Summary: Change doesn’t have to be scary. Our Intranet offers tools to help communication during organizational change, including tracking feedback, to help you through times of change.
Sooner or later, something happens in an organization that affects all employees. In some cases, it’s a merger or an acquisition. In our case, it’s office construction due to growth. We’re bursting at the seams! There aren’t enough meeting spaces! There was a fist-fight over who’s ham sandwich that is in the fridge!
Good news is that you can lean on your intranet’s built-in tools to share information, ensure everybody has read it, gather feedback and post results.
Why Do You Need Communication During Organizational Change?
When an event affects everybody in the organization, it’s important to be able to communicate with every team member in a direct, efficient manner. We know that all-staff emails are cumbersome, rarely read and just plain terrible (we don’t use them here). Making use of your intranet’s tools ensure that your message gets across, can provide feedback, and engages with every user.
For us, because the acquisition of a new space, redesign of old space, and managing many moving pieces at once requires a lot of input, direction, and communication to all members, it just made sense to use the following:
How?
First things first, we set up a new Blog widget on our intranet just for the construction topic. Our CEO was able to outline the vision, reason, and direction for the construction. A team was put together to help make decisions on the construction planning, gather input and provide updates on progress.
If you’ve ever tried to do a home renovation you know there are a LOT of decisions to make that ultimately impact the final result, and everybody will have their own opinion. For example, what kind of flooring to lay down? In order to be inclusive and to make everybody feel like they have a say, you could put up a quick poll widget asking people to choose from options available and using comments, assess feedback.
Blog posts explaining the logistics of moving desks around and planning connection of services such as network and phone help to inform everybody about changes that will impact their area and actions needed on their behalf. In the end, this leads to reduced questions and ambiguity and helps set expectations.
Progress pictures are exciting for everybody and can help people see the light at the end of the tunnel.
If you require sign-off from every user, you can easily use your intranet’s read-and-agree feature to ensure that A) every user is notified of their required involvement and B) you can track progress, and C) set reminder alerts to ensure 100% compliance. In case you had to, say, make sure everybody knows their new alarm codes.
In Conclusion
Any kind of organizational change can be a stressful time for employees. Using the tools and features of your intranet to help with communication during organizational change the way it was intended. It’s an important time to listen as well, so feedback tools help you navigate the multitude of decisions you will face.
