Developing Change Management Plans

We analyzed 4 million recruiting emails sent through Gem. Most get opened. But only 22.6% get replies. Half those replies are "thanks, but no thanks." We dug into what actually works. Here are 8 factors that drive REAL responses: 1. Strategic timing beats everything else - 8am gets 68% open rates. 4pm hits 67.3%. 10am lands at 67% - Most recruiters blast at 9am when inboxes are flooded - Avoiding peak times alone can boost your opens by 7-10% 2. Weekend outreach is criminally underused - Saturday/Sunday emails get ≥66% open rates consistently - Why? Empty inboxes. Zero competition. Candidates actually have time - Yet few recruiters send on weekends. Their loss is your gain 3. Keep messages between 101-150 words - Shorter feels spammy. Longer gets skimmed - You need exactly 10 sentences to nail the essentials - Every word beyond 150 drops performance 4. Generic templates kill response rates - Generic templates: 22% reply rate - Personalized outreach: 47% increased response rate - Even adding name + company to subject lines boosts opens by 5% 5. Subject lines need 3-9 words - Include company name + job title for highest opens - "Senior Engineer Role at [Company]" beats clever wordplay - 11+ words can work if genuinely intriguing, but why risk it? 6. The 4-stage sequence is optimal - One-off emails are dead. Send exactly 4 follow-up messages - You'll see 68% higher "interested" rates with proper sequencing - After stage 4, engagement completely flatlines. Stop there 7. Get the hiring manager involved - Having the hiring manager send ONE follow-up boosts reply rates by 50%+ - Yet most recruiters don't use this tactic - Weekend advantage: Minimal competition for attention 8. Leadership involvement is a cheat code - Role-specific timing (tech vs non-tech) matters - Technical roles: 3 of 4 best send times are weekends - Engineers check email differently than salespeople. Adjust accordingly TAKEAWAY: These aren't opinions. This is what 4 million emails tell us. Most recruiting teams are stuck in 2019 playbooks wondering why their reply rates won't budge. Meanwhile, recruiters who implement these 8 factors see dramatically better results. The data is right there. The patterns are clear. The only question is: will you actually change how you operate? Or will you keep sending the same tired emails at 9am on Tuesday? Your call.

I keep returning to Damon Centola’s research on how #change spreads. Not because it’s clever. Because it’s true. Centola found that change doesn’t move like information. You can’t push it through announcements or clever messaging. It spreads through behavior, #trust, and networks. He calls it complex contagion, and it tracks with what I see inside organizations every day. People don’t change because someone at the top says so. They change when they see people they trust doing something new. Then they see it again. Then maybe one more time. That’s when it starts to feel real. That’s when it moves. Here’s what Centola’s research shows actually makes change stick: - Multiple exposures. Once isn’t enough. People need to encounter the new behavior several times from different people. - Trusted messengers. It’s not about role or rank. It’s about credibility in the day-to-day. - Strong ties. Close, high-trust relationships are where change actually moves. - Visible behavior. People need to see it being done, not just hear about it. - Reinforcement over time. Real change takes repetition. One wave won’t do it. This flips most #ChangeManagement upside down. It’s not about the rollout or coms plan. It’s about reinforcing new behaviors inside the real social structure of the organization. So, if you are a part of change, ask your team and self: 1. Who are the people others watch? 2. Where are the trusted connections? 3. Is the behavior visible and repeated? 4. Are you designing for reinforcement or just awareness? Change isn’t a #communication problem. It’s a network pattern. That’s the shift. That’s the work. And that’s what I help teams build.

