How Quilter embraces change through collaborative communication and mutual respect

The role that internal communication plays when supporting employees through change and large transformation projects is crucial – and it’s so much easier to deliver the messages that matter if you work across the business you're in, rather than just focusing on the expertise you bring to the process.

For Group HR Director at UK wealth management company Quilter plc Penny Cole, it’s all about leaving your ego at the door and finding the right people in the business to help get the job done – and she’s happy to tell us how to do it…

Knock down a few walls

“At Quilter, we are very keen on ensuring that we create an employee experience that represents culturally where we're trying to take the organisation. So when we built an employee engagement programme during a recent large-scale transformation programme called Hello Tomorrow, we deliberately removed walls to ensure that the right people in the business could come in and help. We had Operations professionals and managers, HR professionals, change management professionals and internal comms professionals in the team, so it was really a suite of people that brought many perspectives to the employee experience. The benefit of doing that meant that we had multiple perspectives on the experience we were building.”

Don’t ignore the whispers

“We’ve developed a process here called The Big Ugly Picture, where you stand back, you map out the timeline of the journey, look for areas of light and shade, wrap the human experience around it, then build your change management and engagement plan according to that. This approach really helps you counter the ‘whispers’ – those unhelpful moments in the journey that you're taking people on. It’s really important that organisations consider the tough parts of any change journey and lean into those, we must prepare and support our people through the tough times as well as the good times and think about the story we want them to connect to. There was a particular slide that I used to get senior stakeholders (Board, Executive Team, Steering Committees) on board with this thinking that outlined the unhelpful narrative versus the narrative we're trying to move people towards. It really helped us create that journey.”

Eliminate the blockers

“Quilter has been on a change trajectory for quite some time, but a recent shift for us since the pandemic has been around no longer being able to rely on face-to-face interaction. Because of this, cascading messages through that middle-management layer was actually becoming a real blocker for us. To tackle this, we asked them why we were seeing this barrier, we listened and rebuilt our plans around what they needed to successfully support their people. We found out that what this group needed was really practical support and tools such as managing performance through hybrid working and supporting mental wellbeing. They were struggling to cascade and connect their teams to strategy when the basics were the priority for them. We knew this group was stretched, we knew that they were facing lots of different challenges, so we decided to engage the entire audience on Quilter’s strategy in one go and give our managers the tools they needed to continue the conversation. And that's the approach we've taken since the beginning of this year.”

Do it with feeling

“We had a mantra for many years called One Quilter, but people didn't really buy into it because they didn’t really get why it was important. A subtle change we have made is to worry less about telling people they are One Quilter, and focus on helping them to feel like they are One Quilter. There is a difference. If you can get people to feel it, they will come willingly, and it will open doors.”

Keep checking the temperature

“We are a feedback-hungry group at Quilter, so one of the things that has worked for us really well is constant temperature checking. We deliberately use technology where we can – we have a suite of tools that we use to monitor feedback at the end of a change management activity or training intervention, and we track our open rates and click-through rates. We have an amazing Head of Internal Comms – I have to say she is absolutely incredible; she's hugely creative and has a very good at understanding of how we can trigger behavioural nudges in people that encourage them to act a certain way, while capturing what's working and what isn't. We don't tend to just stick with one format if something's not landing. We're quite inquisitive and we like to make sure we interrogate what else we could do, like the example of engaging actively with our management group last year and asking them what they need. We just weren’t getting the level of engagement that we needed, so rather than just keep going we asked: ‘What's working? What isn't?’ – then we changed tack as a result of that.”

Own your responsibility

“Change is done and decided by business leaders – someone in HR doesn't just go off and make a decision about a change that's impacting people; it is usually linked (or at least it should be linked) to a strategic decision with a commercial imperative. As leaders, we need to own that; but we need to do it with humility and with care. There will always be difficult business decisions and sometimes those decisions impact our people. You have to own it. You have to give justification for it and you have to support your people through the change, whether it's positive or not. Human beings do not mind change. It's a fallacy that they don’t. People absolutely do embrace change – what they don't embrace is the uncertainty that tends to come with it. So be clear. Be straightforward, be empathetic and lead. Those are the most important things.”

*This article was first published in the Journal of Internal Communication brought to you by Gallagher. As a world-leading internal communications agency, we are excited to share our round-up of internal communication trends and provide practical examples of how organisations communicate with their people.