All change involves discomfort, if not pain. Your employees may be more than a little distracted by what is going on around them. You need them fully on board and contributing to making a success of the changes your organization is experiencing. These 10 steps create an environment of contribution rather than resistance.
1. Tell them what is going on, continually. Employees need information as a critical tool to focus their work and keep their efforts aligned with your business goals. If you leave them guessing, they will fill in the blanks themselves. When information is missing, the void is filled with misinformation. When information is incomplete, it is completed with negative conclusions.
2. Tie your communications to the marketplace. Your customers drive the state of your business, so employees need to know how customer activity, or lack thereof, impacts their work.
3. Assess the current state. What are your employees' attitudes, feelings and assumptions about the business and the changes?
4. What do you want your employees to know, think, feel and do relative to the change? Where are the gaps between the current state and where the organization needs to go?
5. What are the most important messages for your employees to hear in order to engage them in contributing to the success of the change? These messages should be geared to closing those gaps.
6. Tell your employees what is "in it" for them. It is human nature to hear information from the perspective of how it will alter their world, positively or negatively.
7. Tell your employees what you specifically want them to do, in response to the information. Let them know they are your business's most important asset.
8. Select carefully the best ways to give the information your employees need. The more complex, difficult, sensitive or important the information is, the more you want to communicate face-to-face, or at least voice-to-voice. Electronic media, newsletters, etc. are not the way to go when your information is impacting your employees and how they work.
9. Make communication two-way. You have talented and dedicated employees. Give them a chance to give you input and ideas, to share your ownership for success. An old adage says "we support what we help create." If you have difficult decisions to make, let them help. You may discover better solutions than those you would have created on your own. There is little more engaging and inspiring for employees than to know they are sharing leadership of the business.
10. Communicate constantly, as an integral part of how you lead. It takes time and energy, but not as much as doing damage control because you left employees to fill in the blanks themselves, feeling powerless.
These steps build trust, initiative, leadership, and collaboration- characteristics that will sustain and grow the strength of your organization and your employees in times of change.