from a communication misstep than it is in revolutionary change, but it is still so very important to not leave gaps in the information flow, allowing them to be filled by rumours. It is important that senior managers, when they do not know the actual future timeline of change, talk about the process to determine the exact changes required. If this message can be augmented by one of empowering stakeholders to determine the “how” of the change, then the change is much more likely to be accepted.
Implementation: presentations by executives throughout the implementation phase can help people to understand that executive support goes beyond just budget and resources, and extends into driving the implementation itself. Executive presentations throughout the implementation that highlight successes and failures—and the remedial action being undertaken, where required—will give individuals the confidence that the change is being taken seriously at all levels of the organisation.

Feedback & Support
Alongside the structured aspects of a communications strategy, more fluid elements can serve an important role in filling gaps and embedding change into the day-to-day activities of the business. Feedback and support can be used in the following ways:

Caring: providing direct feedback on people’s contribution and attitude towards the change can be done successfully in-person, over the phone or using text -based channels. Use face-to-face channels for maximum impact.
Implementation: consider using selected people as post implementation support. The responsibility of these people is to help answer any questions about the new way of working, coaching people as they try to do something new for the first time. In an IT implementation this may be in the form of floor walkers. In a Sales environment it may involve the sales manager accompanying salespeople on a visit as a new Sales Process is attempted. In a call centre this might mean sitting in on a call as a new product or service script is used.
Implementation: obtaining ongoing support from executives—beyond wheeling them in and out for presentations—can provide a powerful message that the change matters; doing so requires little more than the executives remaining consistent in their communications regarding their ongoing support for the change, with these communications potentially taking place in any channel, although face-to-face is the most effective.

Pilots
A pilot, used as a limited real-world test of the change programme, can act as a communication tool in itself. Its results are even more powerful, and give you a significant topic for discussion. You can use pilots, and their results, in these ways:

Belief & Acceptance: consider using pilots of any significant, albeit evolutionary changes, to demonstrate a commitment to “getting it right” and taking into account employee feedback. Pilots have the additional benefits of creating sponsors of the change through a vertical slice of the organisation.
Caring: use the output of successful pilots to help people prioritise. A successful outcome demonstrates both the relative benefits of the change and the absence of unintended consequences that may have been preventing people from prioritising the activities required to enact the change.

Back to list

Audio-Visual Channels

Video
Using video in the workplace is not always commonplace, but as individuals become more familiar with video as a communication medium outside of the work environment (YouTube, anyone?), so it becomes increasingly worthwhile as a medium at work.

Video can be used in the following ways:

Understanding: Although this it desirable It is not essential for the leader or sponsor of evolutionary change to visit each location. In large organisations it may be necessary and even advisable to create a 3-5 minute video to help inform people of the change. Typical subject matter for a video includes but is not limited to the:
- Rationale behind why the change is necessary
- Goal of the change and any significant objectives
- Senior management support
- High-level plan of actions to achieve the goal (do not include timelines; they date the video in long term projects and make a commitment which may have to change)
- Impact on stakeholders
- Place to find more information.

Ensure that the video tells a story and includes 'ordinary' people as well as senior managers. Shooting a video of the CEO standing awkwardly in front of a camera with bullet pointed slides interspersing the vision are insufficient to hold people's attention let alone engage them. Get the video designed and shot professionally. A video of this nature has a shelf-life of up to three years before it is obviously out-dated.

Use the video for communicating in remote locations, to steam over the intranet and use a part or the whole of it as an introduction to meetings and workshops to undertake analysis to frame them in a consistent manner.

Belief & Acceptance: Video can be used effectively for helping people believe in the goal and the way in which change will unfold. In evolutionary change it is important that people believe in the goal and the manner in which the change will unfold and their role in it. Use senior management figures on the video demonstrating that they understand the building blocks of change to reach the goal. Also use a range of frontline and middle management people to give a ‘local’ contextualisation to the change and a use of language which is familiar. Consider, where appropriate, using case studies of other organisations or other divisions.
Caring: Use video updates for remote locations. Having set the scene with a more polished video communication, it is now sensible to scale back the production quality and concentrate on the content. This has the impact of making the message appear more important than the form and adds to believability which helps create a bias for action. Senior management and project team members are both suitable as presenters.
Planning: Use video to communicate the overall plan and the steps required of business units in completing their own sub-plan as necessary. Keep the production quality simple and direct, concentrating more on the content. Use project team resources and subject matter experts as presenters.
Implementation: Use video to communicate case studies of implementations with learning points front and centre of the communication. The production quality requirements of this video will be different for different scales of evolutionary change. The more transformational the change, the higher the production standards need to be with use of graphics and perhaps animation to convey complex messages rather than a talking head. Use executives and subject matter experts as presenters. Also consider a professional presenter.

Ways in which this technology can be used to gain engagement are as follows:

Understanding: create activities that are designed to engage the audience to ensure they understand by making use of the functionality of web conferencing software including but not limited to:
- Slide show presentations
- Live or Streaming video
- Meeting Recording for later viewing and/or distribution.
- Whiteboard with annotation allowing the presenter and/or attendees to highlight or mark items on the slide presentation
- Text chat for live question and answer session
- Polls and surveys
- Screen sharing/desktop sharing/application sharing
Belief & Acceptance: web conferences can be used to help create belief in the change by engaging a broader cross section of the organisation and allowing questioning of the what and the why of the change. It is possible to run an effective challenge workshop using a web conference.
Caring: use web conferences for updates and making sure people are aware who is making progress and who needs help and potentially connecting those people together. Use project team members, human resources and executive management for question and answer questions around the need for the change and the commitment if the organisation to make it happen.
Planning: use web conferences to help provide instructions on how to plan, the steps to take, actions to consider, planning constraints and contingencies to be aware of.
Implementation: use web conferences to help create a positive environment for lessons learned across the organisation.

Back to list

Social Media Channels

Which is not to say that older technologies, such as the corporate intranet, blogs, wikis, discussion forums and the like can’t still be useful.

