Digital transformation: 3 ways to manage change without exhausting everyone

While change is inevitable, it also causes a good deal of pain, particularly in larger organizations. As enterprises grapple with an ever-increasing rate of technical change, they risk demotivating – and losing – their key employees implementing these necessary changes. If you don’t bring your talent along in a holistic way, attempts to improve your business culture and technical stack will fail.

Fortunately, CIOs can take three concrete steps to help ease the organization through digital transformation work.

Your employees need to know not only what will be done differently, but also what role they will play in organizational change. You’ve hired excellent associates who intimately understand how to do the required work. What they must know is what they will contribute to the newly conceived approach.

Lest you think that the answer here is a slew of new and improved job descriptions, these expectations must be communicated in a broad manner. What market drivers are causing the organization to pivot? How will we measure the success of this new approach? Why did the company decide on this path as the best way forward? What are the decision criteria for another change in strategic direction?

While a bulleted list of job functions gives people a “what to do,” it doesn’t help them understand where the organization needs to go, nor how and why their individual efforts contribute to the process.

CIOs leading change need effective vehicles for internal communication. Just as importantly, they need to make good decisions about what information is appropriate to cascade and when to do so. It may seem counterintuitive, but take an hour to do an audience segmentation analysis on your entire organization. This exercise will help you target your communications appropriately and help you visualize how each job function in the company has the opportunity to contribute to successful change management.

In turn, this analysis bolsters your management team’s ability to share information in a way that best supports employee engagement: The “what’s in it for me” question has already been addressed. The more time your managers spend on spreading the word vs. spending time tailoring the message themselves, the greater the organizational uptake.

Last but not least, a thorough audience segmentation ensures that you have a plan to communicate the required information to every group of impacted stakeholders, meaning no group is inadvertently left out of your outreach. Nothing derails attempts to transform like the rapid retrenching that occurs when employees feel forgotten or disregarded in the process of sweeping change.