How Change Communication Affects Your Employees

Although change is inevitable throughout a company’s lifetime to keep the organization innovative and up to date, dealing with the internal shake-ups remains an ongoing challenge for all employees, regardless of how well they handle new initiatives. 

Sometimes, the change might occur suddenly and come from external causes. For example, a smaller company might get taken over by a larger company; this often leads to restructuring which requires employees to adapt. Other times, the change is internal. For example, introducing new software, expanding the company, adding new products and changing the company brand are all internal changes.

To make sure that employees are properly informed and aware of the shifts in the company, sturdy change communication must take place. Want to know how to implement it in your organization? Keep reading.

What Is Change Communication?

Every time any type of institutional change occurs in the company, it will need to be communicated to employees. Often, the change takes months, if not years, to be incorporated into the company ethos.

Given that change occurs in stages, change communication will also need to be rolled out in conjunction with those stages. And you'll need to have a strategy in place to make sure that your change communication is effective since currently, only 34% of change initiatives are successful.

How Do People in an Organization React to Change?

There are three ways in which people in an organization react to change, depending on how much it affects them, how beneficial they think the change is going to be and how they received the information.

The most seamless reaction would, of course, be positive. However, in cases where the employees may have difficulty acclimating to organizational change, it’s important to consider the alternative reactions and not punish employees for their adjustment.

Neutral reactions could be due to multiple reasons. Perhaps the change was noninvasive, or an unfavorable reason, perhaps your employees are disengaged. 

Read more about how to engage your employees. 

Certainly, your employees might react negatively. It’s important to communicate the importance and relevance of change initiatives so employees understand the reasoning behind certain initiatives or changes that they may have been resistant to before.

Types of Organizational Change

While there are the main types of organizational change, it’s important to remember that change is a spectrum. Therefore, decisions can be a mix of multiple types of change, or have similarities from differing categories while being based in one.

• Transformative: Transformative change includes broad, sweeping and at times, drastic changes across a company. Launching a new department, suddenly switching to another software or restructuring teams are all transformative changes. 
• Incremental: Incremental change includes the small changes that employees will make in responding to their daily, weekly or even monthly tasks. For example, an organization could have an overarching goal of changing a team’s focus from one subject to another; incremental change would include slowly phasing in new tasks while slowly phasing out the team’s previous duties.
• Developmental: Developmental change keeps the same processes, structures and teams, but plans to build upon them to enhance efficiency. Introducing new tools/software to streamline tasks is the most common way developmental change happens.
• Remedial: Remedial change involves reflecting on current processes and strengthening them using resources already within the organization, instead of introducing any new tools. An analysis of previous quarters and eliminating areas of efficiency are most likely to be remedial changes.

Stages of Change Communication

Have you decided your type of organizational change? Great. Now you’re ready to move onto change communication throughout your company — check out our recommended stages below. 

1. Prepare: Analyzing how current teams, departments and processes interact with one another while identifying deficiencies and pathways towards improvement are the first steps to helping employees understand why the incoming change is necessary.
2. Envision: Once all areas for improvement are identified, it is time to begin reaching out to affected departments to create a viable plan for all employees. Using the input of the team, a comprehensive strategy will be set up that satisfies all goals and ideas from all involved employees.
3. Implement: With the strategy in hand, relevant departments will begin phasing, launching or eliminating requested operations and processes. Implementation can be announced company-wide as it happens, looping in stakeholders on what is to come.
4. Review: Finally, after the changes have taken place, departments should evaluate how well the changes were implemented and received. This can be compared with outputs and KPIs outlined during the Prepare and Envision stages.

Best Practices of Change Communication

Here are a few things to keep in mind to communicate change effectively. 

Be Clear

If you want to communicate change effectively, you have to be clear about the changes taking place, and you need to communicate these transparently to your employees. It's also a good idea to explain to your employees why a certain change is taking place so that they understand the purpose of the change.

Make It Interesting

One good way to communicate something and make sure that people remember it is to make it interesting in some way. You can do this by introducing some humor or using interesting visuals.

When creating any message that you want to send out to a mass amount of employees, consider digital signage. Digital signage is a great way to send employees regular reminders about what needs to be changed. You can combine calming photos and videos with informative text that will catch your employees' attention without distracting them and reach all your employees, whether they are in-office or in the field.

Modes of Communication
Think about the best way in which to communicate with your employees. This is something you must have figured out from past communications. Does your workforce respond best to face-to-face communication, emails, texts, newsletters etc.? You'll want to use more than one mode of communication, but also put more emphasis on the modes of communication that have worked better in the past.

Show Empathy

One of the best ways to communicate changes to employees is to let them know that you are on their side. Let them know that you will help them to achieve the new company goals in whichever way you can, and be sure to welcome input from employees as well.

It's important to make sure that all the leaders of your company—the CEO, the department heads and anyone else who supervises employees—know exactly what changes need to be instituted so employees can turn to them for help.

Parting thoughts

Change—personal and professional—can be challenging. Change also leads to stress, even if it's a positive change. Keep in mind that the changes that your company is going through are also affecting your employees on a day-to-day basis. Communicating change with empathy, and providing employees with the support they need to incorporate the change, is key.

About ScreenCloud

ScreenCloud helps teams in 9,000+ organizations around the world communicate with those who matter most, using the screens on their walls and the content already in their systems. 

ScreenCloud’s digital signage can inform employees on corporate information like social media feeds, data visualizations, emergency alerts, and live broadcasts – or even simply the news, sports scores and weather. 

Sign up for a free demo and see how digital signage can work for you today.