Ways to use social media channels to gain engagement include:

Understanding:
- Use your intranet as a broadcast medium for developing understanding of a change—as long as it is informative and capable of a degree of interactivity. Using the intranet as a one-way channel to help improve understanding is to underutilise the medium. Means of making the intranet more interactive include:
  - Quizzes
  - Frequently asked questions
  - Downloadable checklists
  - Connecting it to other social media channels
  - Connecting it to eLearning about the initiative
- Blogs are great for sharing individual knowledge and experience, as well as spurring discussion. They are not ideal for project-oriented collaboration.
- Wikis are well suited to the task of creating shared documentation over time from multiple sources. It is necessary, however, to manage them using an active moderator to make sure they don't become chaotic and lose their usefulness.
- Enterprise social networks are suited to engage stakeholders in a Facebook-like application. Services such as Yammer allow for conversation threads to be started by anyone and for collaboration on issues important to the stakeholders as well as broadcast communications.
- Discussion forums or "bulletin boards" are among the oldest collaborative tools, and still very useful for sharing and discussing ideas around a particular topic. Unfortunately, forums can be hard to navigate and search.
Belief & Acceptance: social media channels, where they already exist in your organisation, will be used to form beliefs—regardless of whether you are involved or not. It is better that you provide information and insight into those channels by way of constant updates on progress, asking opinions and answering questions—preferably before they have been asked—by means of constantly updated frequently asked questions. Delegate leadership of discussions and activities to people in the organisation who “get” the change, but have an independent mind and status within the organisation. This is so that discussions are not seen to be propaganda.
Caring: social media channels may be either a driver of increased caring or a rapid means of spreading negative feelings and ambiguity about the change. Their use will magnify the impact of your change management efforts. Controlling them heavily has a negative impact. You are better off to extend the advice given to help people believe—and use people who do believe in the change, but who do not come from either the project team, human resources, or executive management—to initiate and moderate discussion, calling on subject matter experts as required.
Planning: Use enterprise social networks to get quick feedback on plans. Feedback may be sought from within a team or across business units. Use wikis to create planning documents, but use a moderator well versed in the project and with good project management skills to oversee the content build up.
Implementation: Use enterprise social networks to get quick feedback on implementation successes and issues. As a discussion leader, use a person who believes in the change and is experienced in all aspects of the engagement process to date, from understanding to planning.

Back to list

Text-Based Channels

There is a wide variety of text-based channels available, with each serving a specific purpose:

One-way emails are great for quick, simple communication that is not liable to be misunderstood.
Two-way emails are a cheap and quick means of holding an asynchronous discussion where deep understanding and questioning is not required.
Brochures are good for providing a brief overview of a topic using pictures or diagrams.
Newsletters are one-way static communications that could be either paper- or electronically-based. Only newsletters with a high circulation and readership are useful as communication tools.
Desktop guides—being typically a more in-depth, lengthier and more structured view of a topic than a brochure—are good for relaying complex information that is easily organised into sections.
How-to guides are similar to desktop guides but tend to give more direct instruction.

Our recommendations on the use of text-based channels in engaging the workforce during evolutionary change can be found below.

Understanding: to understand a change, people need to be able to question, paraphrase and summarise. For this reason, text-based channels—especially those that are one-way—tend to be less suitable. Use two way emails sparingly to explain a change—and then, only when you can clearly construct an interactive sequence of emails that require recipients to respond. Use two way emails instead for arranging meetings to talk about the change, get a response to a question or advise of timing. Brochures can be effective because they are in a different form to most corporate communications and they stand out from the daily clutter, but they are best used only to get sort sharp messages across and should not be expected to have useful life beyond a few weeks before they find their way into a bin. Internal newsletters are effective means of improving understanding if they have a wide circulation and are widely read; survey the distribution and readership of your internal newsletter to comprehend how useful it may be. Newsletters with high readership levels are better though, for gaining belief.
Belief & Acceptance: brochures can explain the why and broad how of a change. A single brochure can help engender both understanding and belief. Internal newsletters, especially if articles are written either by senior management or by people being affected by the change, can be very useful for developing belief. Try to avoid articles written by the project team, as they are always seen as having a vested interest. The best subject-matter for text-based channels at this stage of engagement is the case study, showing how the change has been beneficial in other contexts.
Caring: use emails to give feedback and to advise of timelines. Use them also to announce the help that will be available in planning and implementation to make the activities required to action the change appear less involved and time-consuming. Internal newsletters are quite useful in getting people to care enough to prioritise. Use internal newsletters to spread stories of early adoption and success. Provide public praise especially for teams rather than individuals.
Planning: Use emails only for communicating simple information including known timelines, risk events, resource constraints. If planning is reasonably complex consider creating some how-to guides. The obvious one is on the planning process itself. Also consider how-to guides on completing process analysis and re-engineering processes.
Implementation: Use emails only for communicating simple information including implementation timelines, resource availability and templated feedback. Typically, any implemented change will generate a number of new process and procedure documents that explain the details of the change and how it is meant to work. If you want your workforce to really be engaged with the implementation, though, consider the use of desktop guides or how-to guides as an expansion on that material that is not restricted by the template requirements of formal procedure documentation.

Back to list

Choosing the appropriate mix of communication channels for your change programme environment and your organisation’s culture is obviously not a simple task. Designing the content also takes skill and experience. We can help to ensure that you are not wasting your time with issuing lots of communications that don’t have the desired impact. Change Factory can help you make the choices and design the content, making change easy.

At the risk of remaining unheard

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 09:31:57 +1000

This article appeared in the May, 2012 issue of IQ – the Records and Information Management Professionals Australasia (RIM) Quarterly magazine. To download, click here: At the risk of remaining unheard

The Executive General Manager tightened his belt as he prepared to give his keynote speech to the project team that was to be responsible for the rollout of an EDRMS to thousands of staff. His attitude was stern.

“This project is very important to us. We must comply with the State Records Act by next year.” His countenance brightened as he indicated to the woman beside him. “Which is why we have elected to give oversight of the project to Sally. Sally is one of our best managers, and I know she will do a good job. That is why I hereby transfer the poison chalice to you, Sally, in full confidence you won’t let us down.”

Sadly, over three years, that was about the best contribution the Executive General Manager made to the conversation about the information management needs of the organisation.

Was it his fault that he did not understand that information management is not about compliance, it is about boosting productivity and reducing risk through on-demand collaboration across the organisation? Our thoughts are no, he should not be expected to be knowledgeable about modern information practices no matter how much we wish that he was. It is our role as records and information management professionals to reframe what we know about records and information management and Electronic Document and Records Management Systems (EDRMS) into the language of senior executives. Too often, however, we know too little about business processes, which means we also, therefore, know little about how the functionality of the EDRMS and good information management practices can actually increase productivity and, in particular, reduce risk.

When it comes to articulating the reduction in risk, we are doubly challenged. Not only do we have difficulty in getting a good understanding of the business processes, but also most people—including some senior executives, not just records and information management professionals—have a poor understanding of the concept of risk.

When presenting a business case for a budget to implement an EDRMS, or materially change the organisation’s information management practices, it is insufficient to just proclaim that we can reduce risk. We must be able to show, with specific examples, how risk will be reduced from a level which is unacceptable to a level the organisation is comfortable with.

It is somewhat helpful to refer to ‘scary stories’ of risk events being realised when poor information management practices occur. At Change Factory and Linked Training, we use them quite a lot in our training of superusers and records management teams with good effect. However, to influence an executive team, our arguments must be more concrete and rooted in known business processes.

