Creating Internal Buy-In

Creating Internal Buy-In: Creating internal buy-in for a company's change through communication

Raaphorst, Stephanie (TU Delft Industrial Design Engineering; TU Delft Design Conceptualization and Communication)

van Erp, Jeroen (mentor)
Mulder, Sander (graduation committee)

Delft University of Technology

Strategic Product Design

2019-03-27

This research thesis aims to create a new perspective of design as an integral part of internal change communication and attempts to showcase what design can contribute to the domain of internal change communication. It follows an exploratory research approach that was driven by a research question and where a design was used as a stimulus to test the research question (as can be seen in Figure 3 on page 21). The research question in this thesis is: what can design offer, in addition to contemporary approaches, in change communication to create internal buy-in? To attain an understanding of organisational change and change communication, both literature and field research (in the form of interviews) were conducted. This concluded the first part of the thesis, the Study, and moved it into the Design part of the thesis. After conducting interviews with eighteen people at six different companies, across the levels of hierarchy, a design opportunity presented itself: after the company change was announced, the employees had lots of questions and they felt like they weren’t being taken seriously. The thesis proceeds to describe how a solution to this challenge was designed and tested. The testing of the design brought the Design and Study parts of the thesis together: the concluding remarks from the test reflect not only the feasibility, desirability and viability of the design, but present insights pertaining to the research question. This thesis concludes by offering the insights that what design can offer internal change communication to create internal buy-in are boundary objects and a user-centred approach to problem solving. Boundary objects could provide a form of common understanding and clarity about topics, that are complex or unclear, that allow for people to have facilitated discussions. By creating a better understanding about the change and how employee questions and queries will be addressed, you can reduce resistance to the change and create internal buy-in (Llenza, 2008). Having a user-centred approach allows for users to inform the design of a tool that they will be using, allowing for it to not only meet their needs, but also creating ownership over that tool and the company change. If the change isn’t strongly or exclusively top driven, employees will feel a willingness to participate in the change and take ownership of the change, creating internal buy-in (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2015).

Communication
Buy-in
Organisational change

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:9a22a68a-ade5-4f98-849d-e0f2d341f2a2

Student theses

master thesis

© 2019 Stephanie Raaphorst