According to recent Gartner insights, “change is the new constant.” However, the study also notes that “only 34% of change initiatives are a clear success.”
Whether the change is as large as an organizational overhaul or as small as introducing a new process, without clear documentation and communication, it will be difficult to get your teams on board. Because, let’s face it, change is hard.
In this post, we’ll explore why most change initiatives fail and how you can overcome common pitfalls by wielding Loom to manage change.
Why change initiatives fail
Business at an enterprise level continues to change dramatically, and an effective top-down approach to change management is now disconnected from the ways teams actually work. However, of the organizations surveyed by Gartner, 80% still lead change management this way.
To help get your teams onboard seamlessly, let’s take a look at the top 3 mistakes organizations make that hinder change management:
Mistake #1: The purpose isn’t clear
The new changes you might be pitching to your organization could seem like a total slog to your employees if they don’t understand why they are being asked to make them. Some changes may even draw an emotional response from teams if they don’t see how the new processes align with the business’s goals.
Even if the changes don’t cause a stir, without the proper understanding, they could lead to employees implementing them with little to no effort or creative energy to deliver the desired results.
To implement change successfully, you need your employees to know why this process is being undertaken at their core.
Mistake #2: The proper tone is not conveyed
As previously mentioned, when you lead change management, you may expect a range of emotions, from enthusiasm to hesitation to resistance. To mitigate possible aversion, leaders need to promote change using an appropriate tone.
It’s not just what we say, but how we say it.
Many phrases we use in daily life mean completely different things depending on our verbal delivery. The same goes for writing. Using the right tone enhances engagement, persuasiveness, and the impact of your message.
That said, maintaining a compelling tone in internal business communications is difficult and completely reliant on consistency. If your reasoning is communicated in a text-heavy format, there’s a good chance it could lead to misunderstandings down the line.
Loom conducted a study of 3,000 surveyed knowledge workers and found that 97% felt that they needed some extra way of clarifying tone in digital communications.
That means it’s always best to read out what you’re about to send before you send it. Make sure you convey the appropriate personality for your message and your audience to prevent responses like apathy, anger, fear, confusion, or other unintended emotions. Don’t leave your audience waiting for clarity.
Mistake #3: The format is ineffective
Change management is more likely to be adopted at scale when your teams can quickly grasp the message and then be able to turn around and explain it to others. The format of your message plays a key role in how quickly audiences comprehend information and how easily they can refer to it.
For example, written communication, such as a Confluence page, is usually better for conveying higher volumes of information when readers need to revisit it at their own pace. However, video communication, such as a Loom, may be better for demonstrating step-by-step instructions that require a combination of audio and visual assistance.
Modern life has led to a short-term memory problem for all of us. As people in a world with fast-moving, high volumes of information, we only remember a small amount of what we hear, read, or watch a couple of weeks later. With Loom you offer your teams a multi-media resource that will be more accessible across learning styles and workflows.
Make better connections with text and video together
A study by the Journal of Computing in Higher Education found that its research participants were more likely to remember information delivered through a combination of video and text over text alone. The study found that the audio-visual experience of video helped audiences develop a stronger emotional connection to the content, resulting in higher levels of engagement.
Loom for change management
If you’re not yet familiar with Loom, it’s a video tool that allows teams to communicate clearly asynchronously, significantly reducing the need to pull teams away from their work for lower-value meetings. If a live meeting is needed, discussions are more effective by preemptively offering deeper context to the matter at hand through a bite-sized Loom presentation.
With Loom, you can record and present everything happening on your screen while also offering a visual presentation so that your audience can see your face, mitigating any lack of clarity in tone. This allows you to present information while also connecting emotionally with your audience.
Establishing a single source of truth can be difficult between Slack channels, knowledge hubs, and other types of communication. When multiple contributors are working on a plan or a process, only so much can be handled through text-based forms of communication before needing to hop on a call for clarification.
By crafting a Loom presentation of a change management document, you can bypass the misunderstandings and meetings needed to clarify it. Effective change management requires early and frequent communication, and this is where Loom excels.
The collaborative nature of Loom allows the audience to respond with their own Looms or to comment on a specific time stamp of the video. This prevents having to create additional disruptive meetings.
Loom AI’s capabilities
Loom’s AI suite hosts tools to speed up and simplify your change management process. These solutions allow you to craft and edit Looms easily and even turn them into documentation.
Here are just a few of Loom’s AI capabilities:
Auto Message Composer
With Auto Message Composer, Loom’s AI capabilities can write a message, a document, or an automatically crafted Jira issue tailored to the tone of your presentation. There is even an option for turning your Loom into an SOP, seriously accelerating your change management process.
Auto summaries
Do you need a quick text-based summary after watching a Loom? The auto summaries feature provides a clear and concise summary of the discussion displayed in the description box below the video.
Auto chapters
This feature automatically generates chapters based on the topics discussed in the video. The chapters break the video into sections so viewers can navigate easily.
Auto tasks
These identify action items discussed in a Loom and provide suggested tasks that you can either accept or decline for your viewers to see.
Filler word removal
Filter out filler words such as “um” and “uh” automatically from your video’s audio and transcript so you can sound more polished.
Meeting notes (now in beta)
Connect your calendar to Loom AI and get instant meeting recordings and transcriptions. Now you can focus on the conversation instead of taking notes. And — coming soon — automatic meeting notes pages in Confluence.
Silence removal
Trim extended moments of silence are automatically from your video and save a massive amount of time editing.
Note: Loom’s AI Suite is a paid add-on for Business and Enterprise plans
Scale knowledge effectively
By using Loom, you can easily make change management much more seamless. Whether you’re in engineering, sales, HR, support, or even education, there are Loom use cases for nearly every aspect of an organization.
With more than 25 million users across 400,000 companies, Loom is opening the door for scaling knowledge and leading change management in an era of ever-accelerated work.
Check out our webinar, “Unlock the Power of Loom for Leadership Teams” and learn how executives and managers use Loom to enhance leadership visibility, drive organizational alignment, and foster transparency.