To be able to reframe our knowledge of information management practices and the functionality of the EDRMS into risk reduction benefits to an organisation, we must learn risk concepts and how to apply them.

If you have a good understanding of risk terms you can skip forward, if you do not have a good understanding then read on.

Risk Terms

Risk sources: In the physical world this is easy, the sources of risk usually being a type of energy: kinetic, electrical, potential etc. In the information world, it’s not so clear cut, but sources of risk can be reasonably classified in terms of integrity, availability and confidentiality. When identifying risk in information management we should look at processes which have the potential to create an event that will compromise the integrity, availability or confidentiality of information.

Risk event: In the physical world, this is slips, trips, falls, mechanical failures and so on. In the information world, this includes but is not limited to human behaviour such as misplacing or misfiling or transcribing incorrectly, poorly executed operational processes such as scanning or copying or mailing, natural events such as floods or cyclones and legal events such as freedom of information or court action.

Risk context: This will be the same as it is in the physical world. It is the criteria by which we measure the consequence of a risk event happening. In most organisations the risk context includes an assessment of the potential impact on:

Reputation
Environment
Assets (financial and physical)
People (customers and employees)

Risk analysis: This is determining the likelihood of a risk event occurring and the consequence if it does occur. The likelihood is rated on a scale, such as from Unlikely (event occurs every ten years or more) to High (event occurs one or more times a year). The consequence is rated on a scale such as from Insignificant to Major in the contexts already established. We need to think about what the consequences would be if specific information is compromised with regard to integrity, availability or confidentiality.

Risk evaluation: This is evaluating whether the risk likelihood and consequence is acceptable to the organisation. This is where most non-risk professionals make a mistake in that they intuitively evaluate the likelihood of risk but not the consequence if the risk event, albeit unlikely does occur. This can result in a gross underestimation of the actual level of risk the organisation faces.

Risk treatment: This is the actions taken to reduce the likelihood and or the consequence of the risk event occurring to a level acceptable to the organisation.

Residual risk: This is the risk remaining after risk treatment.

Risk Analysis that Executives will listen to

So now we have completed Risk Management 101, how do we use this knowledge to our advantage in influencing senior executives to spend some money on information management? Or, even better, to get them to enthusiastically sponsor the project we are seeking budget for?

Step 1:

Look for processes where a compromise in the integrity, availability or confidentiality of information would have an unacceptable consequence for the organisation. It may help to think of processes in a segmented way such as:

Strategic information processes such as organisational development, planning, audit, strategy development.
Operational processes such as service provision, policy advice.
Support information processes such as payroll, recruitment, performance management, accounts payable, accounts receivable, procurement.

Step 2:

Map the process and analyse the likelihood and consequence of information risk events occurring at each step in the current process.

Step 3:

Evaluate where a particular function of the EDRMS and/or better information management practices can form an effective part of a risk treatment plan to reduce the risk likelihood and or consequence to a level acceptable to the business.

From this analysis, we can begin to tell a cogent story about the risks which would be ameliorated if we had better recordkeeping processes and used the functionality of an EDRMS better.

An example might be the launch of a new product requiring extensive briefing of a government department, vendors, an advertising agency and an engineering firm. The processes involved here are complex involving many levels of authorisation and sharing of information. In a poorly-functioning information management world, confidential documents will be sent as email attachments; security on who can see what within the organisation’s shared drives will be lax; knowledge of which version of specifications is the latest and operational tactics will be poor; and no audit trail will exist—to mention but a few of the shortcomings. Completing an in-depth analysis of the processes involved at each step will reveal multiple opportunities and a high likelihood for the new product launch to be leaked to competitors and the media, for specifications to be in error, or for operational tactics across departments involved in the launch to be misunderstood; and these are only a few risk events. The consequences will depend on the need for secrecy, accuracy and speed, but in most cases of this type, any event will at least damage the timing and most likely the effectiveness of the launch.

A fully-functioning EDRMS with good information management practices will reduce the likelihood in many process steps to zero for most risk events. Take that analysis as a case study to the executive management team and you will have their interest and are likely to get some debate about alternative controls and or a request for more information if you do not get the go ahead then and there. If, instead, you only take a mantra that good information management practices and sensible use of EDRMS functionality reduces risk without a case study, they may show interest at the intellectual level, but are much less likely to be engaged in the nuts and bolts of the real benefits.

Good information management practices coupled with proper use of EDRMS functionality do reduce risk (and increase productivity) by allowing collaboration at the point of need. We have to learn the language of business and its executives and gain the understanding of the key strategic, operational and support information processes, or we risk remaining unheard in our quest for improved information management.

Managing change; working with the unconsciously incompetent

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 10:47:55 +1000

“Do we really need to include those articles in the in-house magazine?” enquired the change coordinator.

“Yes, we do” I replied. “The first article is to create awareness around why the change is important, the second is get people involved thinking about the change when they are likely to be first impacted” I explained. “The third is meant to appear at about the time the change program should be complete and link what people have gained from the change at work to their personal life”.

“Well, why do we need to have the team briefs and the mention in the weekly corporate email and the posters and brochures as well as the intranet pages if we are writing the articles? Surely this is information overload for people? I know I’d be feeling upset if all of this communication was directed at me” the change management coordinator huffed.

Cue exasperation rising as I patiently responded, “Very few people, if any at all, will see all pieces of information. This organisation is 6500 people strong. It is made up of people with very different thinking styles and communication preferences. We have to cater for everyone and send reinforcing messages if we have a hope at all in having them see and remember our messages. We have to tell them what the change is, what it means to them and the organisation and what they need to do to participate in the change. We have to help them become engaged in the change and have a channel to give feedback. We are trying to change behaviour with this programme and our communications strategy must reflect that. We are not simply passing on a single message to inform people and request a simple action.”

The exasperation arose not because of the individual, but because this was the third change management coordinator appointed by the organisation I was dealing with that needed education in the very basics of using communications to affect changes in behaviour.

Some twelve months prior to this, we had to counter a belief that the desire to change habits could be affected, in part, by putting a message on mouse mats and distributing them to 4000 users. The rest of the offering was to create a situation where people who displayed changed behaviours would have a green balloon placed by their workstation and those clearly not displaying the preferred behaviours would get a red balloon and those neither here nor there would get an orange balloon.

The mechanics and criteria of measuring changed behaviours was not offered, the usability of a mouse mat with no trackball was not considered, the cluttering of desks with additional paraphernalia with no actual use and the reaction of people to a public reprimand in the shape of a red balloon were not thought through.

