The trouble with “change comms”
Written by Melinda Smith, IABC Victoria Board Member.
Winter had officially started that week and, true to Melbourne form, it was dark, it was cold, and it was pouring with rain when I ran to the waiting Uber. The dog, Lola Pearl, was unimpressed. She’d already missed her walk thanks to the rain and now, adding injury to insult, she was being left inside, alone, watching Muster Dogs at the very time of day I usually knock off and give her my full attention.
I was heading out to the IABC Victoria winter mingle. I’d planned on the train, but the weather forced my hand. On the way in, the rain came down the whole way and I found myself wondering who else was brave, or stupid, enough to fight their way across town to a midweek event in this.
Quite a few of us, it turned out. And the conversations that night, with comms people and change people and others in diverse roles who also came along for the networking, stayed with me on the ride home. Long enough, in fact, to write this.
Ticking boxes
Here is what I keep coming back to after twenty years in HR and Change: somewhere in the last two decades, change quietly got absorbed into the project plan. It either became a workstream with a lead, maybe a budget, a set of artefacts, and a completion date. Or the work was handed to another function like HR or Comms. Regardless of who was actioning it the results are becoming all too familiar:
Emails drafted: tick.
Town hall delivered: tick.
Intranet page live or updated: tick.
Communicated: tick.
And then we wonder why, three months in, people still aren’t behaving as if the change is real.
To manage this, somehow we’ve collapsed two different disciplines into one concept called “change comms”. And everyone suffers as a result.
Core responsibilities
Human Resources gets involved when people are impacted — the policies, the procedures, the end-to-end employment experience. The communication is largely factual, anchored in what the organisation owes its people and what its people owe in return.
Communication, done well, makes the change legible. It’s largely one-way, set at the strategic level, and necessary — people can’t engage with what they don’t understand. Good change communication is a craft. It deserves time, expertise, and a seat near the strategy.
Change work is doing something different. Its job is to help people buy into the change itself. To make them want it. To give them agency. And agency is the word that matters — it’s the one that quietly disappears when comms is asked to carry the work of change. You can communicate at people all day. You cannot give them agency in a town hall or an email.
Awkward truths
Here is the awkward truth, though, and one I heard a version of at the mingle more than once: many organisations don’t have anyone dedicated to change. No change lead, no change manager, no specialist sitting alongside the project impacting on how people work today.
The kicker is that the work still needs doing, so it lands on the comms or HR person, who is then expected to drive adoption, manage resistance, build buy-in, and somehow also have the email out by Friday. All while doing their day jobs too!
That isn’t a comms or HR problem. It’s a resourcing problem dressed up as a comms or HR problem. And when it inevitably underdelivers, it’s the comms or HR function, and the practitioner, that wears it.
Which brings me to the part of this that I think actually matters.
Leaning in
I don’t think the answer is for comms, HR and change to retreat into separate corners and defend their turf. The answer is the opposite. We need to lean further into each other’s spaces, not pull back from them.
Comms and HR professionals stand to gain enormously from understanding what the change practice actually involves:
the discipline of engaging hearts and minds throughout
the psychology of resistance
the slow building of agency
the structural work of sponsorship and coalitions.
Change practitioners stand to gain just as much from taking both the communication and HR craft seriously:
Comms: the strategy behind a message, the discipline of audience, the professional standards good comms is held to.
HR: the employee experience lens, the lived reality of policy, the long arc of how people actually move through an organisation.
Getting it right
The status quo, where one discipline quietly inherits the other’s job and none get the recognition or resourcing it needs, doesn’t serve any of us. More importantly, it doesn’t serve the people on the receiving end of the change, the ones who don’t care where the email came from or who ran the workshop, only that the work felt coherent and treated them as more than a project deliverable.
We get better by learning from each other. By challenging each other. By being in the same rooms, having the same conversations, and being willing to say I don’t actually know how you do what you do — show me.
Which, in the end, is why I caught the Uber and went in despite the horrendous weather. Even Lola Pearl, eventually, forgave me.
Melinda Smith is the Managing Director ofChange with Mel. After twenty-plus years moving between HR and change roles, and still occasionally getting asked to write the email, she now helps leaders stop managing change and start leading it with confidence, through keynotes, workshops and hands-on consulting. Melinda is also a board member of IABC Victoria.
