LEAP Listens
LEAP Listens is a bitesize podcast hosted by Sara MacGregor and Roger Cayless who are both leaders in Employer Branding, Candidate Experience and Recruitment Marketing. In this ongoing series of podcasts they tackle client and industry themes and along the way host expert guests who provide opinion, stories and advice on the world of ‘people communications’.
LEAP Listens
The human side of organisational change with Rachel Tolhurst
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In this episode of LEAP Listens, Sara and Roger are joined by internal communications and change specialist Rachel Tolhurst to explore why empathy should sit at the heart of organisational change. Drawing on more than 30 years of experience, Rachel shares practical lessons from leading change programmes across a range of organisations, explaining why understanding employees' emotions is just as important as delivering the message.
From mergers and redundancies to AI adoption, Rachel shares real examples of how organisations can handle difficult conversations with honesty, dignity and trust, helping employees feel informed, respected and supported through change
LEAP Listens is brought to you by LEAP Create, an award-winning people communications agency. Find out more at leapcreate.co.uk
Welcome And Why Change Hurts
SPEAKER_02Hello and welcome to Leap Listens, the People Communications podcast from Leap Create. I'm Sarah, and with me is Roger, our Creative Director. Hello. In this series, we're talking to industry experts about workplace culture, employer branding, and how to communicate with the people that matter most, your candidates and employees. These are bite-sized episodes, short enough to get to the point and learn on the go. If you're new here, welcome. We're heading towards a hundred episodes, and you can find them all on our website, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. Hi Roger.
SPEAKER_00Hello, Sarah. How are you?
SPEAKER_02I'm very good. Very enthusiastic today.
SPEAKER_00Excellent. I am. I'm enthusiastic because I'm excited about what we're going to do now. What are we going to do now?
SPEAKER_02We're going to be talking about change, behavior change, and how some people are very resistant to it. And it's a very hard job, isn't it, for um particularly internal comms teams to manage this correctly and managing people's emotions as well when it comes to things like redundancy, team changes, but even like small things as well. People don't like changing their desk, for example. So we're going to be talking about managing people's emotions.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And um, you know, as the old joke goes, um how many designers does it take to change a light bulb? I'm not changing anything.
SPEAKER_02There you go. Boom boom.
SPEAKER_00Boom boom. Boom Tish.
SPEAKER_02I have to say, I like your uh LinkedIn posts recently, Roger.
SPEAKER_00Oh, thank you, Sarah. Thank you. Well, I'm gonna um I I just sort of decided to take a different approach which felt a bit more me.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, very good.
SPEAKER_00And I can't compete, I can't compete with with your videos which are all super professional and polished.
SPEAKER_02Thank you.
SPEAKER_00Right, should we crack should we crack on?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, let's do it. So we're gonna be talking to Rachel today. Rachel has over 30 years experience in internal communication across many organizations, and she's now self-employed, working on change projects, hosting roundtables and mentoring, and her experience spans change management, employee listening and measurement. And what drives her is empathy and dignity and how we communicate during those difficult moments. So, yeah, let's let's jump in. Welcome,
Meeting Rachel And Empathy First Change
SPEAKER_02Rachel, to the podcast.
SPEAKER_03Thank you so much. It's such a delight to be here after listening to lots of your podcast episodes on my walkies around the Stroud Valley area.
SPEAKER_02So, Rachel, tell us a little bit more about you.
SPEAKER_03Thank you. Yes. Um well I've worked in the internal com space for 30 years now across many industries and agency, and I absolutely love the variety that this role gives us because we don't have to stick to one particular sector, and I love that sort of freedom and the variety that we get. I've worked obviously on an awful lot of change communications, and I like to take and talk about taking a people or rather an empathy first approach to change because I think that's all what it needs to be about is putting ourselves in other people's shoes, and I'm really looking forward to digging into that with you.
SPEAKER_02So, yeah, today we're going to be talking about um how some people don't welcome change. Um, that's just the reality, and I know that you've learned um a lot about this, Rachel, and got a lot of experience. So let's just start, shall we, with um the honest bit that most people don't welcome change, but what you've seen in organizations and how you handle that, there's been different ways. So, what's the difference between the ones that get it and the ones that are on board to the ones that just don't?
