Changing behaviour in organisations is one of the toughest challenges communicators face. IABC Canberra presenter Tina Chawner offers insights based on her recent UK experiences.

1. Presented by Tina Chawner
IABC
Change Communications
Canberra Chapter

2. Change communications, what is it?
Behaviour change
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3. Factors for communicators to consider
• History, context and environment
• Business objectives and aims
• Leaders and their style
• What can communications do to support the business?
• The role of the communications team
• Having one approach to managing the communications
• Showing the results
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4. History, context and environment
• This will help you understand
– why people may have certain perceptions
– why people are behaving in a particular way
– what the factors are that will impact the way the organisation
communicates
– the key messages for your business going forward
– the channels that will work best for your organisation
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5. Business objectives and aims
• This will help because:
– it shows we know and understand our organisation, giving
communicators credibility
– we can understand how communications can best support
the business
– if the business believes the communications support them,
they are more likely to support the communications
approach
Source: HMRC’s Change Plan, published 28 February 2011
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6. Leaders and their styles
This is important because:
• different styles can be used to achieve different aims
of your communications approach
• you can design an approach which your leaders will
be more likely to support
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7. What can communications do to support
the business?
• Identify how communications can help the business achieve its
objectives. For instance, through improving staff knowledge of
what’s happening so they can plan better, or through
encouraging customers to use the internet instead of calling a
helpdesk?
• What else does your leader want to achieve in addition to
performance improvement? For example, change the
perception of stakeholders or change how staff feel about how
the organisation manages change.
• Understand the approach leaders want to use to communicate
with stakeholders and staff.
• Compare your findings with how communications currently
supports the business.
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8. The role of the communications team
It’s good to be clear and set expectations about what communications will be able
to deliver and what you expect others to be doing.
What is the role and responsibility of the communications team?
• Facilitator, coach, writer, editor or something else?
• Owner of channels or contributor to channels?
• Are you the owner of the brand and corporate key messages?
• Do you have a role in co-ordinating, planners and assuring others?
What’s the role of your leaders? What’s the role of managers?
• Are they the content owners?
• Are you expecting them to deliverer the messages?
• Are you expecting them to be responsible for acting on feedback from staff?
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9. Having one approach to managing the
communications
• The approach we developed included:
– a stakeholder map
– principles (for both internal and external communications)
– objectives
– channels
– communications rhythm, showing the frequency of channels and how they
interact
– roles and responsibilities of everyone involved
– how the overall communications will be measured and reported against.
With this agreed we were able to focus on creating the channels and
developing and gathering the content.
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10. Measure and show the results, people buy
into facts and evidence
• Step 1: Use data and evidence to inform the design of the
communications approach.
• Step 2: Decide what the best measures of successful will be. If
possible make these business measures. Keep it simple and if
possible use data that is already available.
• Step 3: Start measuring straight away, so you have a baseline.
• Step 4: Use the first 6-9 months to get the right measures, to
create a baseline and then set your key performance indicators.
Regularly meet to discuss the results, and work out how to
drive them in the right direction.
• Step 5: Once your 80% ready, start publishing the results
internally.
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11. Presented by Tina Chawner
Thank you
You can contact me at tina.chawner@ato.gov.au or connect with me
on LinkedIn.
Canberra Chapter