A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article on Delivering the Tough Message and I used real life examples to explain the 5 Rules of Delivering the Tough Message. Today I want to post an update to that article. Why an update? Well, I heard first hand disturbing story from a company that messed up on the key rules. Unfortunately this was one of the companies from the first article.
First let’s recap the rules:
Rule 1: Be clear on the facts and do not waffle - facts are facts
Rule 2: Tell the other person immediately within the first 2 or 3 sentences.
If it is a redundancy the conversation would go something like "Thanks for joining me today, as you know we have been looking at restructuring. A consequence of the restructuring is that your role will be disappearing."Rule 3: If it is a redundancy make sure the person knows it is not them, it is the role that is no longer required.
Rule 4: In difficult times people need certainty - don't create grey areas because we all love to spend our most unproductive time in these grey areas and this is where rumours start.
Rule 5: Communicate - effectively and frequently.
In the original article I shared my experience of a successful global company that was making redundancies. The process they were following was creating a huge amount of uncertainty and doubt – Rule 4! I now want to share a more recent story from the same organisation and how they messed up on two key rules – Rules 1 and 5.
In the process of informing specific employees that their role was ‘at risk’ they chose to call the people concerned. One such employee received this call from HR. This call was unexpected by the employee and naturally did not have much of a response at the time. The HR member requested that the employee attend a meeting the following day. Following the call the employee was angry and frustrated and decided to take themselves out of the office for an hour or so to clear their head.
Upon returning to the office the employee saw that there were 6 voicemails waiting to be picked up. The employee dialled into voicemail and found that all of the voicemails were from HR – they’d made a mistake. It wasn’t this employee at risk and facing redundancy it was a different employee with the same name.
There’s nothing quite like working with facts and communicating effectively.
Sorry, that should read this is nothing like working with facts and communicating effectively.
Of course this was an easy mistake to make, both the employees concerned had the same name. Except is that quite an easy mistake to make? Is it really that unusual that two people share the same name in a company with close on 2,000 employees in this site and close on 100,000 globally?
Worse still is that this organisation provides software solutions to help large complex organisations deal with information in order to facilitate better collaboration and communication between employees.
The key lesson here is not only working to the rules above but also being prepared yourself. I have no doubt that the message being delivered by the HR team member was uncomfortable and difficult and perhaps that meant they were not focused on the task in hand. If this was the situation they should have support to help them complete their job. As it was we ended up with a very embarrassed HR employee, an extremely frustrated and angry employee and someone else in the business that does not know their role is at risk although at least one other person does know that about them.
