Budget cuts, service reductions and redundancies mean big changes and bad news. Rather than rumour people want to hear what’s going to happen direct from the top person. The chief exec has a blog but feedback consistently tells us people want more face to face contact with senior management. So all credit to those chief execs who go on the road and have a series of large meetings at different locations open to all staff. The aim is to explain the budget position, explain there is no choice but to make big changes however unpopular and to answer questions as staff try to work out what this will mean for them as individuals.
Getting the tone of these meetings right is tricky too formal and front line staff will feel inhibited about asking what they really want to know and go away confirmed in the view that all senior managers live on another planet and just want to lecture staff. However, if a large meeting doesn’t have a structure then a small number of individuals can dominate the meeting and turn it into some very specific questions about their job leaving everyone else frustrated that the meeting never got round to discussing the big issues that affect most of them. I have in mind the member of staff who asked the director why he had not had a chair when he first started work to which someone else chipped in that they didn’t have a telephone. In the spirit of being willing to answer all questions the director was forced to spend some time clarifying the circumstances and then expressing her view as to what should have happened before saying she would ask the local manager to look into it. By which time twenty minutes of a one hour lunch time meeting had been taken up.
On another occasion the chief exec announced monthly meetings open to all staff to hear direct from him what was happening about the restructuring. He decided to call these meetings ‘Pow wow with the big chief’. He clearly thought this was an amusing title that would convey that this was an informal meeting with a man who was keen to talk to a broad cross section of staff. Unfortunately a lot of staff felt that calling himself the big chief was part of the problem and the rather flippant title of the meeting reflected a failure to appreciate just how anxious some staff were about the proposed changes.
The way I have seen it done best requires some preparation and organisation. Basically the chief exec gives a short ten minute speech telling it like it is-here are the facts. This is followed by a session to address concerns and generate suggestions. The audience is divided into small discussion groups with a group facilitator and a flip chart. They are given half an hour to list their top three concerns make three suggestions to improve the implementation of changes and suggest three ways of engaging staff in these changes. Each group gets to feedback one point from each of their areas of discussion. The chief exec gives a response to each group. All the flip charts are collected, the comments summarised and an undertaking is given by the chief exec to discuss all these points with the senior management team and publish a detailed response on his blog. All the questions won’t be answered at once but all will be addressed over the coming weeks.