Navigating Change: The Impact of Internal Communicators on Employee Engagement and Clarity

Navigating Change: The Impact of Internal Communicators on Employee Engagement and ClarityWhat’s the key ingredient in successful change management?

Effective internal communications

According to a Gallup survey of 18,665 employees, seven in 10 U.S. workers reported experiencing disruptive organizational change in the last year—an increasing rate. The average employee experienced ten planned enterprise changes in 2022, up from two in 2016. Although change is often positive, employees are suffering from change fatigue. Employee willingness to support organizational transformations has recently dropped from 74% to 43%.

If you want employees to support your organizational transformations, what’s the key to successful change management? And how can you make managing and accepting change less disruptive for your people?

The role of internal comms in change management

Internal communicators are integral to developing change management plans and facilitating processes. Since internal comms is typically responsible for informing employees what’s happening, why, and how it will affect them, the comms team can draft messages to communicate the rationale, benefits, and impacts of change and then build exciting stories around the key messages. Proactive internal comms also helps mitigate uncertainty for employees and redirect rumors and employee-driven narratives before they get out of control. Here are three key responsibilities of internal comms during change management processes.

1. Provide timely and transparent communication.

Whether you’re rolling out new tech or acquiring a new company, your employees will have questions and concerns, and you’ll likely feel resistance from some employees, too. Keeping employees informed with accurate, regular, open communication will build trust while fostering a supportive and cooperative culture. Share the good with the bad, as many employees will quickly see through any spin. Include constructive criticism to frame future conversations proactively.

According to Gallup, when employees experience disruptive organizational change and strongly agree that their leaders communicate effectively, they’re 4.3 times more likely to be engaged. So, timely, authentic communication has a huge impact. Communicate directly with the audience, individual contributors, and influencers, and equip managers with key points to share directly with their teams.

2. Simplify change-related messaging.

During change management, it’s crucial to share information in a clear and manageable way and illustrate a top-level before and after vision. Instead of flooding employees with details from day one, internal comms can break the information into digestible chunks, sequenced over time, with key messages repeated for emphasis and better uptake. For example, internal comms could:

  • Offer employees a simplified, clarified version of any dense, industry-speak press releases as a skimmable, bulleted email or post without the jargon (or provide definitions and translations)—link to the full release on the company’s newsroom or press release hub.
  • Share one to three brief updates daily rather than a lengthy, comprehensive list of changes weekly or monthly. PoliteMail benchmark data shows that messages that take less than one minute to read and are less than 250 words long have the highest readership.
  • Depending on your objectives and timeframes, execute a “How are we doing?” update at a pace that enables people to understand what has occurred and leaves time for corrective action. For a quarterly objective, one update every two weeks may be an appropriate time frame to review achieved (or not yet achieved) results. Monthly updates with quarterly roll-ups work well for an annual objective to provide status and maintain visibility.

What you communicate—and how often you relay the information—can work to minimize your employees’ change fatigue and feelings of overwhelm and ensure that they are ready and able to absorb and retain key information.

3. Give the right people the correct information.

Everyone doesn’t need to know everything—something internal comms teams understand well. Internal comms can help target your key audience segments, tailor change management messaging, and set up delivery schedules, depending on who needs to know what and when. PoliteMail’s benchmark data shows that smaller, more tightly focused audiences tend to have the highest messaging engagement since the content is more relevant to that specific group.

One can’t overstate the role of internal communications in change management; you certainly can’t make change without effective communication. More organizations are starting to recognize the strategic value of effective internal communication and are incorporating the communications team into their change management processes to yield more successful initiatives. By creating comprehensive communication plans that target key audiences with simplified messaging and well-crafted stories—and promoting transparency and authenticity—your internal communications will lead to the success of your change initiatives.

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