Alyssa Zeff:
Hey, everyone. welcome back to Employee Buzz. I am Alyssa Zeff, your fan of hiking, concert-goer, and roller coaster aficionado. I'm here with Caroline Hey, project director at Davis & Company. Caroline, tell our listeners something they may not know about you.

Caroline Hey:
Well, I also love roller coasters, and in my spare time, I run an amateur gluten-free cookie bakery out of my kitchen.

Alyssa Zeff:
And I can vouch for the deliciousness of the output of that bakery. Some of you may recall that we had Caroline as a guest on Season 1 of Employee Buzz, where she delved deep into the employee experience. You can listen to that by tuning into Episode 10 from Season 1. Today, we're going to continue with employee experience, but specifically, as it relates to change.

Alyssa Zeff:
So Caroline, help us connect the dots. What do you mean by employee experience? And connect it to change for us.

Caroline Hey:
Sure, because I'm all about the experience. There's lots of buzz about the employee experience these days. You can hardly pick up anything about internal communications without someone mentioning the employee experience.

Caroline Hey:
I think it springs from the client experience, people thinking about the client experience, a very natural extension of that to how your employees experience your company. Really, every interaction that your employees have with your company, starting at onboarding, all the way through to retirement. And one of the really most important tools you have to create an amazing employee experience, is internal communication. It's a common thread that runs throughout it. Think about all the tools communicators use to support managers and leader communication, benefits communication, performance management communication. All of it really goes into that employee experience.

Caroline Hey:
I could go on all day about this. I'm not going to. I'll take it easy on you. But really, when you think about change and change communication, the experience is vital here, especially if it's a big change. And the reason for that is employees, different employees' groups, have different experiences of change. No change is the same for everyone. And so you really have to think about ... before you even sit down to communicate, you have to think about how each of your employee groups are going to experience that change. And in order to do that, you've got to segment them. You've got to understand where they're coming from.

Alyssa Zeff:
I think that's a really great point. So often today, employers think about a change and just rolling it out and employees as one group. And like you said, the way one person experiences a change­—that could be because of their role. That could be because of how long they've been at the organization, or it could just be how they experience change in general—but really getting to know and understand them. And again, we're saying experience. How they experience it, is so vital. So what's the biggest mistake with a one-size-fits-all approach?

Caroline Hey:
The biggest mistake is that you're not going to get the right info to the right employees. I mean, a classic example, if you send out high-level information to all employees, people are just going to learn to ignore you. It's just going to be adding to the email and information overload.

Caroline Hey:
The other mistake is that you might try and not tell anyone anything. You're just going to roll the change out. And the problem with that, if you send too little information out, you could risk missing the most impacted employees with some really important information. And so they won't be ready when the change comes. They won't know what to do. The end result of all of this is that your employees, they're going to be confused. They're not going to understand what's changing. They're not going to understand why it's changing, and they're not going to understand what they need to do. And so they're going to resist the change, and your change will fail.

Alyssa Zeff:
You know, it's interesting. A personal experience I had with this was not actually as a communicator but as a receiver of a change. And I worked for a large company, and they were going through a big software update. And for months and months and months, we heard about this and how impactful it was going to be and how big it was going to be. And when it came time to actually roll it out, the impact to me was nominal. But I had created so much anxiety, and they grouped me in with the people who were going to really be dealing with this software day in and day out. And by the time it rolled out, I was so terrified of it and so resistant to it, when the reality was, I didn't need all of that information.

Caroline Hey:
Exactly.

Alyssa Zeff:
And so building on what you're saying, sometimes it's too little and sometimes it's too much. Like, I don't need all of that information, because I'm not really going to be impacted that way.

Caroline Hey:
Right. You really kind of got to take the Goldilocks approach.

Alyssa Zeff:
So you know, people send the blanket message or clients, they send this blanket message, and they don't think about the needs of each employee group. So how can they start? How do you start thinking differently about this?

Caroline Hey:
You really start by putting yourself in the shoes of your employees. Sit down and think about how is each distinct employee group going to experience this change? Think about your headquarters and your office workers, as opposed to your manufacturing or operations workers or your remote folks. You've got sales folks who are mostly mobile. You've got people in home offices. All of these people have different needs and will experience this change differently and will be impacted by it differently.

