Follow the sun
Follow the sun
Enterprise technology insourcing program · A global financial data and technology business · 2020
In short. A technology insourcing programme moving work into new Centres of Excellence, affecting more than 5,000 colleagues across three continents – and reducing headcount in the sites losing the work. We told everyone on the same day, in fifteen virtual town halls running from 4:00 am until 10:00 pm, and we said what it meant for people's jobs from the first sentence.
The organisation was consolidating technology work that had grown up scattered across the business into a smaller number of Centres of Excellence. Better capability in fewer places, with the operating model designed to hand work between time zones rather than duplicate it.
For the receiving sites, that meant growth, investment and more interesting work. For the sites losing it, it meant fewer roles - or none at all.
Both of those things were true simultaneously, and the same announcement had to carry both, to two populations who would be talking to each other within the day. But only via Teams or Slack or email, because we had to do this during the 2020 pandemic.
I led communications for the programme and for the several months that followed it.
The audience included the people it disadvantaged. This is the whole problem. Most change communications is written for people who will be fine. Here, a meaningful proportion of the audience was being told their work was moving somewhere else, and they were being told it by an organisation asking them to keep that work running until it did. Anything that sounded like spin would have been noticed immediately and would have poisoned everything afterwards.
Three continents, one day, no gaps. Fifteen sites, each needing to hear it properly rather than in a company-wide email. Any site hearing it second-hand from a colleague in another time zone would have concluded, correctly, that they were an afterthought.
And nobody was in a room. All fifteen sessions were virtual. People were told their work was moving while sitting alone at home, without colleagues beside them to absorb it with, and without any of the informal processing that normally follows an announcement like this. Whatever you fail to say clearly on the call, there is no corridor afterwards in which it gets clarified.
A five-month tail. The programme ran for several months afterwards, and productivity in the impacted sites had to hold throughout – which meant asking people who knew their roles were ending to keep doing them well.
The programme was called Right Work, Right Place, and the redundancies were part of what that meant from the first telling.
The alternative was available and it's what a lot of organisations do: announce the strategic rationale, let the operating-model story settle for a few weeks, then handle the individual consequences separately. It's more comfortable and it's less honest, and everybody in the room can tell. A workforce that suspects it's being managed towards bad news stops listening to the good news too.
So the reduction was in the narrative rather than in a follow-up. It cost us the easier first day and bought us the twelve months after it.
Related: the same call, in a very different organisation - The same breath.
This was the call that mattered. The obvious way to deliver fifteen town halls is with one senior executive, or with the global function head who owned the programme, repeating the same session fifteen times. It's efficient, it guarantees consistency, and it is exactly wrong.
I made the spokesperson at each site a leader who mattered to that site – someone visible, known, and accountable to the people in the room. The message was consistent because the architecture behind it was consistent, not because the same person delivered it. Delivered remotely, that mattered more, not less. A familiar face on a screen is most of what a dispersed audience has to go on – strip that away and you are asking people to absorb the worst news of their working year from a stranger in a window.
A central voice parachuting in signals that the decision was made somewhere else by people who won't be affected by it, which is true, and is precisely why saying it out loud that way makes it worse.
I ran the sensitive Q&A at all fifteen. That was the part that couldn't be delegated or scripted, because the questions people actually ask are not the ones in the anticipated list, and the difference between a session that works and one that doesn't is whether the difficult question gets a straight answer or a deflection.
Four in the morning to ten at night, following the sun across the sites – the same operating principle the programme was built on, applied to the announcement of it.
The announcement was designed as the opening of a programme, as much as it was an event itself. Pulse surveys measured how people were actually feeling rather than how we hoped they were. And I ran weekly check-ins with every site leader, which turned out to be the most useful instrument we had. A leader who has spent the week taking calls from their own team knows whether a message has landed long before a survey does – and with everyone dispersed, those conversations were the only place the quiet reaction surfaced at all.
Employee net promoter score rose ten points in the receiving Centres of Excellence within six months.
Productivity held in the impacted sites throughout the programme – people who knew their roles were ending kept doing them properly, which is the only measure of whether they were treated decently that I'd trust.
Nothing leaked. No coverage, no press enquiries, nothing external. For a workforce reduction across three continents at a business of that profile, silence is the outcome you plan for and rarely get.
Disciplines: Internal communications · Change communications · Executive communications · Employee engagement
Sector: Financial services
> The same breath - The same decision to name the cost alongside the strategy, at a charity with no authority to enforce anything.
> A clean break - Change communications facing outward, where the audience was the market, the clients and the press rather than the workforce.