Organizational Change Management

Change has become an inevitable occurrence in business today. This can be as a result of expansion or acquisition of new partner in an effort to expand operations. In an effort to ensure successful operations after change, the organization has invested in organizational change management strategies. However, with different challenges, change can be either be a success or failure of an organization. According to Tocan (158), change management entails the adoption of strategies that prepares and supports an organization, individuals, and the relevant teams towards making organizational change. Common organizational change driving causes includes; mergers, technology, restructuring among other causes. This essay addresses the issue of organizational change with reference to Northwell case study.

History; Case Summary

Established more than 25 years ago, the Northwell medical came about after two firms merged. One from Canada (Northern Medical) and the other from US (Wellness Medical). Despite both parties welcoming the merger, Northwell Inc. was faced with different challenges in its first years of operations. Claudia was handed the lead and led to the introduction of virtual medical service and product in conjunction with Medicheck, however, the overall plan fall behind schedule and the board pressured Claudia to deliver. Medicheck on its side become reluctant and the rest was an overall staling of the organization with employee turnover increasing as well as the resignation of a distributor. With this trend, the board of management at Northwell demanded for a working cause of action in an effort to arrest the challenges as well as rectify them. Taking up the role of a consultant hired by the board of management, I will be focused on devising solutions to the different challenges facing Northwell Inc.

Part 1: Identification of Important Issues That Northwell Should Address

Organizational Change Process and Implementation

Service improvement and offering new products in the market require effective organizational change implementation. Several businesses face a challenge of the organizational change when the dynamics of change are failed to be thoroughly analyzed and properly understood. For Northwell to regain its finical stability, reputation and service quality, several important issues need to be addressed and taken care of in order to keep up with the changing market. Strategic responsiveness is a vital concern, as the organization needs to respond to the external dynamics for it to develop and maintain an outstanding performance.

Recognizing the necessity to change and then responding towards it is very important. The response can be made by strategic renewal which involves combining and adopting new tactics to the shifting realities of the business world. Consequently, addressing organizational change responsiveness will transpire increased internal efficiency and enhance outstanding performance. Change resistance by employees is not natural, but in most cases, they become resistant to the change depending on how it is implemented (Cameron 67).

Effectiveness in Change Implementation

Apparently, a vibrant, competitive environment stimulates the company to transform their plans and strategies for competencies. Organizations always experience dramatic and rapid change, therefore, modification in consumer expectations and demands, change in technology, complete with innovative business models are required for the company to remain still. Therefore, it is important for Northwell to address the techniques to be used in order to achieve effective change implementation. The top managers should also address satisfaction, comfort, and equilibrium of the staff. The employs my resist the change and cling to their status quo, their social habits and groups norm which makes them reluctant to change and hence does not lead to outstanding performance.

The idea should be to initiate behavioral change while focusing on context and unfreezing social habits that exist between employees. In addition, it is also important to address the issues of changing the employee behavior by changing the context. A person’s behavior in a group setting is based on both the context of the group and a person’s psychology in which they find themselves. Performance challenges are always vested in the hand-offs between departments, between duties and roles, between employees and functions thus should be targeted and tackled for change.

Mutual Engagement and Shared Diagnosis

Mutual engagement creates a sense of ownership and belonging to the employees towards the organization, thus building commitment to the whole organizational change process. While diagnosis is all about learning, where individuals get to know what needs to be changed and why the change should be administered. Diagnosis and engagement in an organizational change are there for very critical and should be addressed. Northwell’s organization leaders should, therefore, provide a platform for the employees and other stakeholders to learn by receiving the information from the outside environment and analyzing it in order to adjust their thinking and their perception towards the Virtual Mall.

Preferably, if the issue of the employee engagement is addressed, it will create an awareness gap on the status quo and the desired future state which in turn creates dissatisfaction hence drive change. Another issue at hand is developing a roadmap for directing mutual engagement in a shared diagnosis. In other words, creating a diagnostic framework will help detect all the key variables that influence the performance of the company.

Organizational Redesign

In order to address the challenge of marketing, portfolio, Northwell Company needs to encourage collaboration among the previously independent stakeholders. Changing organizational design so as to maintain competencies in the job market is thus important. In the attempt to redesign the organization informal pattern to fit the ever-changing dynamic environment will require to address a number of important issues.

