Change Management & Communications

Delivering real, sustainable change

Is your organisation 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 do we accompany 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 projects 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 concretely looks like? 

Read more about our client work

What can we offer?

  • Change vision and accompanying communication: There’s nothing more effective than presenting a meaningful, persuasive case for change right from the start. We help you create a clear vision and effectively communicate the urgency of this change, ensuring it resonates and inspires action across your organisation.
  • Stakeholder analysis: We systematically identify all relevant stakeholder groups and develop targeted strategies to ensure successful implementation at every level. 
  • Strategic concepts: Drawing on experience, analysis, and strategic expertise, we design customised concepts with precise action plans tailored to fit your organisation seamlessly.
  • Engagement: With a compelling change story, narrative-driven communication, knowledge transfer, and effective onboarding, we empower your workforce and inspire them to actively support the change.
  • Leadership skills: Managers play a crucial role in driving change. We cultivate the required leadership skills to sustainably champion and support the transformation.
  • Personas and journey maps: We develop individual personas and detailed journey maps for key target groups to implement focused and sustainable change initiatives effectively.
  • Change community: With extensive experience in building robust change agent networks for large-scale programmes, we engage all levels of your organisation to drive change authentically and effectively.

What is our approach?

At PwC we have developed the NextGen change approach, leveraging years of experience in change management and working together with our clients. Agility and innovation are at the forefront and characterise our methodology. With this focus, we employ a unique set of approaches tailored to the specific challenges of your organisation. This sensitivity enables us to effectively address obstacles and guide teams, departments, companies, and institutions through transformative change that has a lasting impact.

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

Agile NextGen change management framework

During the change, we emphasise three key pillars powered by ten capabilities that is tailored to the needs of our clients for successfully delivering transformational change:

Leader & citizen activation

Identifying and engaging the right stakeholders early to create a common vision for the project and define the tone at the top is crucial to inspire and energise the organisation. 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.
 

Personalised experiences

Even major change projects are about each individual. We engage people through a clear communication strategy tailored to specific audiences, delivering coherent core messages. By incorporating creative ideas, we aim to inspire and create lasting momentum. This approach helps prevent change fatigue, resistance, and other common defensive attitudes.

Essential skills & behaviours

Developing the right set of skills, behaviours and ways of working 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. Through customised learning paths and fostering internal knowledge transfer, we help you build an attractive, resilient and future-ready team.

Your benefits

  • A strategic approach to change management, coupled with professional support ensures consistently high-quality execution across all change initiatives.
  • Focus on the engagement of the people involved and their mobilisation, ongoing coordination, management of divergent needs, expectation management, clarity and transparency.
  • Out-of-the-box perspectives, inspiring industry insights, benchmarks from similar organisations and acting as an objective party to engage and inform stakeholders often prove to be the key to success.
  • Positive change experiences leave a lasting impact. Through our work, we establish 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, 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 supporters 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 supporters of our client are here to support their customers. As they are facing similar challenges – more HCP’s per patient supporter, 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. We empowered our end-users to become ready, willing, and able to adopt a Data & Analytics (D&A) mindset and utilise the advanced analytics products and services to meet 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 programme 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

Julia Matzinger

Director, People and Organisation, PwC Switzerland

+41 79 520 61 24

Email

Tobias Sattler

Director, People and Organisation, PwC Switzerland

+41 58 792 91 44

Email

Hiram Garcia

Manager, People and Organisation, PwC Switzerland

+41 79 505 27 97

Email