Culture & Communication - Afterthoughts?

The program teams need to juggle technology changes and consider how data management and integration will be managed. Business architecture and operational models need to be designed with processes and operating procedures embedded. Infrastructure and non-functional foundations must be established. Service levels, business metrics and management information will ensure that costs and benefits are measurable.

What is seldom given rightful consideration is communication and cultural change management. The impact of change on the people within the organisation cannot be underestimated, yet often it is.

Communication is all about engaging with every level of the organisation from the outset. It’s about keeping people involved in the design of the change, helping them to understand why the changes are happening and how those changes will benefit customers, the staff and the bottom line. Regular communications along the path keeps people informed and helps to achieve buy-in. When changes go live, it is essential that staff embrace the change and they can only do that if they are included from the outset and kept informed along the way.

A large transformation may be a multi-year program and this could significantly change the whole culture of the organisation. Established ways of working will be challenged and the change can be difficult for a lot of people to live through - even if they are bought in.

There are many different aspects of cultural change. Two of the more common aspects are cultural change related to the pace of change and the other is a cultural change related to a new strategic direction of the company.

The pace of change must be managed to take the cultural impact into consideration. After all, an environment in which staff are expected to change ways of working many times and in quick succession can result in “change fatigue” and even the most passionate staff can get frustrated. Attrition in those environments is a real risk. Projects that result in changes that expect people to adopt new ways of working must be given time to become the norm, before new change projects are implemented. Certain changes may take longer to embed than others. Enough time should be given, between change projects going live, if attrition is to be avoided. Planners need to take “change fatigue” into consideration and place as much importance on this in their plans, as the attention that is placed on milestone achievement.

A new strategic direction can mean that incumbent staff simply do not embrace the new ways of working. For example, an organisation that is striving to become customer centric, when they never have been before, can mean that a large proportion of their people just do not possess customer centric behaviours. Some can be trained to embrace customer centricity, but there will always be some entrenched staff who just do not understand, or even believe in this concept. Whilst lack of skills and expertise can be trained for, a difference in attitude or belief usually cannot. This can also result in attrition, but in this case, it is not staff-driven attrition. Organisations need to manage organic change in staffing through changes in recruitment policies, so that new ways of working are behaviours that are selected for, rather than forcing out people who were quite happy working in a particular culture and are now faced with living in a new culture. As the percentage of staff who embrace the new culture increases, entrenched staff who preferred the status quo will start to accept the change. Some may never accept it and will likely move on naturally into other organisations.

Transformation plans and roadmaps must ensure that communication and culture management is intrinsically included and not left as an afterthought.