Expertise

Every company today operates in a complex and challenging environment. The level of uncertainty is unprecedented and the velocity of change continues to accelerate. Competitive pressure is relentless while resource availability is severely constrained. Markets and customers have grown increasingly demanding and harder to satisfy. The challenge for every company is learning how to adapt to new business realities, whether it is going into new markets, working through a merger or acquisition, or making sure that one is getting an optimal return from a marketing or communications organization within a company.

Ketchum Pleon Change -- a new business created through the combination of Ketchum’s and Pleon’s Change and Transformation consulting businesses -- helps organizations respond to these challenges. We create integrated communication strategies, craft meaningful and responsive messages, and reshape organizational behavior to enable employees to remain focused on performance that helps businesses achieve their goals. In this way, we focus on a single, overarching mission: To improve business results by effectively managing and communicating change, while aligning the workplace and the marketplace.

Our clients are more profitable as a result of greater employee engagement, loyalty, productivity and retention, as well as through streamlining management processes so decisions are reached quicker and are adopted more readily within a company. We help change employees from being bystanders and skeptics of the organization they work for, to true ambassadors.

We create more meaning for the employee, sustainable change for the manager, strategic alignment and effective communications for the executive, and outstanding results for the organization. We combine the logic of organizational development with the insight of behavioral science and the magic of creativity to create powerful communications plans and comprehensive change strategies to drive performance improvement and deliver business results. We have helped companies better weather the recession, and to be prepared for a recovery. The resulting ROI is found in less churn of employees, greater customer service, and more efficient use of internal marketing, communications and HR budgets.

Our dedicated group of senior communication experts and consultants blend their diverse and experienced views on change with locally relevant context. This enables national and multinational companies to anticipate and overcome barriers, engage diverse groups of employees, and build stronger relationships with customers and other stakeholders. And, we demonstrate the ROI at every step of the process.

Whether a company’s objectives center around organizational or functional transformation, managing change, achieving operational improvements, internalizing the brand, or motivating and engaging the workforce, our consultants rely on expertise within five areas to deliver results:

• Strategic Communications: We craft compelling messages and create breakthrough tactics to ensure the workforce is aligned with a new strategic direction and is sufficiently informed to quickly deliver results. The result is more employee brand ambassadors.
• Employee Engagement: We reshape leader behavior, organizational practices and messaging to respond to the most important drivers of company loyalty and brand affinity. The results include greater productivity by employees and a higher willingness to devote discretionary effort.
• Talent Management: We design talent management systems across the length of the employment lifecycle – we create solutions to attract, bring onboard, develop and retain talent. Borrowing from Good to Great by Jim Collins, we make sure the right people are on the bus and they are in the right seats.
• Change Management: We understand the challenges of large-scale transformations and design solutions that involve the right people at the right time to accelerate speed to impact. Mergers and acquisitions, for example, go better and the inherent investments pay greater dividends.
• Executive Communications and Coaching: It’s not easy to be a great leader. We help great executives become great communicators, and natural leaders who their employees want to follow.