It was clear that this organisation needed help in designing and developing a change management goal, strategy and tactics to affect the change. The project manager who hired us was also clear on the need. The section of the organisation from which the project was sponsored, however, was not only not clear on the need; they were also unconsciously incompetent about creating an environment in which individuals will change their behaviour and business units will adopt the changed behaviours as part of their culture.

Working with unconsciously incompetent managers is difficult, but manageable. It requires some specific skills, behaviour and knowledge, in addition to patience. When managing change in your organisation (particularly when you are doing so from middle rather than senior management) and faced with the unconsciously incompetent, you will need to master them.

Facilitative Questioning

A key skill in dealing with the unconsciously incompetent is facilitative questioning. The design of facilitative questions causes the person questioned to come to conclusions, after we lead them through particular thoughts. We should use specific types of facilitative questions to elicit a result dependent on the circumstance.

For example, imagine a change which requires people to move from services provided through a decentralised model, to a shared services model. Imagine you are speaking with an executive who believes that the change is “just something people will get used to” and that at the end of the day, they just need to be told what to do. Facilitative questions for the executive might include:

Context/background

Where are you right now with your ability to move to the shared services model?

Vision

Where do you want to be in a year’s time/ in three years’ time?
What would you like to hear employees talking about with regard to shared services?

Planning

What are the strengths that you could build on in the next few months?
What barriers/ blockages do you face?
What strategies have you considered to overcome the barriers/challenges?

Knowledge

What do all staff need to know to be able to implement your shared services vision?
Which groups of people will need to know specific information?
How will they get this knowledge/information?
How can we make sure that they actually have this knowledge?

Skills

What will your managers need to do, to create the shared services model in your vision?
What will staff need to do, to use the shared services model in your vision?
How will they get this skill?
How can we make sure that they actually have this skill?

Behaviour

What behaviours do you need people to exhibit to make the shared services model successful?
What change in behaviours does this represent?
What successes has the organisation had in the past in achieving changes in behaviour of this magnitude?
What failures?
What has been the major difference between success and failure?
How can we make sure that a critical mass of staff change their behaviour?
What is the role of the executive in leading their departments to achieve your shared services vision?

Belief

What will all staff need to believe for your vision to be realised?
What will specific staff need to believe for your vision to be realised?
How can we make sure that a critical mass of staff have this belief?

Policies and procedures

What policies and procedures do you have in place which will help move the organisation towards your shared service vision?
Which policies may need renewing?
What new procedures might be needed?

Risk management

What risk factors could jeopardise the successful implementation of shared services?
How might you manage each of these risks?

Evaluation

How will you know if shared services model is making a difference?
What can be measured?
What data could you gather pre-implementation?
What data could you gather post-implementation?

Asking some, or all, of these questions will slowly lead your unconsciously incompetent executive into a degree of conscious incompetence. Transitioning from their answer to further narrow open questions (or in some cases closed questions) may move them into a degree of conscious competence at the knowledge level.

Using the situation above, further questions in response to an answer might include:

Vision:

Q: What would you like to hear employees talking about with regard to shared services?

A: I’d like them to be saying how easy it is to access the services and how professionally they are supplied.

Q: What is required to make them easy to access?

Q: What does professional mean and in whose opinion?

Belief:

Q: What will all staff need to believe for your vision to be realised?

A: I don’t follow with this ‘belief’ stuff. All they will need to believe is that they have to make the change, they have no choice.

Q: What you are describing is a ‘command and control’ culture. Is that the current culture of the organisation? Do you want that to be the culture of the organisation?

Developing an ability to facilitate another person’s thinking will stand you in very good stead in dealing with those unconsciously incompetent in change management.

Perseverance

Going hand-in-hand with the skill of facilitative questioning is the ability to persevere.

Being clear about your goal is an important adjunct to perseverance. It may well be advisable to ask yourself some facilitative questions in a moment of self-reflection to be sure you know what your goal is.

As a consultant, my initial goal with a client is to meet their agreed needs. It is tempting when faced with ongoing unconscious incompetence to move to a goal which is to leave the client to their own devices, upsetting as few people as possible along the way. However, in our business that would not only damage our brand, it would send the wrong signal about acceptable consulting behaviour to our staff. So we have wider goals when we engage a client, which override the temptation to not persevere.

As the change manager within an organisation, we need to understand the organisation’s goal and our personal goal. We need to keep both in mind as we engage people who do not value what we do and potentially disagree with what we know needs to be done.

We are responsible and accountable at a personal level to be able to find a way to enlighten, then convince, the unconscious incompetents. It is our responsibility to persevere.

Facilitative questioning in the face of disagreement is a good skill to have to help us persevere. However, there is an attitude required which underpins the skill. We need to want to understand what makes the other person tick. We need to want be able to intellectually identify with people. That is not to say that we have to agree with them or mirror their feelings.

I once had a client representative that was narcissistic. In no way could I emotionally identify with them. But once I had intellectually identified with them, working with them became much easier. The style of facilitative questions to ask became more natural. The relationship became easy to manage. Similarly, I once had a boss that I originally thought wanted others to make him look good. However, I was wrong in my initial analysis. What he wanted was to ensure that he never looked bad in front of those he thought were his superiors. Once that understanding kicked in, managing him became easier too.

Knowing what makes people tick helps us find new ways to persevere when we are clear on our personal and organisation goals.

Subject matter expertise

In addition to facilitative questioning skills and a positive disposition towards understanding what makes others tick, we still need the core knowledge of our topic. This is clearly the topic of change management in our case. Knowledge of change management, however, is much more than just understanding popular models of change such as Kotter’s eight step model or Prosci’s ADKAR model. It means being able to do (or at least be able to comprehend and knowledgeably discuss) tasks including but not limited to:

Brochure design
Business process mapping and analysis
Business process re-engineering
Change management strategy
Communication strategy design
Communication planning development
Competency framework design
Cultural analysis
Instructional design
- eLearning
- Instructor-led (experiential)
- Self-paced
- Coaching guides
- Virtual learning tools
Key performance indicator design
Performance management system design
Poster design
Procedure writing
Rewards and recognition design
Risk identification, analysis, evaluation and treatment
Stakeholder management
Standards of operation design
Survey design and analysis
Training needs analysis
Training model design
Training and workshop facilitation
Video design and development
Web page design.

Summary

Working with the unconsciously incompetent in managing change is frustrating. However, it is our responsibility to use our conscious competence to move them to at least conscious incompetence. The question for us as change managers is: how competent are we?

Records and Information Management Professionals; Seven Personal Trainer Tips

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 14:42:40 +1100

A personal trainer offers three advantages: assuming you want to get fit.

They offer motivation, helping people move past self-imposed limitations, stimulate a feeling of accomplishment in themselves, and help them achieve goals they never thought possible. Personal trainers make it easier to get results. Studies have clearly shown that people who work with a Personal Trainer will achieve up to 80% better results three times faster than on their own. They also ensure that people exercise safely to prevent injury.

