Communicating change
(and making friends with your OD person)

by Chris Wain, OCIABC Board Member

We’ve all been in situations when a client or stakeholder rushes into our office or calls us frantically (maybe you can even hear their sense of urgency in the way the phone rings). There’s an organizational change afoot, and they need to communicate to employees “right away.”  

If the change is imminent, we’ll have to execute our communications with limited information—and use our own and our clients’ judgment to fill in the gaps. But, if we have any breathing room to develop a communications strategy, this is an ideal time to make friends with—or get reacquainted with—our Organizational Development (OD) manager or consultant. They’re natural partners when we’re planning the communications around a major change in our organizations.   

For example, after we roll out that urgent communication, maybe we’ll learn that the change will significantly impact just one in 10 employees. This is the sort of nuance that a seasoned OD person can help uncover—so that we can maximize the effectiveness of our communications.

What the _ _ _ _  is OD, anyway?

One of the specialties in Organizational Development is Change and Transition Management (CTM or TCM). This is a set of leadership and management practices that helps individuals and organizations absorb change. A principle of TCM is that people don’t necessarily resist change, but they do resist the loss of the familiar—whether it’s a tool, a process, or an organizational structure. And, there’s a fundamental principle in TCM that applies to our communications as well:

Until we can tell people how a change will affect them personally,
they won’t hear anything else that we try to tell them.

For example, a new program from the IT department might have some genuine productivity benefits. Our OD person would tell us, though, that anything that even remotely smacks of potential downsizing can be radioactive. Thus, what IT might want to promote as a “productivity improvement” could sound to employees like a code word for “downsizing” (because fewer people can produce the same amount of work). That’s particularly threatening in the current economic environment, and the rumor mill can quickly take on a life of its own—to virtually everyone’s detriment. So, using productivity messages won’t fly until we can level with the impacted employees about whether or not their department will get downsized.

What OD can bring to our communications

An OD practitioner will bring to the table a comprehensive knowledge of human behavior, supported by a number of intervention techniques. In the course of working on a change initiative or an organizational issue, OD professionals do several things, many of which will assist our communications planning and execution:

• Deeply understand the extent of the change. Taking another IT example: a new IT program might lead to hundreds of changes in business processes, and even after categorizing them as high-medium-low impact, some job functions will have over 50 changes classified as major impacts. OD can help answer the question, “How will this affect an individual’s job?”
• Help ensure that managers are on board with the change, since research repeatedly has shown that information from an employee’s manager is the most credible.   

• Develop transition and change plans that not only incorporate our communications, but also actively engage impacted employees in a dialog (via briefing sessions, department meetings, or perhaps blogs that we help set up) and via more detailed training when appropriate.

Working together

In the heat of the moment, it’s easy to forget that it’s people who must carry out changes, and that there are predictable human dynamics involved. To help human nature work in our favor, we as communicators can benefit from the insight that an OD professional can bring; they in turn can benefit from our skills in shaping and delivering messages. It’s a natural partnership that can help us get better answers to the questions we ask when crafting a communications strategy: who’s the audience, what are they thinking, what’s the message, and what do we want them to do as a result of the communication.

But what if you work in (or with) an organization that’s not large enough to have an OD department or consultant? Where do you look for this kind of expertise? You might find it in human resources or training groups—or perhaps in the operational excellence or quality organization. And, whether or not there’s a person around with those skills, there are some good books that can help us integrate organizational development thinking and practices into our communications:

• The Heart of Change Field Guide, by Dan Cohen
• Managing Transitions, by William Bridges
• Managing at the Speed of Change, by Daryl Conner