Change Management & Communications

Delivering real, sustainable change.

Are you ready to tackle unforeseen changes?

Organisations are experiencing an era of unprecedented change. An ever-transforming technology landscape and shifts in workforce demographics, expectations, and skills, only begin to cover the breadth of change organisations face.

The key here is how organisations tackle these changes. Those that put their people at the heart of change are measurably more likely to deliver successful outcomes.

Solid strategies, processes and technology alone cannot be relied upon to deliver results. It takes people to accept, adopt, drive, and sustain a change to truly realise its desired tangible impacts.

Interested to dig into this topic?

How can we help you?

Our change management & communications experts will help you navigate change with confidence and deliver on your strategic ambitions. Guided by tried and tested methodologies, tools, and industry best practices, we tailor our services and activate the people side of change to meet your specific change needs and objectives.

With our strong track record of driving hands-on and technology enabled change management across the Swiss market – we bring your employees along your transformation journey by tailoring the material to your stakeholder groups.

Interested to know what our work concretly looks like? 

Read more about our client work

What can we offer?

  • Establish a clear vision and case for change to help clarify the need for change
  • Conduct stakeholder analysis and engagement
  • Assess the change impact (as-is and to-be process, technology, or organisation) across stakeholder groups
  • Design a change strategy alongside the execution of tailored change management activities and communications
  • Mobilise employees along the change journey, with the help of the change vision/story
  • Develop change leadership capability to promote and sustain the change
  • Create tailored personas and journey maps
  • Define a change plan including initiatives to successfully carry out the change
  • Build a change agent network with employees, who advocate for the change at all levels of the organisation
  • Measure and tracking change adoption through a series of metrics and definition of KPIs
  • Ensure a sustainable change with tried and tested adoption tools and initiatives throughout the organisation
     

How do we do it?

At PwC we have developed the NextGen change approach, leveraging years of experience in change management and working together with our clients. Our human centric and agile NextGen change management framework allows us to start from where clients are with a clear understanding of their vision and the desired business outcome to make the change happen.

Together with our clients we will co-create strategies based on an iterative approach to align, engage, and enable our clients through the change efforts. Empowered employees can then help evolve and accelerate the pace of change and sustain business value.

The client journey...

Client journey visual representation

...and the capabilities to get us there

Capabilities required for client journey

During the change we emphasise four key areas for successfully delivering transformational change:

Leadership

Identifying and engaging the right stakeholders early to create a common vision for the project and define the tone at the top is crucial. Additionally, building change capability and defining ways of working as well as developing a motivated and engaged network of influencers adds value to the change process.

Engagement

A change requires creation of awareness and commitment across the various stakeholder groups with targeted activities. We do this by having a clear communications cadence to cascade key messages as well as engagement activities. Likewise, managing employee energy levels to avoid change fatigue, disengagement and lack of commitment is critical.

Skills and behaviours

Developing the right set of skills and behaviors is important for the success of every change. Understanding the stakeholder group’s existing capabilities and their learning needs is key for tailoring enticing learning opportunities. These will enhance their capabilities and create a compelling upskilling experience that is sustainable.

Sustain

Change can often be complex, so applying a strategic, adaptive, and long-term lens to change management is key. Conscious efforts to monitor adoption progress, adjust accordingly and plan for sustainability are a central theme across all change activities.
 

Your benefits

  • Building a clear case for change to clarify the need for change and ultimate vision to mobilise your stakeholders
  • Creating strong alignment between stakeholders e.g. teams, business areas and countries to identify concrete needs and expectations of your audience
  • Acting as an objective party to engage and inform stakeholders with an unbiased perspective
  • Establishing an internal change capability within your organisation to tackle changes sustainably going forward
     

Client example: How we have tackled changes and enablement challenges

With this following client example of a Global pharma company in Switzerland we showcase how we were able to support a global pharma company in Switzerland. The overall goal of the organisation was to improve the patient experience world-wide, by offering Patient Journey Partners (PJP) and doctors’ access to new advanced analytics solutions that generate customer insights.

Globally, the demand for high-quality treatment is rising as more and more people get access to healthcare systems. This creates increasingly bigger pressure on healthcare professionals (HCP), who need to serve more patients with a larger scope of treatments at hand. Because of this, the patient journey partners of our client are here to support their customers. As they are facing similar challenges – more HCP’s per PJP, with a complex treatment landscape – it is difficult to provide a personalised customer experience. Fortunately, our client was able to leverage the abundance of data available across the organisation to create analytics products that enable teams to unlock deep healthcare insights improving the outcomes for patients, healthcare systems and the organisation globally. PwC’s People & Organisation team was asked to support the global deployment of these new analytics products through our Organisational Change Management (OCM) methodology.

In a joint team with our client, we co-created a global Organisational Change Management (OCM) approach to drive the deployment. Our OCM approach centred around three key workstreams of training, communication and adoption. Enabling our end-users to become ready, willing, and able to adopt a Data & Analytics (D&A) mindset and the advanced analytics products and services to execute on their analytics needs.

To implement this approach, our OCM team used a layered structure, consisting of global and regional teams. The global team oversaw and coordinated the global deployment, providing essential blueprints and templates for OCM activities. On the other hand, the regional OCM team supported local deployments, ensuring that the approach was tailored to the specific requirements of the pharma affiliates.

Stakeholder management and (local) leadership engagement were central to the OCM approach. We applied organisational listening and adopted a multi-channel communication strategy to maintain a continuous dialogue with key stakeholders across the organisation. Our communication approach incorporated innovative methods such as a podcast series, awareness videos, interactive program websites, and infographics to effectively convey key messages and engage our audiences more effectively.

Our training function played a crucial role in fostering a Data & Analytics mindset, developing leadership skills, and enhancing functional D&A capabilities. We conducted training sessions for healthcare professional-facing roles and D&A professionals, upskilling them on how advanced analytics solutions can aid in creating valuable customer insights, ultimately leading to an improved customer experience. By participating in the training programme, teams gained proficiency in the entire advanced analytics product suite, granting them more autonomy to generate curated insights and gaining a deeper understanding of their customer landscape.

  • User adoption and engagement: Our OCM approach realised the adoption of advanced analytics solutions across all affiliates in the pharma company. This helped the organisation to leverage the wealth of data for better customer insights to drive the customer experience.
  • Data driven mindset: Through our OCM approach, the affiliates within our client organisation developed a different mindset to D&A. Data is seen as the foundation for taking business decisions and to better understand the needs of customers.
  • Alignment with business goals: The global deployment of analytics solutions falls in line with the new strategic direction of our client to create omnichannel customer experiences. This improves the customer experience and enables a new go-to-market strategy for our client.
  • Consistency and standardisation of Data & Analytics capability: With the current deployment, we created a foundation of D&A capability across the pharma affiliates. Through its global consistency and the present OCM infrastructure, new analytics solutions can easily be deployed and adopted going forward.

Contact us

Myriam Denk

Partner, People and Organisation, Zurich, PwC Switzerland

+41 58 792 26 53

Email

Elsa Shaughnessy

Director, People and Organisation, PwC Switzerland

+41 79 507 46 97

Email

Tobias Sattler

Managing Director, People and Organisation, PwC Switzerland

+41 58 792 91 44

Email

Nick Lawitzke

Senior Manager, People and Organisation, PwC Switzerland

+41 79 630 09 72

Email

Hiram Garcia

Manager, People and Organisation, PwC Switzerland

+41 79 505 27 97

Email