From my observation, Records and Information Managers must at times feel like they are on a treadmill sweating it out to get their voice heard in organisations, lifting heavy weights to influence decisions makers in the business and boxing several rounds to get their project (in the shape actually needed to embed good recordkeeping behaviours), accepted by senior management.

Slightly tongue in cheek then, here are seven “Personal Trainer” tips especially for records managers, to influence their organisation to take recordkeeping practices and the use of an electronic document and records management system seriously.

1. Buddy up.

When getting fit, it’s always preferable to have someone work with you - someone who will help motivate you to remain on track and complete your exercise sessions.

It is also advisable to find your buddies in the quest for better information and records management. This is not the same as nominating superusers. Superusers are not necessarily the people who are passionate about the benefits that good information management practices bring to an organisation. Your information management buddies may be in senior or junior positions; the key element is that they can see the benefits. Form a group, give your group a name, make it visible and set out to attract like-minded friends. Create on-line and off-line forums that help people understand the benefits the functionality an EDRMS can bring to business processes. Take care not to have a recordkeeping bent to the group. Make it a business process improvement group. Not only will you find your influence spreading, but soon you will not be alone in thinking about the benefits of good information management practices. Good ideas will be coming left of field to you and requests for budget will be sparked from the business rather than information and records management.

2. Use shorter workouts of greater intensity.

Shorter workouts of greater intensity can be as effective as longer ones when getting fit. Sure, everyone would like to be able to work out for 45 minutes uninterrupted, but with today's busy schedules and demanding jobs, finding time to exercise can be a struggle. The good news is that you don't need a huge block of time to see results. Studies have shown that workouts as short as 10 - 15 minutes can strengthen the body and improve your health.

Similarly, when it comes to getting records and information management on the radar of senior management, small projects to achieve specific aims may have the same impact as a big roll-out. The biggest benefit is that you are always doing something to improve records and information management. For example, run a project to improve recruitment cycle times and security of personnel data of applicants. Recruitment is a process that is often considered ‘too slow’ by the business and has several approval processes from the declaration that a vacancy exists, to salary and job levels, to the actual interview and background check. Getting recruitment wrong or late can have a significant deleterious effect. Recruitment also touches every department and manager level at some time. The opportunity to introduce managers to information management practices and EDRMS functionality with a project that will take away concerns about the process should be an enticing one.

3. Add variety to see results.

Undoubtedly, the fastest way to see changes in your body is to keep surprising it. Changing your routine every few days prevents your body from becoming conditioned to the same exercise day after day and requires it to call on different muscles for different activities.

Add variety to the routine you serve up to senior managers too. Try exposing, in detail, where current information management risks lie if they are not responding to the call for compliance. It is not sufficient here to just run a mantra of risk reduction. Map out a significant process or processes highlighting the probability and consequence of risk events occurring at each step. Re-map the process or processes using EDRMS functionality to eliminate the probability and or reduce the consequence. If risk does not work either, try productivity. Again, map the process and determine where elapsed days or actual man-hours can be reduced by utilising EDRMS functionality and good information management practices.

Talking to senior managers about how good information management practices and utilisation of the functionality of an EDRMS can improve the business from quite different contexts will kindle more interest in the topic as a business improvement tool, which is sure to get more traction than only talking about compliance and retention schedules.

4. Know your excuses and head them off.

When trying to get fit, it can be difficult to discipline yourself to your exercise schedule unless you give yourself an advantage. Good advice would be to sit and write down all the excuses you would use to avoid exercising or eating better. Once you've done that, go back and counter all your excuses. If you wrote down lack of time as an excuse, oppose it with suggestions for short, frequent workouts rather than one long session. If you wrote down sugar cravings in the evenings, be prepared for those by having a pre-determined meal plan. If you can anticipate your own excuses and know how to respond to them, you've won half the battle.

In the records and information world, exactly the same is true. We have had clients who tell us they do not use the EDRMS because it’s impossible to find anything when they save a document into their EDRMS. A bit of demonstration in titling and searching effectively by keywords rather than by classification usually opens up a whole vista of opportunities for them.

Make up a list of excuses that people use to excuse themselves from using an EDRMS. Most of the excuses are built on ignorance of the functionality of the EDRMS. Write out the potential solutions to the excuses and publish it as a set of mythbusters. Go further and run workshops with recalcitrant users and managers and just work on getting the 'why' of their non-use of the EDRMS out on the table. Solve the easy ones such as “I can’t be sure drafts are deleted in the EDRMS" on the spot and take away a clarified set of more complex excuses to find the solutions. Return to a short meeting or meetings if only one or two people had a particular excuse, with the solutions.

5. Make it fun!

Perhaps the most common complaint about exercise is that it becomes boring too quickly. Help yourself break out of the boredom by choosing activities that appeal to you. Instead of spending 30 minutes inside on the treadmill, go for a hike on a local nature path. Rather than doing your aerobics video for the millionth time, go outside with your kids and jump on the trampoline for a while. The goal is to choose an activity that you enjoy and that requires physical activity.

In records and information management, use experiential earning to make assimilating good practices fun. Don’t deliver dry training that is full of PowerPoint slides and system screen shots. When training on the Business Classification Scheme (BCS) for instance, prove to attendees that they use business classification schemes every day and that you are not introducing a new concept to them, merely extending it to the way they store and search for records. You can do this by, for example, handing out recipe books and asking them what classification scheme is being used in the book. One book might use ingredients as a means of classification, another may use country of origin yet another by famous chef. They switch between these means of classification with ease, we are asking them to do the same from usually and organisational or project classification to a functional classification. Ask them to create a functional classification of recipes. Then introduce your BCS when they ‘get’ the concept.

6. Schedule and commit.

To increase your chances of having a consistent workout plan, you need to create a sense of obligation to your personal at-home exercise program. Schedule your workouts just like any other appointment and write it on your calendar. Knowing that you have set aside time for exercise can help you follow through and stick to a successful program.

Create a plan for your records and information management progress from where you are now to where you want to be. Schedule your execution of tactics. Be aware that you do have activities which must be run in sequence for your best chance of success. For example, you will need to get your mythbusters developed before seeking to influence human resources on running a project to improve the efficiency and effectiveness and security aspects of recruitment.

You may need to get a few cross-department processes under your belt before taking on a wider audience or the senior management audience to get approval for a broader and deeper project.

7. Reward yourself (and your team and your ‘friends’)

In a fitness program, it is important to set checkpoints throughout your exercise program to assess your progress. Whether your goal is to lose weight, build muscle, or simply improve your health, take the time to check up on your improvement and then reward yourself for all the hard work!

