Your HR team is in overdrive. You are building processes from scratch and learning a system you will have to support for the next decade, all while trying to keep daily HR operations running. Meanwhile, your communications function (if you have a dedicated one) is being asked to do something they have never done or don’t have the bandwidth to do: communicate a complex technology transformation to a workforce that does not understand why it matters.
The systems integrator has a communication plan. It exists. Slides have been shared. But that plan was built using templates and generic language that could be used at any company. It tells your workforce what is changing without explaining why anyone should care or how it affects them specifically.
See also: 4 reasons HR technology projects fail; how to succeed instead
And your HR team, stretched thin and trying to survive, does not have the bandwidth to bridge that gap. You need someone whose job is to think about your people through this transformation. Someone who understands your culture, your business priorities and what your employees actually need to hear. That person is not on the systems integrator team and they are likely not on your already-stretched-thin HR operations team.
This is what happens when HR is so focused on delivering a technology program that change communications becomes an afterthought. When the people responsible for the employee experience are too busy surviving implementation to actually lead it.
The result is predictable. Employees receive messaging designed by people who understand the system, but not your organization. The communication is technically accurate, but emotionally tone deaf and lacking in clarity. It tells employees what is changing, but not why it matters to them. By the time HR leaders recognize there is a problem, adoption challenges are already baked into the culture.
This is not a technology problem. Research shows that 68% of organizations fail to achieve expected adoption rates because they focus on software features, rather than user needs and behavior change. The gap is not in the system; it’s in how the system is communicated.
Meanwhile, your HR team is already fractured and can’t keep up. Only 9% of HR professionals consistently complete their daily tasks, while 42% admit to working outside regular business hours to keep up. Add a major technology transformation on top of that, and the fragmentation becomes inevitable. Leadership is saying one thing, managers are either improvising or silent, employees are confused, and nobody has the bandwidth to hold a consistent narrative together.
Three questions to assess your risk
Before you make any other decisions about your implementation, ask yourself these three questions to better understand the risk your project might carry.
- Do you have a change communications strategy that sits apart from the systems integrator’s project plan? Not a communication timeline. Not a calendar of announcements. A strategy that articulates who your audiences are, what they each need to understand, and why they should care. If the answer is no, or if you are not sure, there is a pretty high risk in your current approach.
- Do your HR team and leadership have a consistent narrative about why this change is happening and what it means? Ask five different people in your organization to explain the business case for this transformation in a few sentences. If you get five different answers, your messaging is already fragmented. And if the people who are closest to this project can’t consistently say what it is and why it’s important, your employees have no shot at understanding it, driving the risk of adoption.
- Do you have a dedicated person thinking about how to communicate this transformation to your people, or is it being absorbed into existing workloads? If change communications is a line item in the systems integrator’s workstream, a task assigned to your already drowning HR team, or even tacked onto your existing internal communications team, you’re likely at risk.
If you answered no to any of these, the time to act is now. Not after go live, when you are firefighting adoption problems. Not when colleagues are frustrated and HR is drowning in repeated questions. Not when the window for shaping the experience has closed. Now. Why? Because every week you wait, the fragmentation gets worse. The narrative gets more muddled. Your HR team gets more stretched. The only way to prevent this is to get ahead of it, and the time to get ahead is before the systems integrator’s approach becomes the default.
Understanding the systems integrator communications problem
Systems integrators are built for technical delivery. They understand architecture, testing, configuration and cutover planning. And they often have a communications team that can be brought in. You’re probably thinking, “That’s amazing! Let’s use their team. They will be connected, really understand what is going on and what we need.” Therein lies the problem.
When a systems integrator leads communications, the messaging reflects their process, not your people. It is about modules and processes and timelines. It uses templates designed to work at any company, which means they work nowhere particularly well. The audience for this messaging is the project team, who is usually so busy, they don’t have time to really think about whether this will make sense to employees.
Your employees do not experience this as a project, but as a disruption to how they do their work. They want to know whether their role is changing, whether they will lose access to tools they rely on and whether the new system makes their job harder or easier. They want to know whether they can still do their work if something goes wrong.
Systems integrator communications rarely answer these questions because that is not what they are designed to do. They are designed to communicate that a change is happening, not why it should matter to your specific workforce. By the time the message reaches your employees, it has been filtered through multiple stakeholders and stripped of anything that makes it relevant to them. The result is messaging that feels corporate and distant, the opposite of what drives adoption.
The cost of getting this wrong
When HR outsources communications to a systems integrator, the gap between what is communicated and what employees actually understand becomes massive. The project delivers on time and on budget. The technology works, but the workforce isn’t ready. Colleagues do not understand why the change is happening and don’t know how to use the new system for the things they actually care about. HR gets flooded with repetitive questions because nobody explained it the right way in the first place.
This is not a systems integrator failure. It is a structural problem. The systems integrator is optimized for technical delivery, not for translating that technology into language your people understand. By the time you realize the gap exists, adoption is already struggling. And closing that gap after go-live is infinitely harder than building it right from the beginning.
How HR can improve the employee experience
You cannot control the systems integrator’s approach. But you can make one decision right now that changes everything: Bring in an outside change communications consultant who is not from the systems integrator.
This consultant should report to the HR leader or Chief HR Officer during the implementation. Their job is to develop a consistent narrative about this transformation and ensure everyone in the organization, and especially your HR team, understands and communicates from that same narrative.
Your HR people are going to make or break this transformation. They are the ones colleagues trust and are used to turning to when they need help. If your HR team understands the narrative and communicates it consistently, colleagues start to understand what is expected of them. They start to try self-service and become comfortable with the new system. If your HR team is confused or communicating different things, colleagues stay dependent on HR and adoption stalls.
Your outside change communications consultant keeps your HR team in sync. They make sure everyone understands the why, provide consistent talking points, help HR shift from being the solution to being the guide and they build the post-go-live communications calendar that keeps colleagues coming back to the system on their own, at moments when they actually need it.
Research from SHRM shows that organizations that follow change management best practices are 2.6 times more likely to report successful outcomes. An outside change communications consultant is how you implement those best practices with your people. But HR is the function that makes those practices stick.
What this actually means
Organizations do not fail because the technology is not good enough. They fail because their people do not understand why the change matters or how it affects them. And they fail because HR leadership is too consumed with delivery to actually lead.
The organizations that succeed in human capital management implementations are the ones that treat change communications as a discipline deserving its own resources and accountability. They do not outsource it to the systems integrator. They do not add it to an already stretched HR team. They bring in an outside consultant whose job is to think about their people through this transformation.
Here’s where to go next
If you answered no to any of the three questions above, start here. Schedule a conversation with your HR leadership team and the project sponsor about bringing in an outside change communications consultant. This is critical infrastructure for your implementation. You need outside expertise that knows your organization, not a systems integrator using a standard playbook.
The HCM system you implement will be state-of-the-art. Whether your people actually adopt it depends on the decision you make in the next few weeks about whether someone is in the room thinking about them, not just the technology.
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