Getting Buy In for HR and Operations Initiatives

Launching school wide initiatives is part of the job for those in school operations, HR, Finance, IT and it’s hard work. When you are smart about managing the buy-in process, your initiatives have a much better chance of succeeding. Communication is the answer.

Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them!

Was that Aristotle? This article gives you ideas for getting buy in.

Explain Yourself!

If you’re launching a new appraisals process, notifying people of a new software platform they need to use, or telling teachers how they’ll be impacted by a change to the facilities maintenance schedules, you’ll be communicating somehow.

Aim to start letting people know 6 months out, drip feed information about what’s coming, the thinking behind it, and why it’s going to make their lives better/easier/simpler. If you can, start to answer some of the likely FAQs on the topic in these early communications, and don’t be shy about sharing the time you have spent in your team getting to the right solution. Ideally, a good deal of planning has been done and a sensible number of people were involved in the decision about the change so share that. Who was involved, who wasn’t, why, and what is the end goal of the new initiative? This initial stage of explanation gives everyone time to get used to the change slowly. Cultural tip: Some in your community are used to a command and control approach to communication (boss says do it, you do it), others come from consensus driven cultures like North America and Europe and you’ll risk putting everyone off side if you launch into new approaches without this initial stage. It may then be much longer in the end because you’ll get push-back.

What's the S-Curve?

Organisations have been paying close attention to change management for a long time and it’s produced the S-Curve model. It’s not 100% accurate for everything BUT if you’ve never heard of it before, this easy model may help. For the acceptance and adoption of any new initiative, this is how your team will look (we know this because it’s how all teams look).

• Early adopters (15–20%) embrace changes quickly, often within weeks

• Majority (50–70%) adopt after 1–6 months, once peers validate the change

• Laggards (10–15%) resist until changes become unavoidable

The right approach is to make sure your own team is aware of this and comfortable with people moving at their own pace to the extent you can allow for it.

How much is too much?

Let’s say you have to introduce a change to induction for all staff. You’re asking people to return to school a day earlier in August to ensure there is time to fit in the required additional safeguarding and health and safety training, and there are some other changes to the previous years’ schedules that it’s important people feel comfortable with. How many times should you remind people of the change?

Currently, it’s rare that people feel too in the loop. Generally, complaints are that they don’t get told soon enough, it’s a bit of a closed shop or that something comes through but then it gets lost in all the other communication that’s going on in schools every week.

Repetition is respectful of the fact that schools are full of people who are absorbing huge amounts of information all day every day.

RECOMMENDATION: Repeat a message about a change like this at least 3 times to ensure it is heard and adopted. Yes - the same information we mentioned before - why, when, what, who. 

Format matters

You know your school. How do people want to receive the information? You might want to adapt and cater for multiple audiences here. The goal is to get smooth acceptance so the new initiative can begin to bring joy to the school community as fast as possible. Make it easy for people to hear about it, adopt it and feedback on it. 

What about a video update? It’s fast and asynchronous. Videos with subtitles work well and AI helps with translated subtitles too giving you the ability to search for content AND get your message across in multiple languages. 

In reality, your school community probably includes those who leave on time every day and never work late nights, those who often work late on weekdays but never on weekends, those who love the Sunday evening catch ups on emails before the week ahead, and the early morning crew for whom emails and catching up comes only before 8am then not again till the following day, and we’re not even going to start the conversation about whether people like to receive information verbally, visually or kinetically! Since we celebrate everyone’s working preferences as long as the work gets done, it’s the team instigating the change who should consider carefully the way they communicate and they need to be as flexible as possible.