Human Resource Management for Change

SESSION
Prepared by: Morrette Allen 1
 Learning Objectives
At the end of the session, you should be able to:
• Explain the concept of change.
• Distinguish between the term change and transition.
• Explain organizational change and its intended purpose.
• Discuss different types of organizational change initiatives.
• Discuss the acronym VUCA and what it means to businesses.
• Support the implementation of change within their organisation
• Appreciate the importance of managing change effectively in organizations.
 Introduction

• Virtually every organization will, at some point, undergo a transition or change in order to
remain viable.
• Whether onboarding new employees, growing a department, or merging with another
company, these changes can have a significant impact on the trajectory of a business.
• Unfortunately, organizational change isn’t always easy to adapt to and can be intimidating
for all team members who find themselves impacted by it.
• However, organizational change is necessary for companies to succeed and grow.
• HRM plays a critical role in the change management process.

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 What is Change & Why is it Important in Organizations?

 To make (someone or something) different; alter or modify.

 Replace (something) with something else, especially something of the same kind that is
newer or better; substitute one thing for (another).
 To transform or modify something.
 Change encourages innovation, develops skills, develops staff and leads to better business
opportunities, and improves staff morale.
 Major organizational changes can include mergers and acquisitions, redefining a
company’s brand and market position, downsizing, outsourcing and focusing on new
markets.

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 What is Change Management?

Change management is a process of overseeing and facilitating change at any level where
it occurs.
The coordination of a structured period of transition from situation A to situation B in
order to achieve lasting change within an organization.”
Change management, according to the Society for Human Resource Management is “the
systematic approach and application of knowledge, tools and resources to deal with
change. It involves defining and adopting corporate strategies, structures, procedures and
technologies to handle changes in external conditions and the business environment.”

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 Change vs Transition

According to William Bridges, change is something that happens to people, even if they
don't agree with it.
 Transition, on the other hand, is internal: it's what happens in people's minds as they go
through change. 
Change can happen very quickly, while transition usually occurs more slowly.

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 Change vs Transition

For example, COVID-19 has changed us all. And, we are all transitioning in our very
personal ways.
• Using Bridges' model, there are three stages of transition. Endings, The Neutral Zone, and
New Beginnings.

ENDINGS
Loss, letting go, saying goodbye. If you are here, we talk about the importance of
honoring what is ending.
Marking the end is necessary before a new beginning can start. 

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 Change vs Transition

THE NEUTRAL ZONE

Characterized by chaos, instability, disorientation.

Also present in massive quantities in this zone are creativity, innovation, and possibility. 
This state is temporary. The most important thing we can do is be compassionate with
ourselves, find resources, support systems, and use mindful strategies to be open to the
innovation and creativity that shares this space.

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 Change vs Transition

NEW BEGINNINGS
This is a phase of reorientation, acceptance, and identification with a new way of being.
It may be that you accept the new that has replaced the old or that you see a sense of who
you are becoming on the other side.
If you are here, there may be relief that you’ve navigated through the uncertainty, there
also may be new anxiety, excitement, and awareness that change may come again.

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 What is Organizational Change?

• Organizational change is defined as the adoption of a new idea or behavior by an

organization.

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 Purpose of Organizational Change?

 Organizational change aids companies to succeed and grow.

 Organizational change can aid in improving employee performance, skills, attitudes,
behavior and loyalty to the organization, as well as to enhance manager-subordinate
relationships, group cohesion and employee sense of achievement.
 Organizational change can also improve the effectiveness of a business.

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 What Causes Organizational Change?

Many factors make organizational change necessary. Some of the most common faced by
managers include: 

• New leadership at the helm of the company or within its departments

• Shifts in the organizational team structure
• The implementation of new technology
• The adoption of new business models

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 Why Is Organizational Change Management Important?

 Organizational change is the process of shifting a company’s structure or other significant

elements to improve operations and meet new challenges.
 A key component of this process is organizational change management, which is the
strategy the company uses to enact these alterations effectively. Effective change cannot
happen without organizational change management.
 Organizational change management is the method of leveraging change to bring about a
successful resolution, and it typically includes three major phases: Preparation,
implementation, and follow-through.
 Change management drives the successful adoption and usage of change within the
business.
 It allows employees to understand and commit to the shift and work effectively during it.
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 Why Is Organizational Change Management Important?

 Without effective organizational change management, company transitions can be rocky

and expensive in terms of both time and resources.
 They can also result in lower employee morale and competent skill development.
 Ultimately, a lack of effective change management can lead the organization to fail.

 See word document on change management process.

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 What is a Change Initiative? 

• The goal of every change initiative in an organization is to successfully execute strategies

and methods for bringing about change and assisting people in accepting and adapting to
it.
• A change initiative is not to adopt a new system or enforce a new policy.
• Change initiative can be defined as the systematic approach that deals with the transition
or transformation of organizational goals, core values and culture, and processes or
technologies.
 What is a Change Initiative? 

Change initiatives may be implemented to: 

• Solve a problem 
• Improve methods of working
• Take advantage of an opportunity 
• Better align the organization with changing conditions 
• Respond to new business demands
• Respond to a crisis that impacts the organization
• Increase revenues 
 What is a Change Initiative? 

• Improve productivity 
• Enhance quality 
• Improve customer experience 
• Moreover, change is initiated by taking a step back and analyzing an organization from a
strategic perspective before developing a plan for realignment and modifications to how
business is conducted.
 What is a Change Initiative? 

• Three examples of effective organizational change demonstrating what organizations

achieved and how they achieved it include:  

1. Microsoft
• Microsoft's organizational structure was causing significant internal issues. The company
began to undergo significant restructuring when its new CEO took over.
• At a very high level, Microsoft's stock price demonstrated the effectiveness of the CEO’s
initiatives.
 What is a Change Initiative? 

