1. Communication Plan -
Organizational Change Process
Joshua Conner
AET/560
October 13, 2014
Professor Charity Jennings
2. Launching the plan
Technology requirements
Measuring effectiveness and management’s response
Generating feedback for continuous improvement
Addressing negative feedback
Impact on organizational change
3. Strategic Communications are President and Dean approved
Plan will incorporate:
◦ Formal change campaign plan
◦ Open house forums for employees and students
◦ Social media
◦ Local media
◦ Web presence
◦ Cross functional evaluation teams
Plan will be assessed monthly based on feedback mechanisms
4. Expansion of public domain websites
Search Engine Optimization
Formal and anonymous automated surveys
Social Media presence
Podcasts
5. Survey results
◦ Employee perception of change
◦ Public awareness of change
◦ Student approval of change
Program of instruction revision time
Quality of life initiative implementation
Quality of life incident response
6. End of course surveys
Employee surveys assessing goals, incentives, evaluations
Public suggestions through website
Search engine request monitoring
After Action Reviews
7. Negative student feedback to response ratio = 100%
Supervisors will respond to negative employee feedback
Cross-functional team will:
◦ Monitor negative feedback from employees and students
◦ Recommend messaging strategies and corrective strategies to address
trends
AARs will be conducted on shortfalls in:
◦ Change plan implementation
◦ Student satisfaction survey
◦ Course enrollment goals
8. Emphasizes senior leader support
Aligns actions and resources
Coordinates actions across teams
Infuses public opinion and community participation into
process
Develops a culture of continuous improvement and excellence
9. College president and campus dean: “Change is
happening”
Change is a team effort
Change keeps us relevant and makes us stronger
We will continue to change and grow with the
community
10. Cawsey, T. F., Deszca, G., & Ingols, C. (2012). Organizational change: An
action-oriented toolkit (2nd ed.). Retrieved from The University of Phoenix
eBook Collection database.
University of Phoenix. (2014). Virtual organization: Northwest Valley Community
College. Retrieved from University of Phoenix, AET560 website.
Editor's Notes
Our communication plan has been approved by the President of NVCC and all of the campus deans. We will launch the plan through a variety of initiatives.
First, we will introduce a formal campaign plan that will be distributed to every office, classroom, and dorm, virtual and physical. This plan will lay out what changes we expect to accomplish them and how we will accomplish them. The plan will also define how we will collect feedback from all stakeholders and address the communities needs.
Then we will hold a series of open house forums with both the president and the dean educating our employees and students on our change initiatives so that everyone can hear our strategic messages directly from the senior leaders of our institution.
We will expand our social media presence and we will partner with the local media outlets to get our message out to the community. We will also expand our web presence through our formal website to propagate our change plan, solicit feedback, and raise community awareness. All of our major intiatives will incorporate cross functional teams to enhance communication and collaboration throughout the institution.
Last, we will put heavy emphasis on assessing our progress on a frequent basis by monitoring and incorporating feedback mechanisms throughout our change campaign.
The community has evolved like much of the rest of the country. People demand increased web presence and web services. Therefore, we will lean heavily on technology to not only as a critical line of effort on many of our change initiatives but also for our communication plan.
We will expand our public websites, ensuring each page has a banner linking to our change campaign plan and to survey resources such as employeesurveys.com for employees or monkeysurveys.com for our students and community members.
We will also leverage search engine optimization, working with Google and Bing to make our change initiatives that we want to highlight to the public come up when people use common search terms affiliated with NVCC.
We will also broadcast our strategic communication messages and our change initiatives through social media. Also, we will add major change events to our weekly podcast on campus activities.
Our surveys will be used to measure our progress on several data points. First, we will focus on employee perception of our change campaign, including how familiar they are with our key tenants and reasons for change. This will help highlight how well middle management is repeating and reinforcing the messages of senior leadership throughout the organization.
