Your questions

• How do we ensure that the business doesn’t stop while we make necessary changes?
• How do we help both those employees leaving and those staying understand why difficult decisions were made?
• How do we help executives, managers and leaders communicate the changes successfully when we can only tell them about the change a short time before we communicate publicly?
• How do retain belief and trust in our values while we’re making difficult decisions?

Our solutions

It’s one thing to communicate good news, but much harder when the news is difficult and people are impacted. We’ve learned that proactive communication helps organization recover from changes faster and that difficult news can be an opportunity to strengthen relationships and build trust.

We help you tie your changes to your strategy and values

Changes are often in line with business strategies. We help create clear links between the organization’s long-term strategy and why the decisions made will help bring you closer to your goals. We will also use a third-party lens to ensure how you deliver your message and treat employees remains consistent with the values you’ve asked your employees to live up to.

We keep it confidential

We’ve worked with a number of organizations preparing for big announcements that may be material in nature. Perhaps you don’t have a strategic communication team or you are concerned about people leading communication when emotions are high and they are uncertain about their own future. We will sign confidentiality agreements and ensure your announcement becomes public when planned.

We create a proactive communication plan

We will work with you to create a proactive communication plan helping you identify a plan that is aligned with your business strategy. We’ll also help identify and train key communicators whether they are leaders, managers or colleagues so that they can deliver the strategy on message and on time.

We bookend communication with a beginning and an end to help employee focus on strategy

All communication has a launch plan to explain what’s happening, when it’s happening, and who’s impacted. We help manage downstream communication from HR to managers to individuals to ensure consistency. Finally when all impacted employees are aware, we speak to remaining employees about what’s next. This communication provides a starting point on transparently communicating what the organization must focus on now in order to deliver business goals.

The projects

• Divestitures with clients who decided to focus on their strengths and sell parts of their business to organizations that specialized. Helped transitioning employees understand impacts and opportunities clearly.
• Reorganization communication for a number of organizations including HP, Compaq and Loblaw Companies Limited.