Change management has been of the main issues of this year and something that all manner of organisations need to know how to navigate. No company goes through major change without its perennial challenges. Luckily, Poppulo took on the subject and shared a refreshing perspective with their webinar on EVP Misalignment on Change & How To Get It Right.

Our two speakers were Joss Matthieson, Engagement Officer for Change Oasis, and Leona O’Sullivan, Employer Brand Manager for Deloitte Ireland. It was refreshing to see two industry professionals talk so comfortably and confidently on this subject, particularly when referencing their own experience in the sector.

They kicked things off with a quick poll to take the temperature of the call, finding out how much change participants were currently experiencing change at their organisations. Joss furnished this by citing that prior to the pandemic, the average company had 2 or 3 transformational programmes and now, post-pandemic, that number stands at 15 or more.

The solution lay in internal comms teams’ meticulous understanding of a company’s core values and how to position them in relation to specific decisions made in a change programme. For colleagues this creates an opportunity to join the dots and understand where they fit in the context of the wider strategy.

But the greater lessons came from Leona’s own experience of the leadership team at VMware, her former employer and a cloud computing tech company, that was acquired by Broadcom in her time there.

Naturally, as anyone who’s worked through a merger can speak to, there was a lot of anxiety and fear around job security and operations. In Leona’s own words, there was almost no time to catch a breath before they had to start looking at structures and roles within the company moving forward.

This increased vulnerability led them to default to management as new stakeholders increased. Even changes in intranet sign-ins were cause for concern, with many people fearing that a routine maintenance issue or administrative function might mean they were out of a job.

This is where increased leadership communication, even an “over-communication style”, became an essential asset in managing change. Even though much was out of their hands due to regulation and jurisdiction, leaders at VMware would still regularly gather to answer concerns when they could. Investing time, energy, and patience in their people worked to allay fears and reinfuse their culture with trust and understanding. When they had no other options, the best way to manage these anxieties was in this open-hearted manner to create psychological safety.

Obviously, it’s easy to be a human being when it feels like everything is on the line but how can we ensure that connection in our day-to-day? As Leona and Joss’ discussion continued, they talked about demonstrating self-awareness of what colleagues are experiencing and moving away from homogenous messaging was crucial. This culminated in what Joss called the SHIFT Framework:

• Survey emotional culture.
• Hone leaders’ emotional intelligence.
• Integrate emotions into change strategy.
• Foster emotional cultural habits and rituals.
• Track and tweak your approach.

It was a great exploration, not just of how emotional intelligence can make all the difference for our colleagues but how it can be built into functional frameworks. Ultimately, it was proof to me about how much emotional interchanges occur in a business, even where you wouldn’t think it. There’s ample opportunity to flesh out culture and values and communicators shouldn’t limit themselves in what they can build when working strategically.