Decluttering communication channels for your teams during change

Communication is absolutely essential during organisational change, but unfortunately it can be a double-edged sword. As much as we know we need to communicate regularly about the change to keep people informed, motivated and ready for any change announcements and actions, we’re often communicating in an already-flooded internal communications environment and adding fuel to the change fatigue fire. It might be up to you to start to triage and translate change communications to help your impacted teams absorb them and not miss out on critical messages. 

Here’s some ideas to declutter communication channels for your teams during change (and hint: these work really well if you’re a business leader with direct reports too!):

Triage communications 

Rather than everyone on the project (Project Managers, Business Analysts, Test Leads, Training Managers etc) sending out their own separate communications, become the filter and the funnel of communications from the project. This means everyone working on the project comes to you to plan, draft, approve and distribute communications so you can streamline comms (if it’s the same audience, it might be one summary email with a single action list rather than 3 separate emails) as well as ensure tone, consistency and readability hit the spot. A really good way of selling this process to your project team is to go, “To make sure your message gets read and heard, align to our comms process. Because then you’ll be guaranteed that your message will not just be received, but also absorbed.” I've done this myself and it can be a really great way of getting the project team on board with actually following the process and not blasting out their own rebel comms. Become the vessel that all the information and comms comes into so you can digest, triage, and translate communications to your teams and reduce overwhelm.

Chunk the comms

We talk about the Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) technique of “chunking” all the time in my Leading Successful Change program. It just keeps popping up! If you have a regular sequence of comms, you might want to allocate or assign a particular “theme” to the comms. For example, each month you might send out a weekly comms: 

• Week 1 could be technology updates
• Week 2 could be project schedule updates
• Week 3 could be training updates
• Week 4 could be readiness updates. 

Gather up all the messages for that theme and schedule it into the correct week. You help the audience manage their own psychology but chunking information into similar topics.

Move from push to pull communications

Everyone wants to get in the inbox, but you can also teach and train your teams to go and source the communications for themselves. They can’t complain that they weren’t communicated to but the responsibility is on them to stay up-to-date. This could be a central site or hub where comms are regularly posted and you simply build the way of working that leaders and teams go and self-serve from that location. Another example is an opt-in briefing or showcase where employees have to register, rather than a blanket invite going out and everyone being expected to attend. The most important part is to make sure the information is exciting, enticing, relevant and valuable - which is why Module 3 of my LSC program is “Crafting Incredible Communications.”

Decide what’s out of sequence

There might be times which are an exception where you do need to send an out-of-sequence communication. This could be a key announcement or an emergency communication. Keeping these minimal and critical means that they are more likely to be read or watched or attended.

Want more hints and tips for change communications? Grab my free “Creative Launch Ideas Guide” with 53 ways to bring your Change and Transformation to life.

CLICK HERE to download my free Creative Launch Ideas Guide

Lata xx