Successful change communication, with Rachel Miller

Absolutely.

And it kind of makes me think.

So about 20 years ago, I was working at the BBC and moved into local government to set up an in-house organisational development function, which included internal communication.

communication and we did the first ever employee survey and the group that was most trusted by non-managers were their line manager and the further away a person was in terms of their seniority from an employee the less they were trusted.

So there's something as well around the levels of trust, I think, that team members will have in their line manager or should have, hopefully, in their line manager.

And so that makes a lot of sense to me, Rachel.

I wonder also what your thoughts are.

I work with a lot of people managers.

I'm just finishing coaching a group of people managers in a local authority around managing change.

including communication.

And we talk about them being translators.

Often what can come out from the board or from the corporate centre are sometimes very dense corporate speak.

And so I think there's a role for people managers in translating that into something they know will have meaning.

What are your thoughts on that? That's such an important role.

I think sometimes it is translating literally into local languages, where particularly if you are a multinational global organisation and you have a corporate centre, that my very first internal comms job was at an automotive company that had spun off from Ford called Vistion.

So I suddenly found myself responsible for communicating in eight different languages in factories across Europe.

Europe and South America, which was quite the first internal comms job to have.

It was

quite a shock.

And my goodness, I learned so much.

And what I realized was that the center was the headquarters in Detroit, in Michigan.

I was working from Essex, from England, in the UK.

And actually, when I was trying to communicate with factories across Europe, then English was not the language that most people spoke first.

English was our business language, but actually, particularly when we were communicating change to systems, processes, safety, particularly, then I needed to make sure that my colleagues understood absolutely beyond reasonable doubt what was being asked of them or the way that they now needed to work.

So my shift supervisors, line managers, factory regional managers and factory and plant managers were crucial for that conversations because without them translating into local language to help their people truly understand what was happening, what their role was, then no communication would have happened.