Transitioning and organisation from an ad-hoc approach to records and information management largely built around ignorance of what good information management practices and broader use of EDRMS functionality can bring is a hard slog. Records and information management is not sexy to the vast majority of managers and users.

If you have set out a plan (see 6. Schedule and commit) with milestones, celebrate progress with the teams involved, the friends (see 1. Buddy up) of your project and senior management. Convey the progress in the language of the business, not the language of records and information management.

…and when the celebration dies down, give yourself time to appreciate what you have done and use the feelings that flow from that as motivation for the next step in getting an organisation fit for records and information management.

Picking a winning EDRMS team

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 14:01:41 +1100

“I tried that but it didn’t work. I’ve tried everything and it does not matter what I do, I can’t get the executive to budge, nor the sponsor to really believe in the project”, the records manager opined down the phone. I almost let out an audible sigh as I continued on with the interview, one of many conducted as part of our research sponsored by Records and Information Management Professionals of Australasia (RIMPA) into what are the drivers behind successful and failed Electronic Document and Records Management Systems (EDRMS) implementations.

What I had just heard was a common refrain from failed implementations and even from implementations which were deemed successful from our previous quantitative survey but, upon a qualitative analysis of the actual implementation, were not as successful as first thought. Nor was this refrain an isolated indication that skill gaps in the implementation team were having a negative impact on the sustainability of EDRMS implementations.

Picking an EDRMS implementation team is not a trivial task. There is a clear need to have the right skills on the team, as evidenced by Change Factory and Linked Training quantitative research in 2011, which surveyed 107 organisations who implemented an EDRMS.

Although it is not necessary to have specific roles with the skills, the skills themselves must be available in the team membership.

Whilst we use the broad term, ‘skills’ quite a lot in our articles and research findings, it is important to be able to describe and assess the more specific attributes of attitude, knowledge and skills when picking your EDRMS implementation team.

An example of what we mean with regard to attitude is that team as a whole must be consistent in their approach to people and the tactics used to create the environment for change. If the team is very fragmented in their approach and the tactics used by individuals appear incongruent, the validity of what the team is saying will be severely diminished.

One team we know had some members who had an attitude that people would just do as they were told because the records management policy was signed off by the Managing Director and the culture of the organisation was one of control and command. Other members were of the view that whilst that was so, the key to driving individual adoption was to show people how they benefitted. The result was that the attitude that drove the engagements with end-users was quite different. One part of the team, in fulfilling the task of engagement, asked fewer questions than the other, gave much more concrete direction and spent less time educating people about the benefits of an EDRMS and good recordkeeping practices. The consequence was a disjointed view amongst end users about what was driving the program and a disbelief of there being any coherent rationale for adopting the system. It would have been better to adopt one of the tactics completely than have a half-way house based on different attitudes to the change.

Knowledge needs to be measured in terms of its depth. For example, it is one thing to be able to describe well how to drive a car. It is another to able to describe how to drive a formula one racing car on specific circuits around the world. The depth of knowledge is quite different. It is the same when describing something like training needs analysis. It is one thing to be able to describe in general terms what processes might benefit from the functionality in an EDRMS. I could describe some of the processes whilst sitting here typing this article, e.g. recruitment, procurement, accounts payable, asset management and talent management. It is another level of depth of knowledge to know what the process steps in a particular business unit of an organisation are that could benefit from using ‘Actions’ to manage and control workflow for instance.

Often we find people nominated for positions who by virtue of their title such as Change Manager are somehow expected to be bestowed with the knowledge of an experienced change manager. One organisation had a change manager who was expected to know how to create a script for an animated video and understand how to deconstruct images, voice overs, sounds, texts and animation from eLearning and use them in the reconstructed animated video, because she was the ‘Change Manager’ and had the responsibility of managing communications in her job description. She had never been involved in the creation of a video before, nor eLearning. Of course, she struggled (as did the video company) to translate what the project manager, to whom she reported, wanted into reality.

The right skills is undoubtedly the broadest category to evaluate. Skills, like knowledge, are assessed at different levels of depth. For example, two different people conducting a training needs analysis using the same methodology will end up at very different results both of the data collection and interpretation phase and of the analysis and training model design phase.

In the data gathering phase the differing ability in building rapport, asking questions in a facilitative style, being able to ‘sense’ when information is incomplete or missing, comprehending how information given connects together and being able to determine the criteria by which the information should be sifted for a given project will result in vastly different information sets being delivered.

In the analysis and training model design phase, the difference between a workable model where end-users and support staff are educated to create a sustainable outcome may be dependent on different levels of capability to:

Cascade the goal of the project into learning objectives and marry them with
evaluate and describe the culture of the organisation
determine the current skill sets of end users and support staff and its impact on training model design and change management tactics to be sued
evaluate the training technology available and its impact on training model design
determine the internal and external budget available and its impact on the training model design
evaluate leadership strength and style and determine its impact on the timelines of training and degree and nature of change management tactics to be used.

It is, therefore, insufficient when building a team to implement an EDRMs to ‘tick the box’ when it comes to assessing attitude, knowledge and skills. The questions we ask of our team should be detailed and by their answer clearly identify gaps which we have to fill or at least create contingency plans for the risks created by the gaps.

To download our comprehensive checklist, click here.

Selling the sizzle instead of the sausage of an EDRMS to your Executives

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 11:39:13 +1100

Advertisers know that the best way to sell a product is to persuade customers to imagine themselves enjoying that experience. Advertisements for sausages don't list the meat content (and certainly not the fat content). Instead they conjure up the sound of sausages sizzling in the pan, the comfort of traditional cooking as everyone comes into the warm kitchen, out of the rain, safely home from school or work….

Selling an EDRMS implementation and changes to recordkeeping habits needs to sell the benefits and comforts of an EDRMS and good recordkeeping practices and not the EDRMS and recordkeeping practices themselves.

Successful EDRMS implementations where the roll out is to more than 1000 people are not cheap. This is particularly so if all the external and internal costs of creating and executing viable change management, communication and training strategies are taken into account. To be successful the implementation must have executive level sponsorship and support beyond the mere approval of a budget and a project plan. That means they have to truly believe that the EDRMS project will improve their ‘business’ in terms of productivity or risk.

However, to an executive team, an EDRMS implementation often represents something they know they ‘must do’ but find difficulty in expressing the reasons why beyond some generalisations about but not limited to:

Reduced duplication of records
Faster retrieval of information
Improved information sharing
Improved capture of email
Greater security and access control
Reduced risk of loss of records
Compliance with key standards and regulations.

None of these reasons are of the type that executives regularly discuss and can easily evaluate. It is a generalisation, but executives tend to worry about positive and negate risks to:

Financial performance
Financial assets
Physical assets
People – customers and employees
Reputation.

