Mel: [00:00:00] Hello again, friend, and welcome to the fifth and final episode of this five part series on all things people change. My name is Mel Loy and I'm recording this on the lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal people here in Meanjin, Brisbane, where today it is a balmy 38 degree Celsius.

Now in this series that we've been exploring some of the typical people related changes that we see in organisations all over the world, and I've been sharing with you some ideas and best practice tips when it comes to your change communication. And today we're ending the series with one of the biggest drivers of change in the past decade. New technologies.

That's everything from new hardware, like smaller and fast smartphones and personal devices through to new programs and software, and of course, AI enhanced tools. Now according to a McKinsey report, over the next three years, 92% of companies plan to increase their AI investments, and according to Gartner, [00:01:00] globally, IT spending is expected to exceed 6.08 trillion US dollars this year.

That's an insane amount, and it's also almost a 10% increase on last year. AI spending specifically is forecast to hit $2.52 trillion this year, which is 44% increase year on year. And as of early this year, 2026, 72% of companies worldwide have integrated AI into at least one business function. So that's ai.

But then we also have the new, replacing the old, and I'm sure you've all experienced situations where legacy systems are being retired in favour of new enterprise systems, like a new HR system or a new accounting system. And there's a reason why companies do that. Beyond these new systems being more user friendly, it's the bottom line.

The average cost to maintain a single large scale legacy system is [00:02:00] approximately $30 million. With global businesses spending about 1.14 trillion US dollars annually just to keep the lights on with existing IT systems. And this technology change is of course driving skills change. It is in effect human change when we talk about technology change, and by 2030, apparently about 70% of the skills used in most jobs will change.

That's in the next four years, and AI is the catalyst that's driving that change. The World Economic Forum for it was the 2025 Future of Jobs report. It's a slightly more conservative metric. It comes down to how everybody categorises skills and jobs, but they still think that up to 44% of core skills will change within the next five years.

The other thing that is coming along with this technology change is that the speed of change has become much faster. So we're not just seeing. [00:03:00] Uh, change in technology. We're seeing it being done much faster. Uh, some reports from EY and Gartner, uh, they say that while the years of 2024-2025 are about piloting ai, 58% of leaders now think that AI will be their major growth catalyst within the next.

Two years. We're also seeing a shift towards agentic organisations. So 46% of leaders, according to some reports, are using AI agents to fully automate complex word workflows. Uh, and also Gartner predicts that by 2030 80% of organisations will have replaced those large traditional engineering teams that keep these lights on with smaller, AI augmented, nimble teams, so allowing for software development to proceed at pace that we've never seen before. But there's also this thing called the Readiness Paradox, which essentially is, while 81% of employees feel confident that they can keep up with the [00:04:00] technology, 73% of those same employees, so almost three quarters of the workforce, say they have moderate to high stress levels due to change fatigue.

And it's something we've talked about on this show before. And people are not in the dark about this. 61% of employees expect that their jobs will change significantly this year. Although only about half of those employees feel like their people, their organisations are actually providing the training that's necessary to manage the change, which of course is interesting.

So as change managers and change communicators, project managers, team leaders. We really have to up our skills here and up our attention to manage the significant level of technology-driven change in organisations. So on today's podcast, I'm going to share four tips for how you can use communication as part of the change management mix to help drive adoption of new technologies in your organisation.

So again, this isn't about all the other parts of change management, like [00:05:00] training and leadership and governance and all those things. This is purely taking the communication component of change. And the first step is to understand the baseline, not just a digital capability, but also digital confidence.

So being able to use the tools is one thing. Wanting to use them. Feeling safe and confident to use them is quite another. Now, you might be lucky enough to work in a much smaller organisation that has a really ingrained culture of adaptability in a workforce that's really tech savvy. But the reality for most of us is the complete opposite of that.

And you will have a huge spectrum of levels of understanding and confidence in your workforce. You'll have people who are all over the latest technology. They're already built their own AI agents. You know, they, they're loving it, but then you've got people who just don't even trust online banking still. It is a huge spectrum.

So the first thing you need to do. [00:06:00] Is listen. Ask people how they feel about this AI or this new technology or whatever it is. Get to know what they're excited about, what they already know, what they don't know, what they're worried about. And then it's about addressing those worries and amplifying the excitement.

Now of course, you will likely have people running training in the new technology, and hopefully they will take a very personalised approach to that. Rather than a one size fits all, they can, you know, more light touch for the savvy people. A lot more in depth for the people who need the confidence. But before you can even get to training, one of the ways that we can build confidence through communication is reminding our audiences of similar situations that they've encountered before and how they tackled them.