Engagement Data And Change Readiness
SPEAKER_03Yeah, well, I think there's a really broad spectrum of reactions to change. You know, we're all we're all different. There are people like me who actually find change quite energizing and exciting to people who feel deeply unsettled, even if you're just suggesting their desks move, their desk moves to a different position, you know, and that's fine. Um, yeah, I think when we first spoke, I did say loads of people just don't want to change at all. And I'm not just a cynic, I think there's a lot of data to back this up. So, for example, Gartner found that employees' willingness to support enterprise change dropped from 74% in 2016 to just 43% in 2022, a period when the average employee went from experiencing two plan changes a year to 10. I mean, I'd be tempted to say it's more, but we all I think can agree that it definitely increased. Um, I think there are also different types of engagement. So when I worked for a large engineering firm that was a major supplier to government, um, I managed the employee engagement surveying there as I have for most companies that I've worked for, and we did a special project with Kingston University Business School. Um, because I said, and I think a lot of companies will find this, your engagement stats, and I think Howard at Craze might have a comment on this as well. Your engagement stats might be in the 70s, and you think, yeah, we're doing okay, that reports well. But when you read the comments, you think, Oh, maybe not so well. And this matters in change, and what essentially the bottom line was that we found was that people there's a difference between being emotionally engaged with the organization and transactionally engaged, as in you love your job, so you have a specialist role, you will always work in that role, be it finance, highways, rail, aviation. You love the work that you do, but you especially for organizations where people who've experienced a lot of choopy situations, it's just another jacket, and you're the company that's trying to make them do things right now, but another one will come along, and that's their attitude, especially once they've cheopied a few times, they can lose that emotional engagement. And yes, they will still do a good job and probably still be quite good to the public and the people and the customers that they work with, but when you're trying to get their attention for change, it can be a lot harder, and they're not necessarily listening. Um, one lovely method I learned at the Civil Aviation Authority was to do change readiness interviews so that identifies people's concerns but also solutions to change. It doesn't mean if everyone disagrees with it's not going to happen, but actually trying your hardest to understand how people could adapt to the change that's coming will make uh your communications and your change plans much more likely to succeed. And I just think that having a listening approach for understanding where people actually are before you design your communication plan is absolutely essential. So I know not everybody feels that the surveying and engagement stuff sits in internal comms. I often really like it when it does because then you're really close to the data and understanding your audiences better.
SPEAKER_00I yeah, so that's that's uh really a lot of great insight there. I don't necessarily agree with the sort of universal truth that people don't like change because I think people cite wanting to change as a reason to leave something or wanted to do something different, but also it depends on the change, doesn't it? If you're currently deeply unhappy and something is going to change for the better, then that's a a good thing, isn't it? So it it it it's kind of uncertainty I think people don't like more than that.
SPEAKER_03Yes, I agree actually. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right, and I guess the stats for from sort of Gartner that I quote, for example, and I guess a lot of the company change the internal communicators are involved with, let's face it, is isn't always positive or it's disruptive and so therefore can feel negative for a period of time until things settle. So, yes, I think you're absolutely right. And I think a lot of people don't like change. I don't think nobody likes change, but certainly I do.
SPEAKER_02So yeah, so Rachel, I agree with that. I've got a brilliant story about a financial services merger where you basically said to the leadership, tell the employees first. So walk us through what happened and and why you pushed for that.
The Toothbrush Rule For Mergers
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I I mean I think it's about the empathy thing, and I always try and imagine what are we going, what's going to happen to these people the day they hear this news that might scare them, might be a bit scary. And this is an example I call toothbrush, so I remember it if I'm prepping for an interview or something. So the context is I worked on a merger for a financial two financial services organisation, and there was understandable pressure to make the public announcement at a specific time of day due to the stock exchange requirements, which would have been before most of them had woken up in the morning. And my concern was with over 20,000 employees across two organisations, many of whom could eyeball each other across the high street in the opposing branches, so therefore there would be an understandable feeling of threat and fear between them. If they heard while they're brushing their teeth in the morning, getting ready for work, or hear it on the bus, they would arrive unsettled with no information and no preparation to face a queue of anxious customers at the door. Because in those days, if you remember savings passbooks, people would queue up and they'd want their passbook updated, and they'd have like I don't know 12 years worth of pages that you know the dot matrix printer updating it, and it would cause pandemonium, and the people just wouldn't if they wouldn't feel in a good position and they'd be worried about themselves, and they actually wouldn't have any answers either. So my recommendation was to delay the external announcement slightly to pre-warn branch managers under embargo to allow them to open half an hour late, put a sign on the window to say we were having staff training, to enable some briefing of staff and QA's that they could use with customers. The branch managers overnight didn't know what the announcement was, but at least we were able to show that we respected people enough to try our hardest to tell them first. Um, one of the directors promised me he would find a typo and so it wouldn't go to stock exchange till 9 a.m.
