I must live right. I was preparing to conduct a post-session interview for a Conference Board podcast when I heard a remark from one of the panelists that made me sit up straight and lean forward.
Afterward, I approached the speaker and asked to interview him for the conference podcast series. Of course, the focus of my interview was this one remark.
The speaker was Charles Watts, principal of Towers Perrin and leader of the consulting firm’s Change Implementation practice. Watts notes that the practice focuses on reseach and communication around change management. Watts referred to a study Towers Perrin conducted among 40,000 workers in large companies. The researchers examined nine items that comprise employee engagement and compared the results to the other 100 or so items included in the survey. The result: The item that best explained whether an employee is willing to invest discretionary effort in the company’s success is the one that reads, “To what extent do you believe senior leadership takes an interest in your well being?”
As Watts put it, if employees have a sense that their welfare matters to senior management, they are more willing to invest in the company and do good work.
The channels for this communication do not involve the immediate supervisor. Interestingly, face-to-face engagement with senior leaders is the most popular form of communication, according to another major Towers Perrin study, and technology plays a significant role through video and webcasts. The results did not vary among different employee groups; even the employees on the factory floor indicated that they “want to hear from the source that the right things are being done to build the success of the company,” Watts told me.
This does not mean there is no role for the immediate supervisor; it’s just a different role, Watts said. “Am I getting the rewards I deserve, am I developing my career, am I getting the learning and development opportunities I should. These kinds of basics” are what employees seek from their immediate supervisors, the “bread and butter” issues, according to Watts.
In his reply to my critique of his belief that the immediate supervisor should be the sole source of communication during change, Dr. T.J. Larkin suggested that I believe that “communicators should do a little bit of everything.” I believe no such thing. Rather, I believe communicators should use the channels that will, in combination, produce the desired results. In communicating change, it is clear that employees want and need to hear from senior executives for some messages and immediate supervisors for others. It’s not a matter of picking one over the other, but instead a matter of ensuring the complete message is delivered through each channel.
Incidentally, Angela Sinickas sent me some additional research that supports the importance of senior leader commnication during change; I’ll post it next week after I return to the office.
Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.
As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.
