Less Chatter, More Matter: The Communications Podcast

#116 A case study in driving change with a remote workforce

• Season 1 • Episode 116

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When your team is 250 people strong, morale is shaky, and no one’s in the same physical location, how do you communicate a major organisational change—let alone get people on board with it? In this episode of Less Chatter, More Matter, we get a behind-the-scenes look at an award-winning change communication project Mel Loy delivered for a local government client navigating a complex transformation.

With multiple senior leadership changes, ongoing remote work due to office renovations, and a lack of clarity around what the change meant in practice, the challenge was clear: connect and engage people effectively without face-to-face interaction. You get the step by step strategy developed to turn this situation around—starting with a clear focus on outcomes and a commitment to simple, practical, and human-centred communication.

Along the way, you’ll pick up key tips on strategy versus tactics, making virtual events more interactive, and supporting speakers to deliver with confidence. Whether you’re a change leader, communicator, or team manager trying to reach and engage dispersed teams, this case study is full of actionable insights to help you do it better. 

Tune in to learn what worked, what could be improved, and how creativity, clarity, and collaboration can turn a tough communication challenge into a big win.


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So here's the situation. You have a team of about 250 people who are at the beginning of a big period of change. We're talking change in every which way. Technology, ways of working, roles, responsibilities, you name it. But there are some forces in our way. One is the fact that morale is quite low to begin with, thanks to multiple changes at the senior leadership level, and a poor understanding of what the changes actually mean in practice. The other is that due to extensive office renovations, most of the team is working remotely most of the time, and the cost to get everyone together in the same place is prohibitive. So how do you get people to not just understand, but get excited about the change when you can't see them face to face? Well, that's what today's episode is all about. Hello again, friend, and welcome back to the show. I'm Mel Loy, the host of this podcast, and I'm recording this on the lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal people here in Meanjin, Brisbane. So today's episode, as you may have guessed from the intro, is a bit of a case study on how you can communicate change when there's a few bumps in the road. And this is a case study of work I did last year for a client. And the reason I'm doing this episode is because I recently won an award for this work. Hooray. And my good friend Sally Porteous had a great suggestion. Why don't I do a podcast on this episode to share how that event worked? And Sally is awesome. So I said, okay, and this is the People's show. After all, your wish is my command. So today I'm going to share what we did, how and whether or not it was successful. Let's get into it. Step one was to develop a strategic approach to getting the outcomes we wanted, which were basically that people would know what the changes meant and why they were being made. They would feel well informed and confident about the changes, a sense of certainty, and they would begin to work in ways that showed they understood how these changes work in practice. So the key strategy here was to break down the change into smaller bite-sized chunks, because it was just simply too massive, too much information had been thrown at people, and it was really overwhelming. The second strategy was to make sure that the change was communicated in very clear. Simple and compelling ways. Up until this point, there had been a lot of consulting, corporate speak, and we needed to put all of this into words that made sense for the people who were hearing it. And thirdly, we had to make this a two-way communication opportunity if we were going to build understanding and engage people so that they had opportunities to ask questions. So this is where the idea of the virtual conference came in, which leads us to step two. Developing the concept. So if you've heard me bang on about this before, forgive me, but you will hear it again. A strategy is not the same thing as a plan. The strategy is the approach you're going to use to achieve your outcomes, and that's what I just talked through. The plan is the tactics you're going to use to implement that strategy. Too often people jump to tactics before thinking about the strategic approach, so they're just kind of throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, and it's not aligned with the overall outcomes that you're trying to achieve. So the virtual conference was one of the tactics that we decided to use to help drive the change communication strategy. And a virtual event was perfect for this audience because A, most of them were working remotely most of the time. B, we could break it up into smaller chunks, which would make it easier to understand and also easier for people to engage around their existing meetings and commitments. And C, it cost us nothing but time. So to bring this to life, I created a brand name for the conference and that we've since applied that to other similar events, like town halls. And then we mapped out a two week schedule of events. So most days there were two sessions, one hour in the morning, one in the afternoon, and each session would tackle a very specific part of the change and strategy, or it could be a training session, a capability. Building opportunities. So for example, I ran a couple of sessions on business communication skills because the team needed to uplift those because those skills are going to be needed when they start putting these new ways of working into practice. So each session was facilitated by a different person. In some cases it was a consultant like me, but in most cases it was someone from the team, a leader or a project manager, for example. And the great part about this is when people are presenting, who people know, your audience will relate to them. And it's all about that messenger effect. If I know you and like you, I'm more likely to listen to you and believe you. So once we had the concept and the plan mapped out, I was able to get input and feedback from various people in the team to help shape it and get their buy-in to make sure they would help to promote it as well, but also really help to make it more of a success. So then it was on to step three, which is all about preparation and building excitement. So to get people to actually see value in joining in these sessions, we had to make sure they understood that it was worth their while, that it wasn't gonna be boring. There is nothing worse than sitting in front of a screen and staring at talking head for an hour. So there's a few things we did here. Number one created a intranet site specifically for the event. So it was branded as well. And that's why we shared the agenda, including a bit of a snippet about each, uh, item that was being presented so that it would pique people's curiosity. And that intranet