Get employees on board. Know the road that you want to travel and commit to traveling it. Make sure it’s clearly communicated in simple statements to the staff: ‘This is the road that we’re going to take. You’re either on this road with us or you’re not on the road.’ We show them the benefits of why we do something in a particular manner and how doing it differently might damage a process or lead to a broader failure.
If you keep trying to pull people on to that road, they’re going to keep fighting you and they’re going to spawn some other bad seeds. You’ve either got to get them on your team or get them off your team. There’s no middle of the road.
We always start with taking the approach of maybe they don’t understand. So we’re always going to pull them to the side; we’re always going to have an informal conversation. We’ll ask people, ‘So this change is coming up. What are your thoughts? What ideas do you have?’
And after that, then we ask them to occasionally summarize: ‘I want to make sure that people understand what we’re doing here. Can you tell me how you understand it?’ We make it as informal as possible.
We’re going to tell them, ‘Here’s the reality of the situation, and here’s the correction action we anticipate you taking.’ In an informal conversation, it’s obviously a whole lot softer than that.
If that doesn’t work, we’ll have a formal conversation. If that doesn’t work, we may have to take disciplinary actions.
Investigate employees’ perceptions. Identify key peer leaders, meaning someone not in supervision and not in management. They’re going to be the ones who are driving the weekend plans in the group of friends or the ones who are driving where they’re going to go for lunch or even who’s going to take the lead at their break time to get up to go on break. They’re the ones that tend to be more outspoken.
You’ve got to make them an ally — not a spy but an ally. I will pull someone in and bring up the change. And then I will stroke that person’s ego a little bit. I tell them, ‘Hey, I know that people really look up to you a lot, as do I. I would really like your input on how we’re going about this. How are people perceiving it?’
It’s not always pretty, but it’s honest, and that’s what’s needed. We don’t just take one person’s word for it, because most people have personal agendas to advance. So we’ll get a sampling from various departments or various peer groups and see what information tends to be across the board.
Communicate transparently to clients. In order to have a clear, consistent and simple message, you have to be pretty much an open book. If you have hidden agendas or hidden information, there could be a disconnect in the understanding of what your sense of mission is. If you have a mission that is beneficial for all parties involved, you want to make sure that mission is shared uniformly with everyone.
It’s part of our responsibility to make sure they understand what we’re doing on this end. The best way we can do that is to communicate it to them and then to let them come in and listen to phone calls or come into our system and monitor and audit [their] accounts to see that we are actually doing what we’re saying we’re going to be doing.
Perception, like trust and respect, is earned through actions. Simply telling the public one thing and having never backed it up does nothing to modify the perception. <<
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