Stay on message
If you’re changing the way your company does business, your employees need to buy in at or near the outset in order for the transition to be successful. But that’s not the only place where a transition can get off track.
You need to get employees to buy in, but you also need to keep them on board once they’ve bought in. That means your communication can’t stop with the initial rollout. You need to repeat your vision in some form at every opportunity with your employees.
Wathen says it boils down to one word: consistency.
“Consistency is the primary requirement of communications like these,” he says. “I have an operating map with strategic goals, and I take it with me every place I go. I used it in
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hanghai recently. I use it with outsiders. I use it when I do presentations to stockholders and debt-holders. I make myself get to each of our business units regularly and continue to share the message. That’s the key to the whole thing: reinforcing what matters over and over.”
In any time of change or uncertainty, you want your communication to be frequent, precise, concise and answer the ever-present question that employees have, “How does it affect me?”
“It’s total honesty and transparency,” Wathen says. “‘Here is what we’re doing; here is how it affects you.’ I always approach it with the idea of what everyone is going to go home and tell their spouses about my message. That’s the test question. If they can relay the message to their spouse and the spouse understands it, my message was probably clear. You don’t want ambiguity. There is psychology in this. Every person in tough times might view the worst. So you need to tell them exactly what it is and what the message means to them.”
You need to paint a picture of where you are taking the company and the reasoning behind the plans you and your leadership team have put in place. But if the situation isn’t entirely rosy, if there are going to be bumps in the road and hardships to endure in the journey to realizing your vision, you need to be frank about that.
“You have to remain transparent about the way you have to operate,” Wathen says. “What I’ve told our people over and over is that we’re still in a recession, and you have to hunker down and manage costs way tighter than what feels good. You have to do a few things for the future and be careful about it. We still have a lot of facilities running four-day workweeks. It’s not something that anybody wants to do, but it’s a choice we made to keep more people around for when things get better.”