Redesigning the organizational structure will require addressing of challenges for understanding the design. Prior to getting involved in the changing of the design system, the organization needs to understand the challenges that include; the challenge of integration and differentiation, control and creativity and allocation of decision-making rights. Integration and differentiation demonstrate that different departments and units within an organization carry out different functions and therefore, they should be left to develop their own approaches in response to the competitive environment. Exerting control over employees’ behavior so as to align them with the requirements of excellent performance is difficult and require creativity while determining who should make what decision concerning resource allocation within the organization is also way difficult (Janssen et al. 155).

Part ii: Recommendations for Northwell on Each Important Issue

Since the organization transpires to increase internal effectiveness, enhance human capabilities and improve short-term and bottom line performance while ensuring strategic responsiveness, the focus should be on internal barriers that exist in the new technology development. Proper attention should be given to the employee’s behavior towards the change and finding the reasons as to why they are reacting negatively is advised. Moreover, giving attention to the tools and techniques while paying less attention to the employee’s behavior can result to the organizational dysfunction as well as disappointed in the overall company’s performance output. Further, in order to support the strategic renewal and achieve excellent performance, new contacts are required to be sustainable and adaptive to shifts in the external environment.

While striving to achieve effective change implementation, the managers should redesign, new strategically aligned behaviors by issuing roles, responsibilities and good relationships with the staff. Providing training, monitoring and coaching the employees will also impact on their productivity. Further, ensuring assessment, recruitment, compensation, and provision of information builds mutual engagement in the workplace. In addition, it will break social habits among employees that support the existing way of doing things in the organization. The social habits and ties can be broken by the redesigning of the organizational responsibilities, roles, and relationships between employees and the managers. For example, marketers are also used to the way they are interacting directly with the customers even if they are not reaching a wide range of them, thus making them resistance to the implementation of the Virtual Northwell Mall. Finally, reinforce the new behavior with the innovative measurement system.

Instead of coming up with solutions to Northwell by imposing the virtual mall directly to the employees and customers, the management should begin with the diagnosis to identify the behaviors, the current state of skill, competence, and requirements for excellent future performance. Managers and the executives should develop and maintain an open-ended dialogue with employees to allow them to find solutions to the organization’s problems and the barrier to the outstanding performance. In cases where there is a climate of silence between the employees and their leaders in a meeting, for instance, when the discussion seems not to be open and employees tend to hold back some vital information, a third party facilitator should be enforced. In addition, the managers and the executive should bring in a consultant to acquaint the employees with the skills required for mutual engagement and diagnosis for them to participate openly in the dialogue.

Considering many challenges faced by organizations in redesigning, the leaders should allocate high levels of autonomy to the departments so as to achieve marketplace responsiveness and outstanding performance. In addressing the challenge of control and creativity, the organization should build employee commitment by aligning their behaviors with the redesigned strategies and the shifting environments. The commitment can be achieved through increased effort, energy and persistence among employees. Highly committed employees to tend to be more collaborative, productive and are motivated to change their own forms of behavior based on the requirements and brilliant performance. The managers should also rethink job design choices to suit the demanding market. Change implementation brings about questions as to how employees execute their assigned tasks. The design answers the question of ensuring that the individual meets the organizational expectation for the overall performance as well as meeting his own goals. Notably, clarification of the organizational goals will ensure that staff members from all departments are provided with the relevant knowledge to help them understand the organizational values and goals as well as its strategic choices.

In conclusion, organizational change without effective panning can result to challenges, employee turnover, and decreased financial performance such as the case with Northwell Inc. as a result of the merger, the problems facing the organization can be summarized to difference in organizational structures between Northwell and Medicheck, lack of preparation for the incoming project by the responsible team and also poor or lack effective communication of relevant parties. In an effort to get the best in terms of solution, the organization leaders should focus on identifying the existing gaps to their best performance, improve communication with Medicheck, effectively and carefully oversee the change process.

Works Cited

Cameron, Esther, and Mike Green. Making sense of change management: A complete guide to the models, tools and techniques of organizational change. Kogan Page Publishers, 2015. Print.

Janssen, Mijnke, et al. "Improving patient care for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children by organizational redesign (Tornado program) and enhanced collaboration between psychiatry and general practice: a controlled before and after the study." Implementation science 9.1 (2014): 155.

Tocan, Madalina Cristina. “Management of Organizations in the Context of the Knowledge Society.” USV Annals of Economics & Public Administration, vol. 14, no. 1, Jan. 2014, pp. 154–160.