Building a high-performing team is challenging, but creating a high-performing organization is even more complex. My work involves helping leaders and organizations build cohesive, high-performing cultures that bridge strategy execution with organizational values. In this post, I want to share a concept that has greatly influenced my work and helped many clients build resilience: Antifragility. Popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, antifragility goes beyond resilience. While resilient systems endure stress, antifragile ones grow stronger from it. What is Antifragility? Antifragility describes systems or individuals that thrive on challenges, benefiting from volatility, randomness, and disorder. Unlike fragile entities that break or robust ones that merely withstand stress, antifragile entities improve when exposed to difficulties. Pillars of Antifragility: Redundancy and Overcompensation: Build extra capacity to handle unexpected challenges, ensuring not just survival but growth. Workplace Example: Cross-training employees so that more than one person can perform essential tasks ensures continuity if someone is unavailable. Optionality: Maintain flexibility to adapt and pivot when circumstances change. Workplace Example: Encouraging employees to develop a variety of skills and offering multiple career paths allows the organization to quickly adapt to new market demands. Decentralization: Spread risk and decision-making across the organization to minimize vulnerabilities. Workplace Example: Empowering team leaders to make decisions and manage projects increases agility and speeds up response times. Trial and Error: Embrace small failures as learning opportunities. Workplace Example: Testing new ideas with small pilot projects before a full rollout helps avoid larger mistakes and leads to better solutions. Skin in the Game: Ensure decision-makers are directly impacted by outcomes, promoting thoughtful choices. Workplace Example: Linking managers’ bonuses to team performance makes them more invested in their team’s success. Nonlinear Responses: Recognize that small challenges can lead to significant positive outcomes. Workplace Example: Leveraging customer feedback, even from minor complaints, can lead to substantial product or service improvements. Simplified Relationship to Resilience and Psychological Safety: Resilience helps us bounce back from challenges, but antifragility makes us stronger because of them. Psychological safety is crucial for creating an environment where risks are taken and lessons are learned, enabling both individuals and organizations to thrive. Which pillar of antifragility resonates most with you? 👇 #organizationalgrowth #businessresilience #managementskills

If our front line workers are not influencing up, we have a continuous improvement problem. The best ideas and insights come from those who are on the front lines of the business therefore their valuable perspectives MUST be heard. Most companies still have a hierarchal structure which means that front-line workers are tasked with influencing up! Simply put, this means communicating effectively with their managers to gain their support or persuade them to see things from their perspective. In a rigid hierarchical structure, this can be difficult as front line workers can have limited direct access to senior leaders and may have to pass their ideas or concerns through multiple layers of management before they reach the top. All this 'red tape' and associated delays can frustrate people to the point that they just stop trying. We also see (unfortunately) that hierarchies can create power differentials between managers and their direct reports. Managers with unchecked power and ego can create a work environment where employees feel intimidated and fearful. If any of this resonates with you, you may be interested in knowing that there are numerous ways to turn this around. Lean thinking helps a lot here! 💡 If restricted communication is the problem- simply make it a priority to spend more time with people (by going to the Gemba, facilitating daily huddles, holding Kaizen events, organizing regular town hall meetings or hosting Q&A sessions with senior leaders, where employees at all levels can directly voice their ideas and concerns. 💡 If power dynamics is an issues, why not try something like reverse mentoring: Pair senior leaders with junior staff in mentoring relationships where the junior employees share insights and feedback. This can help flatten perceived power imbalances and promote mutual respect. Leadership training is also vital in reducing these issues. 💡 If there are cultural barriers, work on promoting a culture of openness: Actively foster a workplace culture that encourages questioning and exploring ideas. Visual boards can collect people's ideas for further exploration. 💡 If psychological safety seems low, train and coach all leaders to develop psychological safety in their teams. Create team agreements between leaders and teams that clearly conveys behaviours that are out and behaviours that are in (like raising concerns and suggest improvements). 💡 If slow decision-making is an issues, streamline approval processes: simplify the decision-making process by reducing unnecessary steps and empowering more employees to make decisions at their level. Keep trying until you find ways to hear front-line workers voices loud and clear to the point that they are informing continuous change and improvements every day for better decisions and a more inclusive workplace. #lean #leanthinking #continuousimprovement #employeeengagement #inclusion #frontlineworkers #leadership

What if the most important person in your company won the lottery tomorrow and retired? Could your team still function? The "lottery factor" is the most important resilience metric your company is actively ignoring. A founder friend recently shared a painful story: Their lone data engineer, who built their entire analytics infrastructure, gives two weeks' notice. Nobody else understood their pipeline architecture. Suddenly, their leadership team couldn’t access critical metrics. The board meeting was a week later, and they didn’t have reliable numbers. Game over. This single-point-of-failure problem is everywhere in specialist-heavy organizations: - The security architect who designed your entire compliance framework - The financial controller who built your custom reporting system - The growth marketer who manages your acquisition channels Each becomes an irreplaceable link in a very breakable chain. The solution: build a company of versatile generalists who constantly cross-train. Knowledge sharing is an area we're increasingly investing in as the company grows. This requires more upfront investment in training, yes. But it creates an organization that can weather unexpected departures, market shifts, and rapid pivots without breaking stride. The companies that survive turbulent times aren't those with the most specialized talent. They're the ones structured to maintain continuity when faced with inevitable disruption and change.

