Two-way communication: why announcing change is not enough

Suppose a fashion chain with four shops and 28 staff in Can Tho changes its end-of-shift routine: from next week, every shift must count stock before handover. The manager posts the rule in the team Zalo group, asks "any questions?", and gets no reply. Two weeks later the stock figures are still off. Does silence mean people understood, and if not, what should the manager do besides repeat the notice? The chain and its numbers are hypothetical.

Does silence after an announcement mean people understood and agreed?

No. Silence shows only that nobody has spoken, not what each person understood. Lewis retells a study by Gallivan of a company reskilling its IT staff in the 1990s. Change managers pictured a partnership and a big shift in roles. IT managers and IT staff saw a technical update, done gradually. People who worked with IT saw a radical change delivered by outside consultants, and expected heavy lay-offs (Lewis, 2011, pp. 96–97). One programme, three readings.

Back at the fashion chain (hypothetical): "count stock before handover" could be heard as extra work at the busiest moment, as the manager suspecting staff of taking stock home, or as a rule for the evening shift only. Nobody has said so, which leaves the owner unable to tell which reading is in play.

How does two-way communication differ from an announcement?

An announcement pushes information out. Two-way communication has a route back, and someone changes what they do according to what comes back. The site's glossary defines two-way communication in change in just that way, and ties it to Lewis.

In the part of the book I read, Lewis does not use the phrase "two-way". Two of her strategy dimensions sit side by side: a focus on disseminating information and a focus on input (Lewis, 2011, p. 87). She also describes a loop in which implementers "monitor stakeholder interactions and make course corrections in their own communicative strategies" (Lewis, 2011, pp. 107–108). A caution comes with it: implementers may read the situation one way and stakeholders another (Lewis, 2011, p. 108). So ask directly rather than watch and guess.

What do three academic sources say about communication in change?

They differ in the kind of evidence: a theoretical book, a single author's discussion paper, a descriptive survey. What they share is that all three put the leader and the conversation inside the change process, not outside it.

Lewis (2011) is a book. According to the publisher, she draws together research from management, education, organisational sociology and communication (Lewis, 2011). In the chapter I read, she writes: "Not all stakeholder communication is reactionary" (Lewis, 2011, p. 105). Line supervisors, she says, can carry the vision down to front-line staff and carry front-line concerns up to decision-makers (Lewis, 2011, p. 102).

April (1999) writes in the setting of South Africa after apartheid. According to the abstract, dialogue and conversation are core processes for building organisational intelligence and community. Where trust is high, change is managed more effectively; where it is low, communication and co-operation suffer and people tend to fall back on power. The closing claim, by the abstract's own account, is the author's opinion: change is a phenomenon that occurs within conversation and dialogue (April, 1999).

Woodward and Hendry (2004) report two descriptive surveys in financial services institutions in the City of London, looking at change as led by top managers and as experienced by employees. They criticise change process models in the tradition of Lewin for tending to emphasise people as resisting change. Their finding: change leaders are themselves part of the process, and the judgmental and cognitive processes employees engage in, in their relationship with those leading change, carry great weight (Woodward and Hendry, 2004). The abstract does not use the word "communication". Linking it to announcements is my inference: if staff are judging the leader, how the leader speaks and listens is part of what gets judged. The related question of whether resistance is the employees' fault is taken up in the post on four theories of resistance to change.

How did the Junior League do two-way communication, and what came of it?

The Junior League asked first, replied, then let members design and test together. After a decade the result is partial, not complete. Di Mento describes the volunteer network as 292 leagues with 150,000 members in four countries. When Susan Danish became executive director in 2003, membership had fallen steadily for years, and the leadership was not sure which changes were needed (Di Mento, 2017).

The survey found satisfaction down since 1999 in three ways: volunteer work was less meaningful, leagues were run less well, and membership requirements were too inflexible, for example the hours members had to give (Di Mento, 2017). In my reading, each finding has an answer behind it, although the article does not lay them out that way. Leagues chose one problem in their own town and built a series of small projects around it, as a league in Phoenix did with childhood obesity. Leadership was spread within a league instead of coming only from the top. Members no longer have to give a fixed number of hours: previously a new baby or an ailing parent forced a resignation, and now they can give more or less time as their circumstances allow (Di Mento, 2017).

Ms Danish says the whole process has taken a decade and remains a work in progress. Just under 60 per cent of leagues have adopted the changes. She adds: "We're a federated model, and each league is its own 501(c)(3), so they can do these things or not" (Di Mento, 2017). She says members who once told the organisation they were ready to leave now say they will stay, and that years of involvement in design teams and brainstorming sessions were key (Di Mento, 2017).

The article gives no membership figures before and after, and no retention rate. "They will stay" is the executive director's word, not a measurement. So I use the Junior League as an example of a method, not as proof that two-way communication beats one-way. The site also has a short case page.

One difference is worth keeping in mind: in Ms Danish's words each league is its own organisation and may do these things or not, whereas an SME owner usually can give orders. In my inference, what two-way communication buys at an SME is different: information about where the work snags, not agreement.

What should an SME owner ask, whom should they ask, and how do they close the loop?

Ask about the work as it is before asking about the plan, ask the talkers and the people at the back of the room alike, then go back and say what changed because of the answers. The table below is a trial run for the hypothetical fashion chain.

Applied to the example: suppose two of the four shops answer that at the end of a busy shift nobody is free to count. The owner moves the count to the start of the next shift, then tells all four shops, adding "handover times stay as they are".

This fits if the decision still has room to move: timing, order, tools, how the count is done. It does not fit if every detail is fixed. Asking for views and then changing nothing is likely to teach people to stop answering (my inference, not a measurement). Saying plainly what will not change and why, and asking only about how, is the more honest choice. For the worry of being taken by surprise, see Kanter's ten reasons for resistance.

Going deeper: what did I read, and what did I not?

I read Di Mento's article (Chronicle of Philanthropy, 16 August 2017) in full: a news report built around Ms Danish's account, with no independent assessment. "Just under 60 per cent" is the figure at the time of publication; I do not know today's.

Lewis (2011): I read chapter 3 (pages 85 to 115), from a chapter copy posted publicly on a course learning system, plus the publisher's description. I have not read chapters 2, 5 and 8, where the book treats communication strategies and stakeholder interaction in depth. Figure 3.1 also lists "one-sided" and "two-sided" as dimensions; I have not read their definition, so I do not equate them with one-way and two-way. I know Gallivan's study only as Lewis retells it.

April (1999) and Woodward and Hendry (2004): I read only the abstracts, taken from Crossref and OpenAlex; the full papers sit behind a paywall. Everything said about these two papers above is limited to the abstracts.