You’re working on your new website, or a significant rejig of your current one. Part of this involves streamlining the main navigation and reducing content – simplifying everything to make it more user-focused. Great!

But to do this you need to remove some sections from the main menu – Hire and Support Us, perhaps. You also want to refine and reduce your Archive of past projects and activities. Even though you know all this will help your website's users – you have data to back that up – your colleagues are upset, perhaps even angry about this. So you’re struggling to get buy-in, which makes the project more challenging.

We’ve seen this kind of situation crop up a lot over the years. It can be confusing and difficult to understand why people have such strong emotional responses and reactions to these sorts of changes. It’s just a website – why are they so upset?

Self esteem and feeling valued

Our self esteem and feelings of value are often closely linked to our jobs. Our jobs – particularly in the cultural sector – give us purpose; they challenge and reward us. How successful we are in our careers can directly impact our self esteem. And, how our hard work is acknowledged can directly impact our feelings of self-worth.

Think about the last time you achieved something at work, but it wasn’t acknowledged by anyone – how did you feel?

Now think about a time you did receive recognition for your work – even if you didn’t need that recognition it probably felt pretty great, didn't it?

A strong emotional reaction to making changes on your website is often due to people feeling that their contribution isn’t being valued. Removing that section from the main menu means it isn’t worthy of being there. Taking away the Archive of past projects means those projects no longer have any value.

Of course that’s not the case – and it’s not your intention to upset colleagues or devalue their work – but it is sometimes how people read the situation.

We all know that the cultural sector wouldn’t survive without commercial activity and outreach work. But if colleagues don’t feel their contribution is valued, you could be met with an emotional reaction – and a lot of push-back – to making website changes.

Which can make the project, and your job, more challenging.

How to manage a difficult situation

Being prepared with some simple strategies can help to make this process much easier – for everyone. Here're my top tips:

🔸 Be empathic

Data is useful, but pure data rarely wins in a fight against emotions! So, start the conversation by acknowledging that your colleagues might find this process difficult.

Listen to them, hear their challenges and what they’re struggling with. This will help you to empathise with, and support, them.

As well as acknowledging that changes to the website structure or removing content might feel uncomfortable for them, stress that it in no way reflects on how much their work is valued.

🔸 Explain your reasoning and provide alternatives

Be clear that removing items from a main menu isn’t about downgrading their content, goals or activities. In fact, your aim is to get more people to those pages – through strong calls-to-action and clear signposting, from all across the website.

Share data about how many (or few!) people access certain sections of a website via a main menu link, compared with users being strategically guided towards it. If you’re mocking-up wireframes; including calls-to-action and signposting to those sections in the mock-ups will allow your colleagues to see right away that their work will remain visible, accessible, and valued.

And if you’re wanting to remove or rework a bulky Archive, I’ve shared some handy suggestions for alternative solutions in this blog post: Should you have an Archive on your website?

🔸 Set goals – and share them

Websites are constantly evolving, so be open to being wrong. Maybe Hires should stay in the main menu? Maybe lots of your website visitors are regularly visiting your Archive of past projects?

Before making any changes, benchmark some KPIs – such as unique page views, bounce rate, time spent on pages, and conversions. Work towards exceeding these benchmark KPIs with any changes you make.

And share these goals with colleagues. This will reassure them that not only do you value their work and activities, but that you’re committed to improving their conversions – and visibility – on the website.

🔸 Celebrate success

Experience has taught me that the level of emotional reaction to change on a website is often directly related to how good an organisation is at celebrating success, and championing each other.

When people feel valued, and get the recognition they deserve, they often aren’t too fussed about the website. They'll listen to your reasoning, trust your analysis of the data, and move on.

But if an organisation is siloed, teams can feel that they’re in competition with each other rather than working together. In this case, the role of the website can feel much greater – perhaps even fueling this competitiveness – and so the emotional response is greater.

You may not have the power to change the entire organisation (besides, organisational culture is notoriously hard to change!) but you can start celebrating your colleagues’ successes.

This could be through social media posts, writing articles for the website, an internal email to all staff, or just going up to someone and saying “Well done!”.

You might be surprised at just how much these small acts of celebration can boost a colleague's confidence, and help them to feel valued.

🔸 Make the most of external support

It can be really difficult and draining to navigate these situations – especially when you’re working with colleagues day-to-day. So, if you have a web agency, make the most of them.

As an impartial third party, we can often see, understand – and explain – why people are reacting the way they are, and can help them through it; carrying at least some of the burden of pushing for change. We can also help to challenge more senior team members – and we can back you up when you need it.

🔸 Be kind

It may sound naff, but the most important thing you can do is take a human approach to these situations.

Yes, working from data is useful, but being empathic, listening to, understanding and supporting your colleagues will go a long way to making your life easier.

Taking a human-centred approach should help to improve every aspect of your website – user journeys will be truly user-focused, you’ll be able to track progress against your shared goals, and your colleagues will be on board with change.

And you might just boost someone's self sesteem and confidence too, which is a great feeling!