How Do OCM Consultants Create a Digital Brand Experience

Organizational change management consultants are in the people business. Our work is built upon personal relationships. So what happens when our playing field moves from “up close and personal” to screens-from-a-far? How will our customers and stakeholders experience us in the digital world? How do we continue to create a branded experience as a consultant in the digital age and what changes do we need to make to create a digital practice? 

The Digital Challenge 

In a recent discussion with the lead of an internal organizational change management team, I asked him how his practice had fared in the last year. He said, “We’re doing fine. My team is billable, however, people are just not reaching out to us as much.” If we can no longer be with our customers and stakeholders, how do we create a digital brand experience so that we can future proof our customer relationships? 

A digital brand experience is what customers see, think, hear, and feel about your online presence. It is the impression people have of you based on past images, experiences, memories, and stories. 

The big consulting firms have it in spades. They have teams, resources, and money dedicated to building their digital experience. Data gathering sessions may become no longer useful as they develop online pre-meeting diagnostics, flashy and glitzy enough to draw in customers and create an experience of their own. These firms may move away from mass hiring of recent college graduates as they further develop their digital toolbox, which is cheaper, easier, and will travel better. Their ability to deliver a moderated online event with pre-configured technology versus our agility to adeptly leverage Zoom and Mural will feel stepwise different. The sophistication of their tools will be better than ours, along with their perceived expertise and credibility.   

The Digital OCM Experience 

If your customers don’t experience you as being cutting edge or at least on par and up to date, your work may suffer and your ability to get your next job suffers. We once got in a room and facilitated our customers; now we, as independent consultants and small consulting practices, need to intentionally develop our digital experience. How digital will we be able to get? Relative to the big guys, the development of the digital experience that we are able to offer may be incremental. However, no matter our size or budget, there are some digital Dos and Don’ts as well as hurdles that we should anticipate and plan for.   

1. Leverage Asynchronous Time To Maximize Synchronous Time 

Customer experience is everything. Plan ahead and leverage the digital tools that you do have to maximize the heck out of the value of the synchronous time you spend with your customers. With so many people working remotely, Zoom fatigue is real, and people lose the ability to focus and won’t tolerate extended meetings. What used to be a 90-minute, face-to-face focus group, should now be a carefully pre-planned, pre-packaged event whereby an informational video and questionnaire are sent out to stakeholders and responses are consolidated ahead of time (asynchronously), and the meeting time (synchronous) is used to facilitate a tightly focused discussion about key findings and action items. 

We may not be high tech, but we can get organized and pre-planned as possible, and creatively leverage the digital tools at our disposal to move the ball forward without combined time with our customers and stakeholders. As a bias towards high tech increases, we don’t want to be perceived as the consultant that throws another Zoom meeting on the calendar. We have to approach our work differently, move what work we can offline and out of the meeting world, and add value to it. We need to be mindful of our customer’s experience of working with us as a consultant and develop as much digital sophistication as we can. 

 2. Be Intentional  

Time is rarer and more valuable than ever. Time spent with your client should be treated as critical path on the project. As organizational change management consultants, there are activities that we have traditionally done with an assumed group of people in the room. We must challenge ourselves to think about how we can do these activities differently.  

Our change activities must be well-engineered. There is a richness to getting people together in a room that is challenged as we move offline: the facial expressions, body language, and our ability to listen to and interpret these things. When leveraging asynchronous activities, we need to ensure the richness of that experience; we need engineer what goes out to people so that in isolation they can respond to it in a way that still provides the same quality of input as we would traditionally receive through facilitated dialogue. 

Our change activities must be compelling. We may need to reshape how we execute our organizational change management approach. We need to identify and prioritize those elements that are high value, where our clients will enjoy the experience, and give those activities synchronous treatment. There may be other elements, that while still valuable are less value added, that should be given asynchronous treatment or possibly eliminated. 

3. Anticipate Digital Resistance 

In a digital world, our ability to drive consensus, to influence one another, is not as easily predictable as it was before. Studies show that people who are geographically separated and only connected electronically, tend to stay divergent in opinion, especially among peers and cross-functional teams. People have a feeling of anonymity when not face to face and are more apt to fire off an email or blast a text. In an electronic environment people feel less pressure to move versus a face to face environment where interpersonal influence increases cooperation. 

As change practitioners, we need to be aware of digital resistance and perhaps shape our activities accordingly. There can be value in disagreement and some change processes benefit from divergence. For example, a stakeholder impact analysis benefits from comprehensive and diverse viewpoints and could be effectively conducted in an asynchronous manner. However, when there is a need to move to consensus there is a dramatic advantage to doing so synchronously. This will require us to be more planful when we need to help people meet in the middle or somewhere in-between.    

In Closing 

Will we remain in the digital world forever? Is this remote world the end of the organizational change management consultant as we know it? 

A CEO of an energy supermajor once said that there have been very few changes in oil and gas over the last 100 years. Was he being silly? “No,” he continued, “we still drill for oil, put it in a tank, transport, refine, ship, and sell it. That’s what we do. Technology has enabled our process, but the process itself has not changed.” 

Again, organizational change management consultants are in the people business. People have not really changed a whole lot, but our tools have. It is worthwhile for us to take time to pause and think about how we can make our organizational change management strategies engaging and successful in the digital world. We spend our time helping others adapt and adopt, now it’s time for us to adapt. That always feels a bit different!   

Contact ChangeStaffing to learn how our organizational change management consultants can support your organization’s digital journey.  

A special thanks to Scott Owen, progressive and solutions-focused architect of enterprises, organizational designs, talent management systems, leadership development programs, change management, executive coaching, and learning solutions, for his thought leadership and for collaborating with us on this blog.