Records managers wanting to get the support of executives therefore have two problems. Firstly, the executives tend not to use the language of recordkeeping and using that language whilst reinforcing the need to ‘do something’ does not make the project urgent or important when compared with other projects under discussion. Secondly, executives cannot express what benefits to the business they are seeking from an EDRMS other than the generality of improved recordkeeping.

Records managers and project managers of an EDRMS implementation have to become adept at questioning executives to help them realise the payoff for utilising EDRMS functionality on business processes.

Questioning should form a process that ensures that four classes of knowledge are ascertained.

Current Situation

The first series of questions to be answered are about the situation that the organisation finds itself in because of poor recordkeeping capability. These questions are about facts only. The answers to these questions may come from system reports, surveys and focus groups rather than only direct questioning of executives.

Questions may include but not be limited to:

What is the goal of the implementation? (views on this may change as you complete your questioning and analysis)
How is success to be measure? ROI? Risk reduction? Compliance? (views on this may change as you complete your questioning and analysis)
How many users will the roll-out include?
What level of experience do the users have in recordkeeping?
What level of experience do the users have in using an EDRMS?
What degree of information sharing is there between business units and how important is it?
What level of security do we have over our records?
What degree of information sharing is there with external parties and how important is it?
What processes rely heavily on an approval process?
For what processes is it important for us to ensure we have the latest version of a record?
For what processes is it important to have good security over who can see a record?
For what processes is it important that all drafts are deleted after the final version is approved?
What is the cost of storing our hard copy records?
What processes could benefit by using scanning of records rather than relying on hard copy?
How many people are involved in storing and retrieving hardcopy records?

The Problems

The second series of questions are more likely to be those which you may ask an executive. These questions are designed at understanding what problems there are that may be solved by implementing an EDRMS and good recordkeeping practices.

Questions may include but not be limited to:

What issues do you notice because we do not know what version of a record is the current one?
What issues do you notice because people can alter a record without knowing what they altered, who altered it and when they altered it?
What issues are there for the organisation if after we finalise a record, the drafts are still available in shared drives, personal drives and as email attachments?
What problems does it cause HR, procurement, accounts payable, accounts receivable and property if we cannot find all the documents related for example to a person’s personnel record, contract negotiations, services received, services rendered and building leases?
What other business units have processes that would be negatively impacted if we cannot find all the records related to a specific set of actions for a particular process?
What issues does it cause the business units which have lengthy approval/editing processes if we cannot track where in the process a document is?

The Implications

The third series of questions are designed to delve deeper into the problems caused by not using an EDRMS and or having poor recordkeeping processes to get at the implications of the problem. By the time we get the implications we should be getting to the language executives understand and can easily deal with.

Questions follow on from the ‘problem’ questions and may include but not be limited to:

What would it mean to the business if draft copies of some processes surrounding the creation of policy or decisions related to customers or investment decisions were discovered in a freedom of information search?
What is the implication to our workers’ compensation self-insurance status if we cannot find the relevant records for the audit? How much time could we save if we could relate all the records so that when we found one, we found them all?
What happens when lengthy approval processes get stuck along the way because someone is away or very busy? Are there any approval processes where this might be of serious detriment to the organisation and if so what is the level and type of detriment we are talking about?
What happens when we are managing large contracts and we cannot be sure we have the latest version of contracts, specifications or other documents we sue to control the execution of the contract?

We may need to investigate particular processes further to get the true implications of using shared folders and poor recordkeeping practices by talking not only to executives but to the people who actually do the work. It is normal for executives to have a sense of importance and the general implications for a particular process but the people who execute the process day in day out are more likely to know the detailed implications and flow on effects for other processes.

The Benefits

The fourth and last series of questions are designed to get the person being questioned to think about what the true benefits of an EDRMS and good recordkeeping practices are beyond the generalities they may have started with. They follow the sequence of questions already asked. They may include questions like but not be limited to:

What benefits are there to our reputation in being able to ensure that all drafts are deleted when records are finalised?
What are the benefits to the organisation in retaining our workers’ compensation self-insurance status?
What is the benefit of being able to track where an approval process is and who needs to promulgate it any given day?
What incidents in the past in managing contracts could have been prevented if we were able to find the latest versions of all records relating to a contract? What costs would have been saved? Could the incident have been worse than it was?
What would be the benefits to the organisation if all of our records related to personnel were secure and were the latest versions and we had an audit trail of who looked at or edited the record?
What does it mean for accounts payable if we can find all the records to do with each purchase with one search and can search on vendor, invoice number, purchase order number, date ordered, date paid, authorised signatory, contract number or any other metadata we think appropriate.

One of the key outcomes of this series of questioning and the prior questioning is to get the implications and benefits in the terms of the executive.

You may need to complete some analysis at this point including risk and financial analysis, to quantify not only the benefits of using an EDRMS and good recordkeeping practices but also the return on investment in an EDRMS and training and change programs that go with its implementation. If return on investment is not the favoured measure some simple questioning of your executive during situational questioning will have found that out too.

Putting it all together

It may take several weeks to ask all of these types of questions and to follow a questioning string to go from understanding the general situation to uncovering some problems with current recordkeeping practices to determining the implications of those problems to finally determining the benefits of solving those problems. It is also clear that the questions should be asked of different people. This is a question model for the organisation, not an individual, per se.

There are a few rules for following this process. Although the process is somewhat iterative, ask situation questions first. Don’t ask problem questions until you have clearly understood the situation. By the time you are asking implication type questions there should be little in the way of situation questions left to ask. Leave benefits questions to the absolute last.

You should now have information you use to create a compelling presentation to your executives, some of which they have contributed to. The presentation may follow the form:

What is our current situation with regard to keeping of records; who, what, where, when, how and even why?
What problems do we experience with our current level of recordkeeping, what are they, who gets impacted and what behaviours and or situation do we have to change to fix the problem?
What are the implications for the organisation if the problems are not fixed? The implications will those that are important to the executive and their people, not us
What are the benefits of fixing the problems we have with recordkeeping? These benefits will be expressed in the mindset of the executive and their people not ours. The measures we use will also be those the executive favours rather those we think are important.

At the end of this process both you and your executive will understand more about why you are doing this, what is required and what the benefits being sought after are. You will also be talking about business improvement through better recordkeeping instead of just better recordkeeping. You will be selling the sizzle instead of the sausage.

Creating KPIs; Know Your Critical Path

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 18:25:20 +1100

Creating, socialising and measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) and taking action dependent on the value (or trend in value) of those KPIs is no trivial matter. Yet too often, organisations treat the building of an integrated system of KPIs to measure, control and advance their business as something of an afterthought. They allocate the task of creating KPIs to individuals and managers without ensuring those individuals and managers have the requisite knowledge and skills to do so. They allow business units to create KPIs in isolation of one another, sometimes adding a set of ‘Corporate’ KPIs on top with no discussion or thinking about how the various KPIs interact with each other to drive behaviour.