page was also where we laid it, housed all the recordings, the presentations, and any other materials from the each session. The second thing, uh, we created a virtual show bag for the conference. So. You could download that from the intranet site as a zip file. And because this particular organisation is a local government organisation, we couldn't include anything like vouchers from local businesses, but. We also wanted to make sure that whatever we included aligned with the theme of the conference. So we created a PDF that was a series of posters with quotes about change that people could print out and display in their own work areas. Uh, there was a bingo cut that people could fill out with the sessions they attended, and if they filled out five, they could go into a draw to win a prize. Uh, we also created these vouchers that were designed for team members to give to their colleagues. So for example, you could give a colleague a voucher for a coffee and a chat. And the third thing we did, and this was really key, was have a speaker preparation session. So I had provided all the speakers with a written brief and then I got them on a call and spoke through all those expectations, making it really clear that presentations had to be interactive. So they had to think about ways they could get the audience involved, and most of them did. And honestly, there were some really creative ideas, which were really great. Um, also we didn't want death by PowerPoint. So they had to stick to their timing, as few slides as possible, allowed for questions. That speaker preparation session was also an opportunity for speakers to ask questions from me, um, and build their confidence to present as well. So all the speakers were tasked with providing. Three to five key takeaways for the audience, and we also made those available on the intranet, so if they didn't watch the recording, they didn't look at the slides, they at least got those three to five top key takeaways from each session. Now another key action is of course, the logistics. So this is step four, and it will really depend on the organisation you work in as to how the logistics will work. I luckily had access to a wonderful executive assistant on the team who I worked with. She sent out the invitations to the whole team, so they were all locked in their calendars. And of course, we did a lot of communication in the buildup to the event so people knew what was coming and why. We also sent reminder emails to all the presenters. Reminders on teams to the whole team about the events coming up the next day, what had been covered that day, all that sort of stuff. So really kept that flow of information going. And we just ran these as standard Microsoft teams meetings because it was a small enough group. But if you are going to go bigger, you may want to use the teams webinar functionality or another system. It is totally up to you. Okay, step five was measurement. So we looked at both the output and the outcome measures to see how successful this virtual conference actually was. So output measures were things like how many people attended, how many viewed the recordings, how many people viewed the SharePoint site, et cetera. The outcome measures we're asking things like how well informed people felt about the changes after the event. So what difference did that make to that understanding of the change? How valuable they felt it was? So we got essentially a net promoter score out of that and what worked well and what could be improved. Because this was the first time doing it, we really wanted to understand what they liked about it, what we would do differently next time. And to make sure we got as much feedback as possible. That feedback survey link was included in most of the sessions on the last few days, as well as sent via teams email plastered all over the intranet page, you name it. And we also kept an eye on how many people had responded and recruited senior managers to encourage their teams to also provide feedback. So it was a lot of work. I'm not gonna lie, and we had to turn it around really quickly. Thankfully, the speakers were super keen to help out and we kept it all pretty light touch. We didn't over complicate things. So did it work? Personally, I think it was pretty successful. When I look at some of the measurement results. So for example, 95% odd survey respondents said they felt somewhat or extremely well informed about the changes. Thanks to the event. 90% said they found the event valuable and each session attracted an average of 130 people, which represents about 65% of the team. So I'll take that as a win. Most people said they liked the format of the event too, but interestingly, I. You had some who said, oh, it should be spaced out more, maybe over three weeks. While others liked that, it was in the shorter timeframe. Like anything, you can't please everybody and that's okay. But the conference also got the attention of others outside of that team. So I should mention though, everybody could join in. It wasn't just closed off to this team. So it did have a few other people from around the business who knew this was happening, and some of them did join in some sessions that were relevant. But it was so well received that not long afterwards, I was approached by a person outside of that team in the broader organisation who wanted to scale the concept up and do something similar for the whole organisation based on the broader transformation work. So that's pretty nice and it's nice to know it was valuable further afield as well. So the key lessons I would impart on you, dear listener from this experiment are, number one, be clear on what you want to achieve and design the agenda to suit. Don't just think about the different elements of the change that people need to know about, but what are also the skills that they will need to bring that to life. Number two, get people involved who have skin in the game because it's more likely to be successful and the audience can relate to them more. Number three, make it fun and interactive. Find creative ways to engage people during and outside of the sessions to really build a sense of excitement around it. And number four, give speakers a lot of support, particularly if they are not used to this kind of thing. So have a detailed written brief, provide guidelines, templates, run a live session with them, and also make sure you review their presentations before they run them. It's a really good opportunity to help them learn, but also you'll get a sense for, you know, is this going to be too long or has it gone off track? Okay folks, a short but sweet one today. But before we go, I just want to give a massive shout out to everyone who has purchased my new book already, who has left a review, or who has sent me an encouraging message. You are simply the best. And don't forget that every review left on Amazon. I will be donating some of my consulting time to a nonprofit organisation. So the more reviews that are submitted, the more time I'll give to this organisation. And you will also score yourself a free ticket to my upcoming webinar where I'll talk through the framework that is essential part of that book. So make sure you check out the links in the show notes for all the details. And in the meantime, keep doing amazing things and bye for now.