What are your weapons for winning the war of capturing stakeholder attention?
The carrot and stick will never cut it. Neither will pressing ‘send’ on your communications, and hoping people will read it. Have you ever sent your target audience several (personalised!) emails, then wondered why a small percentage complain that they don’t know about your change? It is not their failure — it’s yours. So how do you gain your audience’s attention? All you need is a small slice of their attention span.
Scott Keller and Bill Schaninger from McKinsey wrote about managing the change journey. A primary lever? Nonfinancial rewards and recognition.
“The best change leaders use small, unexpected nonfinancial rewards and recognition to great effect.” ¹
Rewards and recognition may follow once you have captured people’s attention span. But what works? Money or other extrinsic rewards?
“….the upside to linking change objectives to financial compensation is generally limited, practically and psychologically.” ¹
Also, shelling out each time you want someone’s attention is prohibitive. External rewards are costly, your audience get used to it and become ‘trained’ to put their hand out. What about making your change a part of your target audience’s job role? Very unlikely. Let’s rule extrinsic and structural approaches out for now.
What about another approach? One combining novelty, a dash of personalisation, right timing and solid tactical planning?
This is where public relations professionals earn their bread and butter. Public relations is a ‘sister’ profession to the change profession. What can we learn from public relations professionals?
Public Relations leads to ‘earned media’. What is ‘earned media’ in a change professional’s context? Put glibly, people telling others about your transition. Your target audience aim to make sense of what any change means for them. This sense-making happens in part when your audience tells others about the change.
What prevents you from achieving ‘earned media’? To your target audience, your change (and messages) will likely be:
- A small part of your audience’s working life;
- Not urgent enough to absorb at this point (especially if go-live is quite some time away);
- Ignored if the first three seconds doesn’t capture their attention;
- Never seen (if you expect their leaders to cascade your message). Sorry leaders everywhere. I may be wrong, but relying on top-down ‘cascading’ hasn’t worked in my experience;
- A minor grab for attention. Especially in the clutter of other ‘advertisements’ from other initiatives across the organisation;
- Seen with scepticism;
- Overlooked. This is the likely case if your audience’s leaders or team overtly ignore your change messages or are focused during peak operational timeframes.
Think through many change interventions at your disposal. The change interventions you choose depend on several factors:
- Your project’s size;
- The nature of the change;
- Resources at your disposal;
- Sheer practicality;
- “Fit” within your organisation’s culture.
You might also ask others — what change interventions have worked in the past?
Applying public relations approaches
The “what” — looking at your options from the “top-down”
What are some change interventions at your disposal?
“Push” approaches — get that message out there!
- Private-label communications (like a press release provided by public relations professionals to media agencies)
- Town Hall presentations
- Explainer videos
- Enterprise social media
- Posters in prominent places
- ‘Interviews’ in employee association magazines, newspapers and social media groups
“Pull” approaches — draw your audience to you (they have to register, or seek your event out)
- Webinars, including educational content and employee/expert ‘interviews’ about the future state
- Token economy team-based activities (with prizes for individuals or teams) ²
- Gallery walkthroughs of the future state
- User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
- Combining one of the above approaches with a feedback mechanism e.g. user experience survey, or project email account
“Authority” / testimonials / social engagements ³
- Testimonials from operational staff involved early on in your project
- Joint ventures / cross-promotions with similar teams and projects
- Drop-in sessions and information booths
- Competitions
- User trials
- Brown bag lunch educational sessions
- Coffee vans
- Brief presentations at employee association gatherings
The “how” — walk in their shoes, and be inspired by successful campaigns
It would help if you met your target audience where they are. Do they have a brief attention span at 6am? Are they receptive to new messages at a team briefing before their shift starts? So be it. Be there with a coffee cart, banners, collateral and coffee in a prominent location as they walk into work at 6 am. Have a chat with them in exchange for a coffee. The conversation could finish with some call to action. How else can you personalise your interactions with your target audience?
Do you have any change agents or ambassadors you can lean on? How can technology support you meeting people where they are? Sometimes technology won’t help either. Shift workers may be paid to produce a product or service, and may fleetingly read an onsite poster. Or the messages your audience absorb are dictated by their shift leader.
Feeling stuck creatively? Consider successful campaigns for inspiration. The Clean up Australia Day campaign is an incredibly successful Australian campaign ⁴, led by a single person (Ian Kiernan). This campaign snowballed into a charity and an institution in its own right.