“Storytelling” gets thrown around A LOT in change comms. But it can be hard to know where to begin. One of the simplest places to start is the humble project update. 🧠 People remember stories up to 22 times more than facts alone. (I know, the irony that is a fact is not lost on me.) Let's take a standard project update as a 'before' example: “Phase 2 of the Optimise Programme is now complete. A new automated process has been implemented to improve data accuracy and reduce manual input.” Factually accurate but dull as sh*t. I practically fell asleep writing it. Here's the same message, but with a story – and a human: “It used to take me hours – now it’s sorted in the time it takes to make a coffee.” Roger, Team member, Finance Ops. Same project. Same outcome. But now it actually means something to the people reading it. So if you want to make your project updates more effective... start here: 1. Find the friction (or 'the villain', as I like to call it). What wasn’t working before? 2. Find a human voice. Ask someone involved (ideally an employee) to describe the difference. 3. Frame the change. Make it about real people, not phases, platforms or processes. Storytelling isn't about writing a novel... Just start with one real voice. That's it. Because a single quote beats a five-point milestone update. 👊 Find this useful? Give me half a day and I'll turn your change team into proper writers. -------- Sign up to ‘The Comms Nerd’ email, unlocking the neuroscience behind words, storytelling and behaviour change: https://lnkd.in/eDsS55KQ Download my free Change Comms Checklist for change colleagues: https://lnkd.in/eJQX_ZKy DM me to find out more about my comms, narrative & writing programmes and The Change Writing Workshop.

"Here's the change. You don't need to know why. Accept it. Move on. And continue to perform." Someone left this comment on one of my posts recently. "I know I'm resistant. Change has always been a struggle. However, I feel change is exponentially more difficult in the corporate world because RARELY does an organization support their employee fully through that change. It's more a message of, 'Here's the change. You don't need to know why. Accept it. Move on. And continue to perform.'" I'd call that pattern recognition, earned the hard way. In our research on what actually helps employees acknowledge and harness difficult emotions during change, one strategy outperforms everything else: regular, clear, honest communication on status, even when there's nothing new to report. This is why communication is one of the most important modules within our industry-disrupting curriculum. The leaders who do this well will tell their teams, plainly: "Nothing has changed since last week. Here's what I still know. The moment something shifts, you'll hear it from me first." That's it. Silence is what erodes trust during change. People don't need good news every week. They need to know someone's still paying attention. There's a second habit most leaders skip, and it pairs with the first. After a big change push, give people time (and more than a day), not just to recover, but to reflect: what they learned these past few weeks, what they'd do differently, what’s been lost, what's worth telling the team before everything moves again. That's how you turn burnout into continuous growth. Say something, even when you have nothing new to say. And when you give people rest afterward, make it count: time to actually sit with what they learned, time to grieve, not just recover, before the next push starts. Neither of these work alone. A weekly update with nothing in it is just noise. A day off with no reflection is just a pause before the same cycle starts again. To the person who left that comment: this is what being supported through change looks like. Most organizations haven't built the habit yet. And please know…it MUST become a habit. Repeated, intentional action. The best part is that any team can start building it this week. What would it take for your organization to begin doing this today?

During my time as Managing Director of an agency, we went through more change than I care to remember. We bought smaller agencies, attracted outside investment, were acquired by a global consultancy and, when that didn't work out particularly well, completed a management buyout. Along the way came new structures, new priorities, changing expectations and more rebrands than even the designers could get enthusiastic about. From the boardroom, most of those decisions made sense. We could see them coming, understood the rationale and were often involved in shaping what happened next. For the teams living through it, the experience was often very different. I still see the same pattern today. A leadership team spends weeks discussing a change, testing assumptions, answering questions and refining the plan. The communication goes out. The rationale is clear. Then, two days later, half the organisation appears to be having a completely different conversation. Someone is convinced a restructure is coming. Someone else is worried about what it means for their role. A perfectly ordinary Teams message suddenly acquires the significance of a life-altering legal document. Meanwhile, Linda has concluded that William is selling the business because he cancelled their regular one-to-one this week. One thing I've learned after years of leading through change is that most organisations are reasonably good at communicating the facts. The challenge usually begins afterwards, when people start trying to work out what those facts mean for them. That is where uncertainty tends to take hold. People begin filling gaps in information with assumptions. They pay attention to tone as much as content. They look for clues in places that were never intended to contain any. A message saying, "Can we have a quick chat tomorrow?" can easily create an afternoon of entirely avoidable speculation. Earlier in my career, I thought communication during change was largely about clarity and confidence. If leaders explained things well enough, people would feel reassured. What people often need is something slightly different. - They need help separating what is known from what is assumed. - They need space to ask questions. - They need leaders who are prepared to repeat important messages without becoming irritated that they've already said them once. - And they need steadiness. Because when people are trying to make sense of uncertainty, reassurance rarely comes from a perfectly crafted announcement. It comes from the behaviour of the people leading through it. A question I often find myself returning to is, “When you're leading change, how much attention goes into communicating the decision itself, and how much goes into helping people navigate the uncertainty around it?” They're related, but they're not quite the same thing.

