When Do You Call in the Comm People?
The March/April 2010 issue of Communication World includes an article on how to communicate a changed employee value proposition to a skeptical audience. I was less interested in that storyline than in a set of statistics cited from the Towers Watson’s 2009/2010 Communication ROI Study. Here’s the noteworthy finding.
Phase at which communication function became involved in the change process:
- Identifying the problem > 8%
- Identifying possible approaches to resolve the issue > 23%
- Implementing the change > 27%
- Selecting the approach to resolve the issue > 11%
- Planning the implementation > 31%
Frankly, I’m surprised that almost one-third of the organizations surveyed involve their comm people only when they are planning how their change project will be implemented. I would have figured that communications is more embedded in change management than that. Could that be why so many change projects rot on the vine?
The Towers Watson survey involved 328 companies and 5 million employees.