We will also measure public awareness of our planned programs. We want the public to know that we are revising our courses and how they are offered, as well as offering new programs that better fit the needs of our local employers. The community can’t take advantage of our improved offerings if we don’t do a good job educating them on how we will better support the community’s needs.
Surveys will also help us gauge how well we are doing at meeting students needs once they are enrolled in one of our programs, and they will be one of our primary feedback mechanisms for continuous improvement, which we will address further later.
We also need to become more adaptive to changing needs of the community. We will measure our adaptiveness by how long it takes to implement recommended changes to our programs of instruction. Quicker is better. We also need to improve our quality of life offerings on campus, which help our students feel more connected to the institution and increases the likelihood students will stay connected to us through our new life-long learning initiatives. Finally, we will also gauge how well we are doing at responding to students non-academic needs, such as dorm incidents or other events that may cast a negative experience for students attending NVCC. We will continuously monitor to what satisfaction do we respond to student issues, and how long it takes us to respond to student complaints.
While we have had end of course surveys for some time for all of our courses, we will initiate a cross-functional team at the campus level that will monitor end of course surveys for trends to ensure that we address systemic concerns rather than dismiss or ignore them.
Our employees are as important as our students, and employee feedback is also important. We will be issuing campus-wide surveys assessing how well employee goals are set with respect to our change initiatives, and how our incentive and evaluation programs are reinforcing change behaviors, as well as employee satisfaction that they are receiving sufficient information about changes that affect them.
Our cross-functional team that will monitor the end of course surveys will also monitor our public suggestiong page and track trends and requests. Public feedback should be a major factor when we determine potential new programs for resourcing. We will also work with the major search engines to moinitor search terms that are commonly used in conjunction with NVCC or Kelsey Campus to help us identify if there are offerings that the community is searching for that we do not support.
Last, after action reviews (AARs) will become part of our culture. Anytime we receive negative feedback, whether it be from end of course surveys, employee satisfaction surveys, or otherwise, we will continually address how we can do better, and the AAR results will drive change.
Our goal is 100% follow-up when we receive negative feedback from students about a course and the student opts to identify himself on the survey. The intent of the follow-up is two-fold. First, we want to reinforce to the student that we care and we are committed to continuous improvement, and two, to capture more detailed feedback than a survey alone for AAR and improvement purposes.
Likewise, when employee surveys indicate they are not familiar with our change plan, or if they are dissatisfied with the implementation, supervisors will discuss the concerns each and every time. We want our employees to know they their input and participation in our change initiatives are valued and important.
All team-based efforts supporting our change or improvement plans will be cross-functional teams. Collaboration across functional areas is not only vital to assessing our progress and coordinating the right resources to keep our plan on track, but also to continuing to promote collaboration and continuous improvement.
Anytime we receive a negative indicator, whether it be a failure to hit a benchmark in our change plan implementation schedule, student or employee satisfaction surveys, or a failure to hit enrollment goals in a course, we will emphasize the AAR process to identify what we can do better. We will inculcate a culture of meeting failure or negative feedback head-on, rather than ignoring negative indicators or hoping they improve on their own.
Our communication plan is an important part to implementing change throughout the campus. First, it emphasizes senior leader support, so that all employees know that the initiatives are endorsed from the top and that their work and efforts will not be in vain. It also helps align actions and resources across functional areas, as it enables mid-level managers to make better decentralized decisions. Third, it will help better inform the public, raise their enthusiasm, and recruit more quality ideas for future incremental changes from the public. Last, it will emphasize a culture of continuous improvement. We can and should always strive to do better in all of our courses, programs, and activities.
Change is happening. The president, the dean, and the community all feel we have not been as adaptive to changing conditions in the community as we could be. In order to become more adaptive and to inculcate a culture of continuous improvement, we will promote the use of cross-functional teams as frequently as possible to ensure we get the collaboration and community buy-in that major change initiatives require. This will help keep us relevant and will strengthen our relevancy in the community, which is essential to our long-term viability.
