Leading internal communication techniques at Vodafone

Communicating change in the best possible way requires a high level of intelligence around where your employees stand psychologically and emotionally in relation to change. What will the real and perceived impact of the organizational change be? What will their reactions be?

In Melcrum's recent report Essential Toolkits for Communicating Change, Laura Ferguson, former head of internal communication at Vodafone, and a speaker at this year's SCM summit UK, explains the process behind McKinsey's stakeholder prioritization matrix. The matrix was used at Vodafone some years back as part of a larger toolkit to ensure that the company was communicating change effectively, by understanding as much as possible about those who would be affected.

Ferguson will be presenting an interactive session at this year's SCM Summit UK where she'll suggest practical tools and techniques, like the McKinsey matrix, for planning change communication.

Below is the three-step guide to using the McKinsey model to improve change communication in your organization.

Step One
Start the process by asking:

• Are people directly affected and impacted by a particular change?
• If so, do people need to change the "what" or "how" of their activities? If people are not directly affected, would they be interested and do they need to be aware of something that is happening in the business?
• Can people tell a clear story about what's happening?

Use McKinsey's model (below) to help analyze the impacted stakeholders reactions to change and determine where they fit in the space of "hearing it, believing it, living it".

Figure 1: Example of McKinsey's stakeholder prioritization matrix

The model measures people's sphere of influence - the ability of someone to support or derail objectives versus urgency. The people in the top-right hand corner of the diagram are those with the utmost priority because they're very high in influence and you need to get them on your side right now.

Step Two
Draw the prioritization matrix on a large sheet of paper. Stakeholders are identified on Post-It notes and placed in one of the four boxes, an exercise that can be done in a workshop, with the HR team, for example.

Participants discuss and agree the stakeholders and whereabouts they are on the matrix. For example, the people in the bottom left-hand box are probably people you would inform at a later date. The position of stakeholders on the matrix will change on a regular basis, as the change program evolves, which is another good reason for creating a matrix at the outset to help track communication timing, and keeping it in a flexible format such as Post-Its that can be moved through the matrix.

Step Three
The next stage is to use the matrix to think in more depth about each stakeholder group. It is used to figure out where people are currently in terms of how they think or feel about the change and where you ultimately want to get them to be. It helps articulate: "What is our desire in terms of the change program, whatever it might be?"

Ideally, these emotions and measures of awareness and understanding will be captured directly through talking to stakeholders. However, this isn't always practical when faced with tight timescales.

Although some individuals may not be directly impacted, they should understand at least what the organization is going through.

P.S. Did you know Melcrum run in-house training sessions on any given communication topic, tailored to your team, in your office. Find out more!

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