Communicating and Influencing SCS Example — 750-Word Statement

SAs director of people and change for a national agency, I led the people side of merging two regional directorates into one, affecting 1,200 staff across nine offices. The merger was politically sensitive: it involved closing two small-town offices, a minister had questions in parliament about one of the towns, the unions were already critical of us over pay, and a previous restructure two years earlier had been handled so badly that staff still referenced it in surveys. Internal trust scores sat at 41 percent. Rumours were outrunning facts, and middle managers, who would deliver most messages, felt as anxious and uninformed as their teams. I reported to the chief executive and worked alongside a ministerial private office that needed reassurance we would not create a bad news story during the announcement window.

TI owned the entire communication and engagement strategy: what we would say, when, through whom, and how we would keep staff, unions, the minister and local media hearing one consistent, honest story over the nine months the programme ran. Success meant no industrial action, no ministerial embarrassment, and trust rising rather than falling through the change.

AI began by listening at scale. Before a single message was drafted I ran twelve listening sessions across the nine offices, and what staff told me shaped the strategy: they did not fear change, they feared finding out second-hand. I also surveyed all 1,200 staff monthly from month one, so the board saw evidence rather than anecdote. So the first principle I set, and defended when lawyers and the private office pushed back, was that staff would always hear significant news before anyone outside the organisation, even when that made announcement logistics harder. I built a single narrative, one page, three plain sentences about why we were merging, what it meant and what would not change, and every subsequent message, from the chief executive's video to union briefings to answers for the minister, drew from that page so nobody could drive a wedge between our audiences. I trained the six senior leaders who fronted messages, rehearsing hostile questions with each, because a strategy dies quickly when a leader waffles on the day. Knowing middle managers would be asked questions I could never script, I briefed them a day before each milestone, gave them honest question-and-answer packs including the questions we could not yet answer, and ran a weekly phone line where they could tell me what their teams were really asking; their reports rewrote our frequently asked questions eleven times; twice their reports changed real plans, the notice period and the travel policy. With the unions I shifted from formal consultation letters to monthly working sessions where they saw draft plans before publication, which turned them from critics of our secrecy into critics of our detail, a much safer argument. When one union representative leaked a draft to test us, I called him, acknowledged his members' anxiety rather than accusing him, and he brought his next concern to me first. The two office closures were the flashpoint. I advised the chief executive against the drafted announcement, which buried the closures in paragraph four, and argued for leading with them alongside the relocation package; the revised announcement was painful but credible, and the local member of parliament, briefed by me personally the day before, publicly described the package as fair, defusing the coverage. When a regional paper ran a leak claiming 300 job losses, I resisted the instinct to stay quiet, took the chief executive on a visit to the affected office within forty-eight hours, and we answered staff questions unscripted for two hours; the paper's follow-up quoted staff saying they finally felt told the truth. Throughout, I published a monthly you said, we did summary, kept a public log of every commitment made, and reported trust scores to the board quarterly so communication was treated as a delivery risk, not a soft extra.

ROver nine months there was no industrial action, grievances fell by a third compared with the previous restructure, and the voluntary redundancy scheme filled within six weeks, avoiding compulsory losses. Staff trust scores rose from 41 to 58 percent during the merger itself, the minister's office commended the handling to the permanent secretary, and the narrative-first approach, staff before media, became the agency's standing policy for change programmes, applied to two further restructures the following year. Two years on, staff in the merged directorate still rate communication above the agency average.