Deanne Raseta is a force in the comms world. From her work at organisations like PayPal, Colt and Aviva to her leadership and coaching qualifications – she knows how people tick. It’s unsurprising, then, that we had a packed house at our Change Comms Breakfast event last Thursday at which Deanne shared the essential principles of transformation and working with the psychology of change.

So, what change are you dealing with?

To kick things off, we went round the table to find out exactly what sorts of challenges everyone was facing. These varied from handling the impact of new CEO appointments, return to office mandates, AI implementation, shrinking labour markets, and (you guessed it) increased change fatigue.

With clear sight on the real-world problems hitting communicators, it was time to look at what change means for our people on the ground.

Negativity bias, neuroplasticity, and trust

Deanne then started grounding the topic with some background considerations of how change is perceived. Psychologically, there was three things to consider: negativity bias, neuroplasticity, and trust.

• Negativity bias is the default psychological reaction we all have to change that can allow for negative interpretations or emotional reactions to even neutral changes in our working lives.
• Neuroplasticity refers to how our brains rewire themselves to deal with new situations and make sense of our new surroundings.
• If not responded to effectively, both of these can undermine trust in organisations. Communications has an important role to play in building trust in times of change, but equally, done poorly, can erode it.

Change ‘failure’ and building trust

Deanna pointed to the infamous statistic that 70% of change programmes fail, with 64% of employees overwhelmed with the results. This prompted an interesting discussion about measurement and success rate. When it comes to less clear-cut claims such as levels of trust and “change failure”, what results best evidence them?

Change failure can be measured by the colleague benefits that emerge from these change programmes. Put plainly, did the change programme (such as a new intranet or more streamlined comms systems), work to improve the workforce’s ability to do their work effectively? If not, she considered it a failure.

Leadership comms

A particularly interesting strand came down to how leadership comms configure into wider change management. It’s not always easy for leaders to have difficult conversations, even when given all the tools to do so effectively, but there is a responsibility to inform their people where possible – and if they don’t the answers, say as such. In some cases, ignorance about leadership decisions and wider organisational strategy continued to plague ongoing change programmes.

Deanne’s answer was to look at data silos that people weren’t using, specifically in how certain managers were impacting their teams. Considering managers’ retention rates, sick day numbers, and internal promotion opportunities would shine a light on what kind of environments they build. Even shadowing particular managers to see what behaviours and means of working had real resonance with colleagues could unlock the road map to improving engagement and understanding exactly what type of leadership gets the best responses.

Breakout groups

After that, it was time to break into groups of five and talk through some of the techniques that worked and more candidly what didn’t.

Peer learning and support are an integral part of these breakfasts -when else will you have a room of comms pros who know what you’re going through? To workshop your challenges with you? The breakout session at the end brought the surface really important points of friction that many of us will encounter at some point in transformation.

One group raised the struggle with being ‘burned’ early in the process resulting in leadership clamming up, swinging from the extreme of over sharing to under sharing. For another group it was the struggle to create listening opportunities for the workforce even when answers aren’t necessarily ready. And finally there is always the question of a deadline that sounds nice but isn’t right –transformation takes time and there is no getting around it.

Anon or no?

There was a great exchange on the question of anonymous Q&As. Deanne’s recommendation is to always make space for anonymous Q&A. Some in the room, however, had seen the uglier side of this format with Slido becoming a battle ground for personal attacks and repetitive negative questions that have already been answered. There were some creative alternatives offered –assigned spokespersons who represented colleagues –but Deanne remained firm stating that if people are still asking these questions or behaving negatively that is indicative of a bigger problem. It’s also not fair for leaders to shift their discomfort of answering tricky anonymous questions onto colleagues by removing the option of anonymity.

Organisational change affects workforces outside of their job role. By its nature, real impactful change is challenging, and you can’t get away from providing the support that makes for true longevity. How it feels is as important as how it’s done.