Our project team hit an obstacle when leading change for a Fast Moving Consumer Goods Company’s supply chain. Before implementing a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution, we had to deal with a vast, multi-tentacled beast: data integrity. Or lack thereof. The company supply chain’s existing ERP system needed considerable data clean-up. Once our house was in order (so to speak), we would then be better positioned to migrate to the new system. We created a “clean up supply chain day”, adapting the Clean up Australia Day campaign. Promoting this concept took some further creative licence, energy and buy-in from colleagues. We also needed to spell out what a “clean” supply chain looked like. When it comes to data, putting this into words is quite a challenge given data’s abstract nature!
Putting your campaign and tactics into practice
The “way” — think both top-down and bottom-up
You may be excited about the various possibilities considered here. Better yet, you plan to put in place ideas outside of this article. Perhaps cool ideas from an agile or lean change initiative, or something that worked in the past for your organisation. Public relations activities are limited only by one’s imagination, after all!
You may have a series of tactics, or even a full campaign, in mind. Yet this is only one perspective — “top-down”. Now it’s time for another perspective: “bottom-up”.
Let’s say you have two target audiences. The first audience is white-collar and exhibits similar working routines and learning behaviours. The second audience is blue-collar. As a collective, they also show similar operational patterns and learning behaviours.
Scan your “top-down” list of public-relations tactics. Would each work for your first audience? You drop some tactics, as they might not “feel” appropriate. Or you consult with representatives of your first audience, and they find some of your tactics unsuitable. It may be that the tactics are a little on the nose (in the face of a sceptical audience). Or they know that other tactics aren’t practical, or won’t achieve your coveted share of attention span for other reasons.
Your second audience’s routine and behaviours prevent many tactics. You may need to rely on their leaders to cascade communications. Are you leading a change implementation where you will never visit your audience in person? If so you may need a “person on the ground”. Going back to common behaviours, what standard systems do your audience use? What times of the day do they engage these systems? Do they walk past a specific part of the office, elevator, factory or distribution site? Your audience’s operational routines and common behaviours can act as a filter for suitable tactics.
Execute with panache…and sustainability in mind
Next, consider the cost of execution — including the effort required of your team. Consider if each tactic contributes to your change objectives. Is each tactic likely to leave a positive lasting impression with your audience? Consider the team involved in executing each tactic. For example, you are handing out flyers about your future state at a turnstile at head office. It’s a chance to foster excitement about your initiative and chat with the few people interested in what you have to say. All employees pass security and go through the turnstile. So far, so good. You know it’s natural for people to pretend you’re not there, or politely decline your flyer. Thus you take this rejection in stride and don’t push the issue. Your presence, including banners near the turnstile, achieves the tactic’s aim of raising awareness. But what if a member of your team chases employees down, and ignores any cues to back off? What are the reputational consequences of annoying the wrong person? Never underestimate the cringe factor of missteps in executing a tactic.
Even if there are no clear and present reputational risks in each tactic, can you still execute each tactic with panache? Can you apply a sense of fun, or authority, or whatever emotion the tactic calls you to convey? In the “Clean up Supply Chain Day” campaign, our team brought a sense of fun to the event. Even if the event was the mundane task of cleaning up back-end materials planning and master data. The clean-up was for one day only. Our team spent time breaking down the specific actions needed for our audience. We had incentives in place and reported progress from each team. We had groups in many states, and one in New Zealand. Our progress across different time zones made for one long, fun and productive day.
So choose the best tactics then cross-examine each against your audience’s reality. I learned that your public relations style tactics also need these ingredients:
- A clear call to action;
- Feedback loops (a project email account, intranet site or another escalation point);
- Potential for measurement;
- Coherence with the rest of your change.
Finally, does each tactic have scope for ‘post-game’ wins? For example, if you are running a competition, what follow-up activities do you have in mind? You could take photos of the competition winner (with your project’s sponsor). Sound bites, testimonials, or excited people engaging with your future state are other ‘post-game’ wins. Each of these small steps help to reinforce a positive ‘buzz’ of your public relations tactics. Until your next one, at least!
Recap
Public relations tactics need sound planning, high energy and resources. Well-timed and executed tactics create positive momentum, ‘earned media’ and useful insights. Meet people where they are and link each tactic to your change objectives and activities.
Your call to action
What creative and pragmatic public relations activities work for your change?
My book — The Change Manager’s Companion — is available now. You can also check out my online course on Change Management.
Reference list
1. Keller S, Schaninger B. How do we manage the change journey? | McKinsey. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/how-do-we-manage-the-change-journey?cid=other-soc-lkn--mck-oth---&sid=3355044077&linkId=88999893. Published 2020.
2. Token economy — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Token_economy.
3. Cialdini R. The 6 Principles of Persuasion by Dr. Robert Cialdini [Official Site]. https://www.influenceatwork.com/principles-of-persuasion/.
4. Clean Up Australia. Cleanupaustraliaday.org.au. https://www.cleanupaustraliaday.org.au/who-we-are/about-the-organisation.