The result of these ad-hoc, uncoordinated, unskilled attempts at creating a system of KPIs ranges from frustration at the individual level to the demise of parts of the business.

Consequences of Creating KPIs in Isolation

In an organisation I worked in for many years, the business had invested in its own research and development and international sourcing of specialist products for the mining industry. The marketing arm in Australia set about lifting their market share in this profitable product area from the paltry level of 2% to something more fitting with their general share of mining market of 25%. To their credit, they increased their share to 50%.

The sale of the specialist products, and the services that went with them, resulted in strong ties between influential staff at mine sites and our sales and logistics staff. This meant we had a better understanding of mining companies’ needs, and we were able to raise our market share to more than 30%, thanks to employing the right specialist staff in the right roles. In other words, successfully recruiting the right specialist resources was a leading indicator for specialist product sales. In addition, the market share for these specialist products became a leading indicator for the market share of more general products, which we also sold to mine sites, as the mining companies became comfortable with the performance of our specialist products and switched to us as their preferred supplier for generalist products as well.

Essentially, successfully employing the right specialist product sales staff and account managers became a leading indicator for our performance and market share in the mining industry as a whole.

In addition, many of the mine sites we supplied were in regional or rural Australia, so managing our supply chain, which mostly originated in Europe or the US, was also important.

Around a year before this model reached the height of its success, moves were afoot in both the logistics and human resources business units. Both had been moving from local control to first zonal control from the Singapore office, and then to global control from the head office in London. With this new model came an increased emphasis on KPIs as a means to manage behaviour and performance. The logistics KPIs were all about stock turns, or proxies for them. The HR KPIs were all related to career paths and development.

Unfortunately for our established model, all the specialist sales staff were so specialist that they didn’t easily fit into the new HR KPIs for career advancement. Up until this point we had been able to circumvent any issues on that front by hiring those specialist resources as contractors, who were outside the usual strictures of HR. When, as part of a separate initiative, all of the specialist resources were brought in as employees, their poor fit with HR’s vision of ‘good employees’ meant that some left and others were lost to poorly-chosen career moves instigated by compliance with HR’s KPIs for career progression.

In the end, the focus on stock turns led to longer supply chains, which reduced our responsiveness in Australia. At the same time, because the specialist products sold in Australia only represented a fraction of the global market, supply chain disruptions here were not considered important enough to remedy. The recruitment of new specialist sales staff to replace those lost was far less successful as the recruits had to fit the new HR model. The development of, and compliance with, KPIs for both logistics and HR led to a decline in market share that lasted a number of years before a review was initiated to determine the cause.

Knowing the Critical Path to an Organisational Objective

The creation of KPIs by different business units in isolation of one another and in isolation of an overall goal meant that in this case, no one knew the critical path to reaching the objective. This was mainly because an objective had not been agreed upon. However, even if it had, it is unlikely that a critical path to reaching that objective would have been known, as the teams were analysing their positions in isolation.

This was a simple example of poor management of KPIs leading to business decline. If the business units were forced to work cooperatively to the one objective and create KPIs accordingly from the beginning, then it may have been possible to avoid any decline at all. The creation of the KPIs in that example would not have been difficult. Creating KPIs that actually measure the drivers of a business requires in depth thought about the critical path to reach that objective. It is insufficient to trundle out the usual suspects of KPIs that ‘everyone’ measures, or to measure everything. It is also not only insufficient, but wrong, to brainstorm KPIs. It is necessary to analyse and to think.

Take, for example, the open cut coal mining industry. What would be the KPI for their mining process, in the context of the goal of maximising profits? What is their critical path to profits? In my experience, the critical path to profitability varies. In one mine site where there was a constraint on shipping coal, a current indicator of profitability, there was a very long single conveyor system. The availability of the conveyor system or its ‘Up time’ was the leading KPI of profitability. It was the key constraint on the critical path. Of course, there were many other performance indicators which needed to be measured and acted upon if they varied from the preferred range, but the availability of the conveyor belt was key.

In another example, the mine site had a duplicate short conveyor system, but only one dragline. The dragline removed the overburden from the coal. A dragline costs in the order of $50-100 million to build. The mine site economics could not afford two draglines without a major expansion, which the company did not want to do at the time. ‘Up time’ of the dragline was therefore their leading KPI of profitability.

In Australia, and generally around the world today, a performance indicator of recruitment and employee satisfaction such as ‘Unplanned turnover’ may be a leading KPI of profitability.

Each mine site has its own constraints which hamper their ability to reach a particular objective. The objectives range from profitability to safe operating. Measurements of the performance of the constraints on each of the objectives are likely to be candidates for a KPI of the whole mining process.

To develop the KPIs for your organisation to indicate the performance of a particular strategic objective, as they have done in mining examples above, you need to understand what is constraining your achievement of the objective. Determine the constraints by conducting analysis and creating a critical path to the objective. In many cases, this will be an iterative process to arrive at the true critical path. Identify the constraints on the critical path and, if necessary, use trial and error to choose between candidate KPIs. The analysis however, must take into account the whole of the organisation and not be limited to analysis of departments in isolation.

My KPI Checklist

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 23:14:50 +1100

Now that you know what a key performance indicator is and have developed your own set (maximum of 7, remember?) to measure against your objective, it’s important to keep a few things in mind. Use this checklist to ensure that your KPIs are in check.

Tick
	I am measuring a Key Performance Indicator
	I am measuring the performance of a repeatable process, not a one-off event
	The performance indicator I have chosen is the KEY measure of that performance
	I know which process I’m measuring and why
	I know the outcomes/objectives I want to achieve
	I have a preferred threshold or target range for the KPI
	If my KPI is not at the level I want, I know what corrective action to take
	My team believe in using this KPI as a measure of this process
	The KPI is easy to calculate
	The KPI is easy to communicate and understand
	The KPI is built on stable data
	The people who are being measured can impact the value of the KPI
	My KPIs are aligned
	My KPIs support each other
	My KPIs are aligned to my business objectives
	I have made provision for support and training
	I have consulted my employees
	I have thought about a communications plan
	I have thought about a rewards and recognition programme
	I have thought about a training programme
	I have built in review mechanisms
	I have set a date to review and revise my KPIs
	I have a system in place to keep my KPIs under control
	I will be alert for new KPIs arising—formal or informal
	I will be alert for unintended consequences of using this KPI on my employee’s behaviour
	I have set a reminder to round up my KPIs—formal and informal—on a regular basis to see what is driving the behaviour of my employees