Technology changes at exponential speeds, but human psychology moves at the speed of trust. If you treat your AI transition like a software patch, you will fail. If you treat it as a Human-Centric Adoption, you win 👏 To continue the Human-AI Synergy theme in my previous posts and how it impacted the human-centric part, I'm sharing a deck of 100-days Roadmap in Planning and Executing to achieve that optimum synergy, together here also in the post, the summarized Change Management & Communication Strategy for "The Synergy Sprint", designed to turn skeptics into advocates in 100 days. 👇 ➡️ Change Management Strategy for 100-days Human-AI Synergy Roadmap implementation: 📌 The Change Strategy: Psychological Safety First To minimize resistance, we move from "Command and Control" to "Co-Creation." 📌 Radical Transparency: We stop the "Siloed Shadow AI" witch hunts. By studying how employees already use AI, we validate their ingenuity rather than policing their tools. 📌 The "Layers of Autonomy": We remove the ambiguity of "AI taking jobs." By categorizing tasks (Human-only vs. AI-supported), we provide a clear map of how roles evolve, not disappear. 📌 The Junior-Senior Bridge: We protect the "Succession Pipeline." We ensure AI doesn't hollow out entry-level learning by making juniors the "logic-checkers" for AI outputs. ➡️ The 100-Day Communication Plan: Segmented Precision 🔊 Efficiency requires speaking the right language to the right stakeholder. We don't send "All-Hands" emails; we drive narratives. 📣 For the C-Suite (The Visionaries): Focus: Competitive Gap & Agility. Message: "This isn't about headcount reduction; it's about increasing our organizational 'Internal Speed" 📣 For Mid-Managers (The Gatekeepers): Focus: Capability & Capacity. Message: "The 'Human-AI Labs' will offload your drudgery iterations. You aren't just managing people; you are now an Architect of Work." 📣 For the Frontline (The Executors): Focus: Future-Proofing & Safety. Message: "You are the Pilot. AI is the Co-pilot. We are measuring your judgment, not just your output." 📈 Sustaining the Momentum By Day 100, we shift from "Skeptics" to "Advocates." We do this by changing what I refer to as the "Augmentation Metric". When performance reviews reward how a human improves an AI output (NOT the AI prompts), the culture shifts overnight. You could turn internal wins into an Employer Brand that screams: "This is where the future of work actually happens." The question for leaders today isn't 'If' AI will change your Org Design and Behaviours, but 'How' you will lead the humans through it. Are you ready to stop measuring prompts keystrokes and start measuring human-result judgement? ⚠️ DISCLAIMER: The methods and approaches shared in this post is my own personal POV and doesn't reflect the view of my organization. Results may vary when you try to apply the methods here #AIRoadmap #ChangeManagement #DigitalTransformation #TalentManagement #HRStrategy #HumanAISynergy

Should you treat email, SMS, and WhatsApp the same? Absolutely not. Email is expected. It’s the channel customers check when they have time. It’s passive, it sits quietly in the inbox. SMS and WhatsApp are different - they interrupt. They live next to messages from partners, friends, group chats. You’re not just competing with other brands, you’re stepping into someone’s personal life. If you're going to use those channels, the message has to earn its place. What’s worthy? A product drop with real demand. A time-sensitive, high-impact promotion. A restock alert for something I actually wanted. “New arrivals” and “browse the latest” might be fine for email, but they're lazy content for SMS or WhatsApp. If you’re working across multiple platforms, the question isn’t just what you’re saying, it’s how, where, and when you're saying it. We should be considering: Sequencing: If the customer received the offer via email this morning, should SMS follow up tomorrow if unopened? Or should WhatsApp be used only if they’ve historically engaged there? Suppression logic: Avoid over-messaging. Are we throttling based on frequency and channel mix? Personalisation by behaviour: Does the channel match the customer's engagement pattern? (E.g. only send SMS to those who click and convert from it.) Context-aware content: Messaging should feel native to the channel. WhatsApp shouldn’t feel like an email copy-paste. SMS shouldn't mimic a website banner. Most importantly: your customer is one person. They deserve a joined-up, intentional journey, not three disconnected nudges about the same thing.