So for example, maybe it's something like, remember when we implemented that new accounting system last year? Yeah, it was a bit rocky to start with, but now you're all using it seamlessly. This is just like that. You've done this before. You could also have some general information and Q and A sessions [00:07:00] before you get to training or implementation.

So people can join in, they can find out more about what's changing and why and what to expect, et cetera. But they've got an opportunity to also have their questions answered. And again, it's about building confidence. Confidence doesn't just arrive on your doorstep overnight. It's usually built in little chunks, and that's what we need to do here.

Little chunks of communication that help to build confidence. The other thing to think about here is to avoid applying or assuming generational biases. I've heard it before where we, you know, people think that Gen Z or millennials are just gonna pick up this new piece of technology much more quickly than Gen Z or boomers.

But the reality is that. Those older generations are much more used to change. They've seen it all like from the first internet browsers to faxes being replaced by emails. Um, computers replacing typewriters, smartphones, replacing the first mobile phones, mobile phones, replacing desk phones. They've seen it [00:08:00] all.

And if you assume that certain cohorts of your audience are going to be more adaptable to the change than others, then you are already setting yourself up to fail. So instead provide different levels of training and information that people can self-select into, depending on where they are at. That way you're not risking, shining a spotlight on people who really won't appreciate it.

Okay. That's the first tip, is understand the baseline of confidence. The second tip is. When you talk about the benefits for users, not the business, and when talking about the why behind a change, not just technology change, but any change, it's pretty easy to go straight to business benefits because that's what the sponsors are looking at, right?

That is what's important to them. So, for example, this new technology will save us X millions of dollars a year. It will make processes more efficient, or the phrase I absolutely hate the most, it will help us deliver shareholder value. The reality is that Maryanne in the mail room doesn't [00:09:00] give two hoots about saving money, especially when she doesn't end up with any of that savings or delivering shareholder value, completely meaningless to her.

So the why needs to be centred around your audience, not the business. And it's even better if you can point back to some of the feedback or pain points that your people have raised that the technology helps to address. So, uh, for example, you told us that these three systems were really slow and clunky. So this new system is designed to replace those three and make it easier for you. You can also tap into the power of should in this scenario. So using that word strategically helps to highlight a gap that people may not have realised was there or had gotten used to, or it makes it feel heard, like, yes, we shouldn't have to do these things.

So for example, you could say you shouldn't have to use three systems to do one task. Now again, this taps into the fact that the change has been partly driven by your [00:10:00] audience. People do not like change when they feel it happens to them. I've said this before, but if they feel like it's driven by them in some way, or they're empowered to help control the change in some way, they're much more amenable to it.

Another way to talk about the benefits for users is using comparison, so really simply. In the past, you had to do X, Y, Z to manually generate this report. It took you 10 hours, whatever. Now all you need to do is blah, blah, blah. You could even show this in a really simple table if there's enough, um, of a difference to talk about.

So for example, on the left hand side of the table, you have an item, like three systems to do one task. On the right hand side, you'll just have just one system to do this task. In the left column could be a statement like... 10 minutes to generate one report and on the right 30 seconds to generate a report, you get the drift, I'm sure. And you can even then go further on from that and say, so that's gonna save you XX hours a [00:11:00] year spent on these things, which you could be spending on other things, whatever.

Now that said, do not oversell the benefits if they aren't genuine. And don't be afraid to talk about the things that aren't good or the impacts; people will have fears about introducing new technology, especially AI and the biggest fear of of course is: Will this AI tool take my job? It's about me. Now if that is the case, well that's a whole other episode.

In fact, go back and listen to the restructure episode we did a couple weeks ago. It's probably a good place to start. But fears can also be things like, what will happen to all the data I had in the old system? Will my personal information be safe in this new employee database, et cetera, et cetera. The listening that you should have done to prepare your comms should help to unearth some of the fears people have so you can help address them.

So that's number two. Focus on the benefits for your end users, the audience, not the business benefits. Tip number three, and I've spoken [00:12:00] about this in other people change scenarios previously, but it applies here more than anywhere, is co-create the change. Having a project manager come in and just start implementing a new system is unhelpful in both the short term and the long term.

If they design and implement something that doesn't actually help people or meet their very real needs, then it's going to be a very costly failure. So interviewing the end users and really understanding their roles and tasks is critical to the design of any system. It's basic user experience, but more so it is co-creation.

