Certain environments are notorious for being challenging, I’d argue none more so than the Police!
I was drafted in to manage the communications for an IT project within one police force. The situation was that Phase One had already been completed and there was a hostility towards the project. Frontline officers were being forced to change their behaviour and spend time working with an IT system; this required classroom training sessions, practice and, ultimately, time away from their focus – the beat.
As I turned up I was confronted with posters promoting the project adorned with the tagline “Resistance is Futile”. This message was disheartening. The slogan accepted that police officers hated the business change, but worse, reinforced that they had no voice in the process. Staff that were reluctant to accept the business change were being pushed further away.
In a previous post, I’ve suggested that of the three components of effective marketing communication (message, audience and medium), audience is the most important. In this instance, the previous leaders had failed to consider the impact of that message on their audience and, as a result, fueled disdain rather than creating buy-in.
When I joined the project team, it was the first thing that I addressed; I removed the slogan and redefined the team’s ethos. In all things, we set out to “Honestly manage expectations”. We said that Phase 2 was going to be a challenge, but that we and the force’s leaders were with every frontline officer each step of the way. I created a 12-point Communications Strategy that set out to transform the officers’ feelings of hostility, through acceptance and then on to appreciation. How this was achieved is another story. But, over the period of 10 months, we were able begin the process of changing the behaviour and the sentiment towards both the project team and the IT system that forced the business change.
The result was a healthy uptake of an IT system that underpinned the frontline officers’ activities; if they were knocking down doors, the use of the system equipped them with instant intelligence to prepare and protect them. Effective marketing communications can significantly influence business change. Get it wrong and you lose the buy-in of your audience, get it right, regardless of the message, and you have the auience on your side and behaving the way that you need.
If you are facing business change and need a strategy to influence success, please get in touch.