Webinar
Duck Creek Technologies Targets Employee Development and Retention With Saba
Oct 14th, 2008
Conferences
Talent Management Magazine's Strategies 2009:
Innovation to Impact
February 23rd — 25th, 2009
The Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel, Dana Point, California
PLEASE VISIT OUR SPONSORS
London — July 16
In one of the 27 interviews with change and communication experts published in the comprehensive new report, "Delivering Successful Change Communication," Roger D'Aprix, vice president of ROI Communication and author of "Communicating for Change," stresses the importance of keeping the employee perspective in mind at all times.
"That's one of the great failings of companies in the midst of change and all the chaos that surrounds it," he said. "People tend to forget that there are human beings on the
other side."
But to create a compelling rationale for change, communicators must look outside the organization, D'Aprix said.
"I firmly believe the only way you can rationalize the change is by reference to the marketplace and the forces that are driving the organization," he said.
The problem is that internal communication professionals are not nearly well enough linked to the external aspects of the business.
"My observation is that communication people have been craft people," he said. "They've focused on the media and content they create without understanding the organization they're part of, and more particularly, the marketplace. This aspect needs work and communicators must pay more attention to it."
In the report, D'Aprix summarizes the critical issues employees need to understand, particularly during continuous change, i.e. when change has become "business as usual" for the organization.
Employees need to know:
The role of leadership during change is another common theme running through the 21 case studies published in the report.
Senior communicators from global corporations such as Shell, Intel, Vodafone and Ford Motor Credit, agreed visible leadership was crucial to keeping their change programs on track, even when the changes being communicated were unpopular.
In a case study on sustaining employee engagement during a major restructuring at Ford Motor Credit, Communications Director Chris Solie described how honesty and vision from the company's leaders was key to
maintaining morale and engagement.
"Employees respect our CEO for giving them the hard facts and presenting them with a plan for the company's future," Solie said.
D'Aprix agreed
"Leadership at a time like this has to be extremely visible and doing lots of face-to-face communication," he said. "The good, solid leaderships do this fairly naturally. The bad ones keep it all secret and quiet, and they pretend that everything is fine. That's a recipe for disaster."
Manager of Leadership Learning & Development
Sandia National Laboratories is one of the country’s largest research and engineering laboratories, employing 8,500 people at major facilities in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Livermore, California.
October 2008
What to Do About Performance Troublemakers
Individually, novelty, complexity and abstractness are performance killers. Together, they are even more troublesome.
September 2008
Stop Wasting Money on Training
The cost of inadequate workplace performance is staggering, but training, while a logical solution, is not always the answer.
September 2008
Do You Get It?
Business executives divide the HR community into two classifications: those who “get it” and those who miss the point.
August 2008
Auditing Global Performance Improvement Initiatives
Global performance improvement initiatives are costly and complex. They require a clear vision of desired outcomes supported by meaningful metrics.
September 2008 1
The Price of Finding the Right Gen Y Candidate
The competition for quality Generation Y talent is steep. But talent managers must consider how to best recruit and retain this critical workforce demographic.
September 2008 1
Talent Transformation at Textron
Multi-industry firm Textron initiated a transformation of its talent strategy, emphasizing employee development, succession planning and active input from leadership councils in key divisions.
September 2008 1
SAS: Connecting People, Process and Products
Creating a unified, successful global talent management strategy is a tall order to fill.