SPEAKER_02So did you have any other pushback other than I mean, obviously that was a very kind thing for him to do to enable that to happen. But did you have any other pushback from other leadership?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it was the whole C-suite to be honest, because absolutely we must stick to stock exchange rules. But actually, if our contract wasn't signed and ready until 9, it was appropriate within the rules to announce it then. We didn't we weren't a listed company ourselves, so we didn't have to, you know, there weren't shareholders to be concerned about. So in that instance, so people were saying no, and they just thought I was trying to be, you know, do the do the fluffy stuff. But when I told the story, and this is where I talk about coming at empathy, tell them a little story so they have a little film of visual running in their head, they can actually realize if you arrive at work in that state, it's not going to go well, and your customers won't like it, and the press can say about how negative it was, and no one knew what was what to say. So it's and and it's not just me trying to influence, it's genuinely me trying to make it a better experience for the employees. But we should always be thinking about what's the impact on the wider business, and that would be on customer satisfaction, customer service, and potentially sort of reputation and and media. And I think the the bottom line for me is even when there is terrible pressure, or terrible pressure, a lot of pressure to do something to a certain time or in a certain way, there can sometimes be just a tiny way to find out that you could pay tell your people first, and the cost of not doing so in terms of trust and loyalty, I think, is far higher than the inconvenience of a little delay.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that's really good advice, and obviously appreciate that there was legal reasons around that, but I guess in a lot of organisations they're often trying to foster a sense of togetherness and things being non-hierarchical, and I suppose nothing's gonna kind of sever that quicker than that idea that you're the last to hear about some major announcement.
SPEAKER_03Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02And once you'd done it that way, Rachel, what was the what was different about how people experienced that?
SPEAKER_03Obviously the news was still big and impactful, and some branches did close because you wouldn't want two branches of the same brand facing each other on the high street. So the change was still difficult, but I think it helps with people feeling respected and valued that you were honest and upfront with them, and I think that helps with loyalty and trust. I think it's really important. It's clearly still difficult, but at least it means you you still have their you still have them at the beginning, you haven't lost them immediately by just not bothering to tell them at all. It's how they would see it.
SPEAKER_00Did you consider consider doing any A-B testing where you did tell some branches or didn't tell others? Well that that would give you the that would give you the case study data for the answer to Sarah's question.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, not wanting to break the embargo, uh, that's not something I was prepared to risk. I don't think I could have pushed it that far. But nice idea.
Dignity When Delivering Hard News
SPEAKER_02So um what does so we talk about like dignity say in in difficult moments? Um what does dignity actually look like when you're delivering like really difficult news, like redundancy, closure, that kind of thing?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, there's a couple of really short stories I want to share, share here in terms of ways that I've done this, and it is about that telling people first, but also really showing you thought through their experience. So I one change was um in financial services, a wholly owned subsidiary that had been homegrown and loved and nurtured for a long period of time, it was successful, um, was about to be sold. So they would obviously feel quite rejected. Now, at the time, I don't know if you remember this, we've gone through lots of phases of things. If you had a team important meeting or off-site, you'd travel to a hotel, say, and you'd be in a different space and you'd be away from the office. Isn't it good to be away from the office to talk? And in that situation, the C-suite was pushing for this, and I just thought, oh, that sounds awful. And I said, Look, the moment someone says to you, we need to talk, whether it's your friend, your parents, your partner, your boss, you're like, oh my god, and you want to know now. Yeah, you don't, there's nothing else you can think of. And I told them again a story of imagine this, and they're worried, and then they get their coats and they don't know who to put their phone through to, and then they queue outside, they all get on the bus, and then they get stuck in traffic, and then they finally get there and they have a cup of tea, and an hour later you tell them the news they were worried about, and then they're upset, and then they're trapped at this location, and they actually just want to go home, or some might want to go to the pub, some might want to work, but they want that they want to be treated like adults, and we need to show empathy for the fact that they want to make their own choice at the end of it, and they put just you know, from the moment of we need to tell you something, we need to talk, it really should only be a few minutes. And I persuaded them that even though the building had four floors, we lined up a C-suite director and a union rep and HR on each floor. They said there's going to be an announcement in five minutes. We've agreed for the call centre to take your phone number to take your calls, put your phones through to this number in five minutes. I'll brief you right here, right now, and that's what we did. And they were all told in person simultaneously across the four floors. There was no shuffling people about or leaving them, and then they were allowed to do what they wished once that announcement had happened, so they could go home. Some went home, some went to the pub, but it was respected that they showed that we'd really thought through how it would impact them. And I do think that makes a massive difference.