Caroline Hey:
One client I have that I'm working with right now, they're getting ready to implement a new customer relationship software, and they recognize that they need to do high-level communications to most employees. Most of their employees aren't going to be impacted by it, just like your example that you just mentioned, so they just need to be generally aware that something's changing. They need to understand how it ties back to the strategy and they need to know why it's changing. But the sales employees, this is a huge change. It's going to entirely change the way they work. They're going to have to develop different behaviors. They're going to have to use new tools. So these are the guys that at the end of the day, we've really got to work with. We've got to engage in this change and really make them a part of it.

Caroline Hey:
And the way we're doing that is we're creating some very rich high-touch experiences for them.

Caroline Hey:
And we're starting out on a small scale, to sort of dip their toes in the change, with golf cafes, little coffee hours where they can come. They can get some demos. They can get some questions answered and have a little fun with a putting contest.

Alyssa Zeff:
Oh, how fun!

Caroline Hey:
Yeah, yeah. As a golfer, I very much appreciate that.

Alyssa Zeff:
Me too.

Caroline Hey:
And then we start building from there and we give Power-User forums. We're going to do hands-on training. We're going to have chats and office hours and all kinds of that, just lots of different types of experiences so they can really build their knowledge and build their confidence, so they understand that even though they're going to have to change the way they work—it's going to be a little bit painful for them—in the end, it's going to be good for them. Because out of all of this change, they're going to be able to work faster. They're going to be able to work smarter, and they're going to be able to spend their time strengthening their client relationships.

Alyssa Zeff:
I think that's great, and I think fundamentally, what is so important to build on what you're saying is you need the information to create your plan, to create your tactics, to create your ideas. And that starts and ends with data. You cannot create this in a vacuum. Segmentation starts with data. You really need to understand your audiences, and it doesn't have to be overly complex research, like surveys, focus groups, studying the demographics, as you mentioned. But any information that you can have to feed it is what's going to power the most successful implementation.

Caroline Hey:
Absolutely, and you would hope that you have a lot of this data from your internal communication planning, and I can guarantee you, HR has a ton of data that you can grab and run with.

Alyssa Zeff:
Is this type of thinking appropriate for all changes?

Caroline Hey:
I think it is. I mean, I think clearly, it's really important for the big meaty changes, things that impact your company strategy: mergers and acquisitions or big technology changes, infrastructure changes that really affect everyone. You've really got to get the employees involved for understanding, for adoption. But then even in smaller changes, you can create some of these high-touch experiences. Things like Lunch & Learns or Coffee chats. It's high-touch but with a lighter touch. So you can really scale this approach up or down, depending upon the impact of the change.

Alyssa Zeff:
You know, we had done some thought leadership here at Davis & Company and built a quadrant where the X-axis is impact and the Y-axis is complexity of change. So high complexity, high impact would be if I work in the finance department and rolling out a new finance software. So I am going to have to learn how to do everything about my job differently. And that's a lot of that meaty stuff that you were talking about. Bottom left quadrant, low complexity, low impact, would be something like a new menu in the cafeteria. Not really that complicated. Maybe not everybody doesn't use the cafeteria. It's nice to know that it's happening. It is a change, but not really that big of a deal. Or a new food service vendor, which really doesn't impact employees directly, necessarily, at all, other than again, a new menu.

Alyssa Zeff:
So, I think as we think about the complexity and impact as the factors, it gets to how much am I experiencing the change and therefore, what is it that I need to do as a communicator to help employees understand and embrace it.

Alyssa Zeff:
So last question: If you could give everybody one piece of advice, who is about to go through a change, what would it be?

Caroline Hey:
I would say look beyond the facts and figures. People have spent a lot of time putting together these presentations to really sell the importance of the change to management to get the funding for the change. Throw all of that away, because that doesn't really speak to what employees need to know. And awareness is fine for most, but the most impacted, you have to build deep understanding. And you can only do that with meaningful high-touch experiences.

Alyssa Zeff:
Absolutely. I could not agree more. Thank you, Caroline, for joining us on Employee Buzz..again.

Caroline Hey:
Thank you for having me.

Alyssa Zeff:
Thanks for joining us on Employee Buzz, where we laugh and learn. Remember to rate, review and subscribe.