Best Practices for Your Change Management Communication Plan
Myths, Mistakes, and Must-Do’s
It’s standard practice in most organizations to build a communication plan as part of the overall change management project plan. Most companies understand that communication plays an important part in achieving the change management project initiatives. Not all communication plans are created equally, however, and many miss the mark. Communication should be more than just an occasional, sporadic activity. Here are some key points to remember in making your next communication plan more effective:
Myths, Mistakes, and Must-Do’s
It’s standard practice in most organizations to build a communication plan as part of the overall change management project plan. Most companies understand that communication plays an important part in achieving the change management project initiatives. Not all communication plans are created equally, however, and many miss the mark. Communication should be more than just an occasional, sporadic activity. Here are some key points to remember in making your next communication plan more effective:
Mistake: Confusing communication with implementation
While a solid communication plan is extremely important, communication alone is insufficient. Generating sponsorship, developing a reinforcement strategy, defining the change, and developing readiness are as important—in fact, sponsorship is the single most important factor in achieving project success. Organizations over-reliance on communication is a common mistake in many implementation plans.
Myth: Providing information is the primary goal of the communication plan
In reality, the primary goal for project communication plans is to drive behavior change, not just to provide information-sharing. Even if you successfully communicate information to the target audience, you miss the mark if that communication doesn’t actively promote behavior change.
Mistake: Depending on one-way, top-down communications as the primary delivery method
One of the most common mistakes we see is a dependence on media like newsletters, emails, and even web-sites as the primary method for communication of large-scale, complex changes. Even in large, geographically-dispersed organizations, agents should rely much more on two-way communication than is often the case.We see many communication plans that do a fair job of information-sharing, but fail to have a mechanism for gathering data to be fed back to the project team and sponsors.