SPEAKER_00I can couldn't agree more with that. I think um that story particularly resonated with me because I remember when I was about 18, I worked in Safeway and I fancied this girl called Charlotte, and I asked her out, and she said, I'll tell you in two weeks' time. It might have been a week, yeah. So I had to wait for a whole week. That's a long time when you're that age as well for her to come back and say I've thought about it and no. Um and I'd I'd really rather have that she had just said no uh at the time. So no, I think that that uh very much resonates and is actually a little bit triggering. Oh sorry. What did you do? Go to the pub, go home. Embarrass myself and try it again, you know, a couple of weeks later. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Like that, you know, tenacity. Um, another would be a very short example, another would be um work for an organization that had very high number of frontline workers, and they won work, you know, through government contracts, so you would then have rebids as well, and this rebid was coming. And on the one hand, you want your current company employer to stay because it's who you know, and then the other hand, maybe the new ones would be nicer, but on the other hand, there'd be changes regarding, like it's very unsettling for people, and we committed to just again. This was the almost the opposite. So everyone was out, so just a few office workers, and everyone was out in the lorries, doing their day jobs, doing the physical jobs, and we promised as soon as we had the answer, we would call them to their locust, excuse me, their nearest, that's localist, local and nearest depot. Um, we would call them to the nearest depot where senior manager and HR rep would be waiting to tell them what happened and handle the QA's, no matter what had happened, um, because it was a difficult transition, so it's kind of the opposite, but it's the same again, and people say they did say, I really appreciate that you trying so hard to tell us first because gossip spreads and people people respect that. Not a labeling support, but I just I really think it's so important. It's not just well, we sent them QA's and you know they all we read from a script to tell them the news. No, like we treated them like humans because yeah, they all they that's all we all are.
SPEAKER_02Because you hear some horror stories, don't you? Oh, yeah, of some companies that deliver you know news particularly of redundancy that you just think, goodness, like who's making these decisions? So, Rachel, if you were to do this again, or you're giving advice to somebody that had to sort of deliver some um some news that's um not gonna be you know uh taken particularly well, what what what advice would you give?
Practical Steps For Better Change Comms
SPEAKER_03Gather as much information, sort of data, anecdotal that you possibly can about your audiences, so have some audience segmentation or personas, like know who they are, know where they are in their working day, like my different examples, or they were in a branch and they'd have customers coming in, or they'd be out on the road, or they'd be in the office but constantly on the phone, etc. Really understand how they work and how their day is, as well as the types of history that they have, the things that they feel, the things that have happened to them, and just understand as much as you can, and then really try to think through like me telling those stories of those people's days, work that through, like what's what is going to be their experience of that day, and really think it through, not just you know, we we woke up to the announcement often, but we don't necessarily think so much, but we're like, Oh, we'll deal with the other bit afterwards, but actually do plan that too, and try to think about how you could mitigate things going wrong or things being misinterpreted, you know, difficult change is always going to be difficult, but I think that listening and understanding of who people are and what they need and what they're going to experience, and demonstrating that you've tried to meet them where they are, both physically and emotionally, I think is really important.
