Organizational culture change
Introduction
There are several reasons why organizational culture change is inevitable. Organizations change their culture because of various reasons such as new technology, performance gaps – where organizational goals and objectives are yet to be met, or during a crisis. An excellent example of a crisis is this Corona Virus Pandemic, where the whole world is under distress. Various countries are under lockdown, and organizations have asked their employees to work from home following alarming rates at which the disease spreads. The current pandemic has created a significant economic crisis, and most organizations have been forced to change their organizational structure in order to survive.
Body
Kotter’s eight-step change model
John Kotter introduced Kotter’s eight-step change model in 1996. In his book “Leading Change,” the Harvard professor and change expert clearly outlined the model based on the one hundred organizations that were changing at the time. The book provides a helpful model of understanding and managing change. Each step used a fundamental principle identified by Kotter relating to people’s response and approach to change and in which people see, feel, and then change.
Organizational change chart
Step one: Create Urgency
Since the Covid -19 pandemic was unforeseeable, the first step for the leaders was to create a state of urgency. A state of urgency is like a state of emergency where the relevant stakeholders have to understand why change must occur. For the leaders to carry out the change successfully, they must use relevant facts and figures to illustrate their objectives. For instance, the organizational leadership came with facts of how the Italians were dying in thousands in the space of 24 hours and how the pandemic is spreading rapidly. Since the economy is severely affected, we came up with ways of working from home in order to keep the organization afloat as a measure to mitigate Covid-19 infection.
Step two: Form a powerful coalition
The leaders of an organization ought to identify the right people to work with in order for them to realize the desired change. The team is able to steer the team towards the desired change. The guiding team should believe and be committed to the said change. At our organization, all the stakeholders saw how the Covid 19 affected the economy, and how it has ruined families by the numerous deaths, so people were willing to work as a team in adopting the new culture of working from home.
Step three: Create a vision for change
A vision for change is foreseeing what the organization will be short ones the change has been implemented. Without a vision, it is hard for the organization to sustain commitment made to the change they have realized. The leaders ought to identify areas of change and provide clear targets g within specified periods. Organizations should also establish certain tools to measure their success. Our organization had to compare the profits it had realized during this pandemic and contrast them with what it made when there was no pandemic and see how they can better reach their clientele during this crisis.
Step four: Communicate the vision.
The leaders and guiding team communicated the vision to the stakeholders that aim at making the rest of the team understand the vision. Ones the vision is appealing to the managers and the other employees, then they will strive to make the change happen since employees recognized the importance of social distancing and working from home. They were committed to the new vision of working from home, and they still strive to reach their target clients.
Step five: Remove Obstacles.
This is the implementation stage. At this stage, resistance to change is less, and the organization aligns more with the vision to change. Here anything that does not conform to change is done removed. In the case of our organization, employees who were against the change had to be laid off so that the rest of the stuff can continue realizing the change vision.
Step six: Create short term wins
The leaders and the guiding team create short term goals that can be achieved. The short term wins a momentum for change, and thus it is able to steer the organization towards sustainable change. Our organization compared the first and second month of working from home and indeed we had made more profits in the second month and that to us was a win.
Step seven: Build on the Change.
This is ensuring continuous improvement by analyzing what has worked improving on it and analyzing at what has failed and ways that one can make it work. Our organization, for instance, had to see how to improve working from home experiences. We had to use the internet in order to telecommute, and instead of holding traditional meetings, we are teleconferencing.
Step Eight: Anchor the changes in corporate culture
This is ensuring that the change is fully aligned with the organization. For the successful transition of corporate culture, motivations such as rewards are given, training is made to the stuff, and the human resource process is done factoring the change. At our organization, the stuff was sensitized about the covid- 19 pandemic and how it is spread. The new recruits were further trained on how to use voice over internet protocol (VoIP), Virtual chat room, and video conferencing.
Conclusion
Kotter’s eight principles model has proved to be an effective tool to inspire change in organizational culture because it shows how leaders and the guiding team can meet the change objectives. The organizational change chart shows the hierarchical flow of information from the management to the junior employees.