And we know that when people co-create a change, they are more likely to support it because they have skin in the game. So get your people involved at all stages of the project, and then this is the clincher. Get them to talk about it. This kind of testimonial is gold for social proof because of a couple of things.

Number one. Similarity bias, basically, we tend to listen and agree more with people who we think are like [00:13:00] us. So it could be that they're in a similar role or um, similar age, you know, those sorts of things. So if the person talking is a colleague or someone who does something similar, they will have more credibility with your audience.

Which also leads us to the messenger effect, which basically says that, who says a message is more important than the message itself. So using these people who've been involved in the co-creation to share messages can be super powerful. And also asking them for testimonials about how great the new system is to use.

Very powerful too, to this is social proof, which is basically that we are likely to follow the behaviours of others. So get people involved not only in co-creating the change, but get them to talk about it and then use their words in your comms to keep driving the change forward. The final tip is to use your communication alongside the actual technology itself to make it easy.

Now, this is about reducing the friction for people [00:14:00] between what they currently do and what you need them to do. In their book Nudge, which if you haven't read that, it's like a seminal work in behavioral science. So go read it. Nudge by Richard Taylor and Cass Sunstein. They talk about the concept of change architecture, which is basically.

Everything that's set up around a change that can either help enable it or create what they call sludge. That's the stuff you don't want, because if it's not easy to make a change, then people will not do it. It is easier for them to revert to their old ways of working, or they just find workarounds. Now as communicators, there's obviously only so much we can do here.

If the new tech or the system itself is super clunky and hard to use, no amount of comms is gonna fix that, my friend, but. Some of the things that are in our control that can at least help are things like providing easy access to relevant information in relevant places at relevant times. So for example, having QR codes on people's desks that [00:15:00] link directly to the help guides for the new system or...

Having a direct link from everyone's desktop to where the info is stored on the internet so they don't have to go searching for it. There is no point having information stored somewhere that people have to try and find it. Uh, you could also talk about, um, or include providing opportunities to join in information sessions where people can ask questions.

You could have these change champions on call ready to help their peers where they need, um, have the information in different formats to meet people's needs. So, for example, you might have visuals, you might have written instructions, video recordings, printed and digital information, et cetera, et cetera.

But as always, test your materials with your audiences. Find out if they're actually easy to use, easy to follow, easy to understand or not, and how they can be improved before you go and spend time mass producing them. If they find them complicated, filled with jargon, which happens a lot in technology, let's be honest [00:16:00] or hard to find and understand, you will know about it, you'll hear about it, and that kind of feedback, it not only makes us better communicators, but it also saves us a lot of time spent on reworking the materials later on.

Okay folks, that's our episode done. So it is time for your recap, and today I shared four tips on communicating about technology change. Tip number one was understand your baseline, not just people's technological capability, but also their confidence. It is likely that you'll have to tailor your comms to meet people along a very broad spectrum of confidence, and your comms will need to help build that confidence before people build capability.

Tip number two was to focus on the benefits for users, not for the business. Employees don't care if it saves the company money, if that means the co money doesn't go back to them in some way, and it's very unlikely that's ever gonna happen. So focus on what's in it for them. Number [00:17:00] three, get input from your audience, co-create the systems and the change comms pilot test, and use their voices to share the message.

It taps into that power of co-creation as well as the similarity bias, and messenger effect. And tip number four, make it easy. Like I said, there is only so much we can do if the new technology itself is hard to use, but there are ways that we can make it easier to find what people need or for people to find what they need when they need it.

All right, that was the last of our five part series on all things people change, and I hope you found that useful. And of course, please get in touch. Let me know what worked, what didn't. I'm all for feedback, and by the way, I do have a free little gift for you. If you head to our website, so cuttlefish.group and go to resources.

Under there you'll see freebies and we've added a new one, and these are help guides. Each one of these two page guides provides a summary of the key points that we've tackled, uh, [00:18:00] in some of our key episodes, as well as actions you can take right away. There's 27 of them so far and counting now when you sign up, you will get a new guide every fortnight delivered right to your inbox, and best of all, it's free, so it's just a nice little dopamine hit every fortnight.

The other piece of news to share is that from next week, we are heading into another new five part series on the podcast. And this time I'm co-hosting with the incredible Prina Sha, and we have focused on leadership communication. So if you are a leader, an aspiring leader, you know someone who is, or you're involved in supporting leaders, you do not want to miss this series, I promise you.

Now. In the meantime, if you haven't already, could you please do me a favour and rate and review the show? It means the world to me. It helps to spread the good news of good, effective communication even further. Alright, team. Until next week, keep doing amazing things and bye for now.