SPEAKER_00So, are we coming to the end
AI Adoption As Behaviour Change
SPEAKER_00of our time? I do have just one quick question, and um it's obviously mandatory for all conversations to mention AI. Um, so we've reached that bit. And just thinking about how um AI is not just detecting but a behavioural, cultural change. So have you got any advice for how people should deal with that?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, definitely have some stats again as well, because I'm a bit of a geek. Um, yeah, AI in some organisations is being rolled out just as tech, but that won't necessarily work because it's a change to ways of working, isn't it? So, you know, organisations across every sector, there's from Gartner Digital Workplace last year. Uh something that really struck me was they said that from their research, almost every organization said, Yeah, yeah, we're implementing AI. Only about 20% of them knew why or had a reason why that they could actually articulate to staff and customers, which is so important, and also that fewer than 20% had any governance around it, so they predict a lot of data breaches and issues for security around AI as well. So there's a lot of future risk, and organisations that just switch the tech on without guardrails, without thinking about those safety aspects, without Actually involving people will often struggle. So there was research also in 2025 that surveyed two and a half thousand workers across the US, UK, and Europe, and they found that 31% of them admitted to actively sabotaging their employers' AI strategy. And among them, the Gen Z workers were for that that figure rose to 44%, which I can understand because I think there is a real concern around early careers and jobs, you know, because those of us who are more experienced can use AI to do things that a junior person may have may have done. But we need to think about again, think about the consequences of not getting it right. I think would be in addition to what I'd say to my earlier answer and try and understand every everything and try and mitigate, but also try and mitigate some of those risks that where it could really go wrong. And I think there's an opportunity for IC practitioners not to own AR implementation on our own, because I don't feel that's right either. But we should work with key stakeholders, particularly sort of HR security and IT, on this change to how we are as an organization and make sure there's a really clear and honest reason why we're implementing it. That can be difficult, especially if the efficiency conversation comes in there. But if you have no reason why, they're going to assume that's what it is and they might sabotage. So it's a really tricky one. It's fascinating. So many conversations about this, but it's really tricky to get right, and I think we're going to hear loads more examples as, or just as the year goes on, as everything's happening so quickly about whether things are going well or not. Um, I suppose the bottom line is there are quite a lot of reports about how AI implementation isn't giving return on investment for organisations as well. So will it stop or will they just start slicing out swathes of people to try and prove that it saves them money? I who knows, but I'll be really interested to find out.
SPEAKER_02Great. Well, thank you, Rachel. It's been um yeah, really interesting, and also to share your experiences as well. I think that's been really sort of beneficial to the conversation.
SPEAKER_03Thank you so much for the opportunity. I've really enjoyed
Recommendations And Final Takeaways
SPEAKER_03it.
SPEAKER_00Well, it's that time, isn't it? So it's that time where we ask if you have any interesting reads or listens that you would like to recommend.
SPEAKER_03I absolutely do. I've recommended this book and podcast for a number of years now. It helped me at a time when I needed it. Um, it's a book called Untamed by a lady called Glenn Doyle. And essentially it is around how we often feel that we're somehow caged by things that we've been told about behaving a certain way or not causing a fuss, or and actually often the things that hold us back is just ourselves because we somehow fear that we would be told off or in trouble, but actually we want to make a change. So I feel it's quite appropriate book for this conversation. And she also has a podcast uh called We Can Do Hard Things, which and it's all about I think being brave, but also realizing the things that we think we're not allowed to do, we often are. So that could be change, you know, change your job, move your house, um, be brave, learn AI, whatever it is. And I think learning to feel more free and brave is a wonderful thing for everybody, both in work and personally.
SPEAKER_00That sounds brilliant. Uh Sarah's there thinking Roger needs the book that is that's the opposite of that, which is to think things that he thinks he's allowed to do, he's he's not. Great. No, that's brilliant.
SPEAKER_02Great, no, that is good. Definitely one for the for the reading.
SPEAKER_00Thank you very much, Rachel. Really nice to talk to you.
SPEAKER_03And to you, thank you. It's been a pleasure.
SPEAKER_00Well, that was an interesting chat with Rachel.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely, very good.
SPEAKER_00I don't know what you got from it, but I thought that she actually made some really interesting points, especially the stuff around telling people sooner, you know, not making making people wait for some announcement, so they've just got more time to to worry. I thought that was a really good point. Yeah. Um, and this I guess it's just that putting yourself in other people's shoes, isn't it? Really? It's that empathy, dignity, and then things around the the kind of unintended consequences of what you might be doing. So I think in a head, which I thought was all you know just sensible advice really for for life and work.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, absolutely. And and also considering the different personas and just doing some scenario planning, isn't it? It's just like how would they act and what can we do to support them in those moments and um sort of really going into the detail of that before you do anything. So I thought that was really good advice.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. And um, do I need to say something about subscribe to the podcasts? Thanks for listening.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, all of that, Roger.
SPEAKER_00Subscribe um on all good platforms, and thanks for listening.
SPEAKER_02Wonderful. All right, until the next time. Bye. Goodbye.