Your Business Needs Change - See Why

In today's business environment, change is the new normal.

Renowned management consultant and thought leader Peter Drucker once described our era as an "age of social transformation." For Drucker, this meant not merely an age of widespread and revolutionary social change. Much more radically, our age of social transformation is an age in which change itself has become a social constant. Our economy, as just one example, has definitively gone digital, wedding itself to a technological rate of change that calls for almost permanent revolution.

Faced with these trends in social and economic change, businesses have to adapt to thrive. What's more, they need an approach to business that harnesses the dynamics of the changing social and economic environment and allows them to work to their advantage.

One thing is clear: The old vision of a top-down, command-and-control corporate strategy and management is becoming increasingly a relic of the past. Traditional management hierarchies are rapidly flattening and only getting flatter; so going are the days when the manager ' s best interests were served by a command-and-control structure.

But if the traditional corporation and its vertically stratified management structures are shifting, what comes next?

Statistics on employee engagement and consumer trends offer some insight: 94% of employees today want a job that fosters continual learning and personal growth, with a vast and ever-growing majority of employees decisively preferring agile, flexible, supportive and purpose-driven workplaces. In the same vein, 63% of the global consumers surveyed prefer brands that stand for something besides profit.

The data here paints a fascinating picture. In order to compete for employee talent and customer loyalty in today's transforming society, the new business organization itself may need to become dynamic, decentralized, human-focused and value-driven. It may need to take on a workplace culture of continual transformation (learning), procedural flexibility, value-driven occupation and deliberate, strategic communication.

And to do that, I believe the business of today needs a viable strategy for change.

In its early days, change management meant something like an emergency response, an ad hoc management tactic for addressing operational rough patches during major project initiatives or large-scale transformations like downsizing, mergers and acquisitions, or rebranding efforts.

Since then, the meaning of change management has evolved. Today, the best in change management takes a holistic approach to building a growth-oriented, value-rich and authentically committed workplace culture. Contemporary change management is not just about one-off projects or initiatives; it is rather about generating real employee engagement on a daily basis and fostering among workers an intrinsic motivation to learn, commit and grow.

For change management today, a company's specific change initiatives are always downstream from internal cultural change.

The importance of this holistic and culture-conscious sort of change management cannot be overstated. It's a well-known fact that over 70% of change initiatives fail and that the leading factor in this failure is employee resistance to change. And similarly well-known is the fact that the best way to overcome this resistance is by taking a holistic, personal approach to change management that focuses on shaping employee mindsets, revitalizing organizational learning habits and incentivizing the right attitudes.

What is less well-known is how this sort of holistic change management depends upon strong, strategic internal communications.

Too often, internal communications are viewed as just one tool in the managerial toolbox — as a way to get the word out now and then when necessary — but not as an integral part of change management itself. Yet the data shows just how wrongheaded this approach is.

Only 19% of employees globally perceive a strong match between actual workplace culture and their employer's brand image. Four out of five American employees report feeling stressed out by poor workplace communications. And nearly one-third of the more than half a million American employees surveyed by one company simply don't understand what their employer's chosen change initiatives are even about.

The problem is simple: In change management, as in every other aspect of business, you get what you incentivize. And from what I've seen, the communications strategies deployed by many companies today continue to incentivize skill stagnation, message confusion, debilitating departmental compartmentalization and productivity-shredding employee disengagement.

To fix this, I believe we need to recognize the real role that communications can play in creating change. A holistic and culture-conscious approach to change management needs a complementary holistic and culture-conscious approach to internal communications.

The key to crafting such a holistic communications strategy is to shift focus from securing temporary, outcomes-oriented employee compliance to generating lasting, value-driven employee buy-in. Essential to this shift is a renewed emphasis on story.

Employees, quite simply, don't want to be told what to do. Rather, they want to understand why what they do has meaning. They want to become participants in the company's pursuit of real value; they want to be active coauthors in an overarching story that ties together the daily intersections of people, processes and purpose.

Internal communications have the difficult but rewarding task of telling these stories in a way that creates global workplace cohesion around shared value. A good way to do this is for leadership — both at the top and across business lines — to find examples of individuals actively engaged in and supporting change-oriented activities and then share those stories as appropriate in staff meetings and other employee-related communications. This sort of low-impact but strategic communication can show staff buy-in and reinforce the desired organizational goals and values.

Only these sorts of holistic, story-driven internal communications can ensure that, whatever change strategy and value-goal you choose, you have the narrative in place to keep employees engaged, harmonize your brand image with your corporate culture and make change management work. and purpose.

"The essence of management," as Drucker put it, "is to make knowledges productive." Through an approach to change management that integrates the power of story-driven communications, it's possible to unlock the productivity power of engaged, committed, value-focused employees in an age of social transformation.