2. Google

• Google became a collection of separate companies owned by Alphabet.

• This happened because they were growing so much that they needed to break themselves
apart to work better.
• Google co-founder Larry Page believed it was time for him to restructure the entire
business again after dominating various high-tech projects, which proved to be a success.
 What is a Change Initiative? 

3. British Airways

• British Airways is the largest airline in the U.K. because it merges with four other
companies.
• The company had difficulty managing and providing quality service in the immediate
aftermath of this significant merger. 
• Its privatization and the incorporation of a new chairperson led to the company’s positive
momentum and increased profits by restructuring the entire organization.
 Types of Organizational Change Initiatives

What is process change?

• Process change refers to the steps and procedures that organizational leaders enact to
ensure a greater level of effectiveness in the way an organisation operates.
• This primarily refers to how leaders change individual processes, such as how an
organisation cleans its equipment or handles data.
• Changing processes comes from senior leadership and managers, as these are the staff
members with the authority to change how an organisation works.
 Types of Organizational Change Initiatives

What is process change?

Organizations have several motives for changing processes, including:

• Introducing regulatory changes: Organizations change how they handle products in line

with regulations changing in their country of operation.
• Increasing productivity: Some organizations make changes to increase the rate at which
they produce goods.
 Types of Organizational Change Initiatives

What is process change? Cont.

• Reducing waste: Organizations may change how they create a product to eliminate waste
from the manufacturing process.
• Increasing satisfaction: Some changes aim to improve employee morale throughout the
organisation.
 Types of Organizational Change Initiatives

Benefits of changing processes

• Some of the benefits of effectively changing the processes in an organisation include:

• Higher revenues
• Lower costs
• Employee retention
• Workplace safety
 Types of Organizational Change Initiatives

What is strategic change?

• When conducting strategic change, organizations plan and implement changes to

boost competitive advantage or achieve another significant objective.
• For example, they may make changes to the business's policies, structure or
processes.
• Often, these changes serve as a response to market opportunities or threats. The
responsibility to guide strategic change typically falls to upper management or
executive staff members.
 Types of Organizational Change Initiatives

What is strategic change?

• Once leaders identify their desired goals or missions, they must perform the change
management process in a structured manner.
• The use of change management models, such as Kotter's 8-step change model, can
help organizations implement plans thoughtfully.
 Types of Organizational Change Initiatives

Types of strategic change

• Restructuring - In some situations, organizations may need to reorganize aspects of their
company to remain competitive.
• This process is known as restructuring. These changes serve as a response to market
opportunities or threats
• Organizations can restructure their departments and hierarchy levels, whether by reducing
the number of departments or changing the relationships between various departments.
• Downsizing represents another option in which the organization reduces its number of
employees to lower its costs.
 Types of Organizational Change Initiatives

Types of strategic change

• Reengineering -When pursuing change through reengineering, organizations focus on

redesigning their business processes and related systems to improve performance. 
 Types of Organizational Change Initiatives

Innovation

• Organizations can also pursue strategic change through innovation, which refers to using
skills and resources to develop new ideas or improve existing offerings.
• This process enables organizations to meet customers' new and changing demands.
• Focusing on innovation often requires investing heavily in research and development
activities.
 Types of Organizational Change Initiatives

Innovation

• The professionals in these programs spend significant time researching, developing and
testing new ideas.
• There is some risk, as not all ideas may result in the desired financial outcome or success.
• However, continuing to offer new and exciting products or services can also provide long-
term value.
 Types of Organizational Change Initiatives

Example

• A car manufacturer notices that its top competitor has begun selling electric models. The
company determines that to stay competitive, it must also begin offering electric vehicles
as consumer interest in these models continue to grow. As a result, the organization
designs and develops electric vehicles and eventually launches them on the market. To
further differentiate itself, the company also begins investing heavily in research and
development activities to lower the cost of its electric vehicles. The company hopes that
by achieving this goal, it will attract more consumers and outsell its competitors.
 Types of Organizational Change Initiatives

Cultural Change

• Cultural change is the process in which an organization encourages employees to adopt

behaviors and mindsets that are consistent with the organization's values and goals.
• Cultural change may be necessary to better align the behaviors of employees with current
and future business objectives (such as, for example, after a merger of two organizations
with distinct cultures).
• Successful cultural change initiatives are often gradual and must be done at a sustainable
pace so that employees can acclimate and adjust to the change without becoming
disengaged.
 Types of Organizational Change Initiatives
How to Identify Bad Company Culture

• An organization’s culture can either be its greatest strength or its most damaging
weakness.
Warning signs that a company’s culture is broken. Red flags include:

• No defined core values

• Managers don’t follow the core values
• A high rate of turnover
 Types of Organizational Change Initiatives

How to Identify Bad Company Culture

• Warning signs that a company’s culture is broken. Red flags cont.

• A bad company reputation
• Employees are often tardy or absent
• A large amount of office gossip
• Glaring inconsistencies between what people say and do
 Types of Organizational Change Initiatives
How to Identify Bad Company Culture

Warning signs that a company’s culture is broken. Red flags cont.

• Unfriendly competition between employees

• Employees aren’t adequately acknowledged or rewarded
• Employees who don’t take lunch breaks, or regularly work nights and/or weekends

Once you recognize negative or toxic cultural trends, it’s time to make a change.
 Types of Organizational Change Initiatives

• It is important to identify and address the underlying issues of a bad culture so corrections
can be made you as organizations work towards changing the workplace culture.
Four steps to set an organization back on the right cultural track:
1.Foster an environment of accountability, from managers down to individual employees.
2.Discuss with teams what matters most to them.
3.Institute better practices based on feedback.
4.Continue to assess the culture.
 Organizational Culture Change Example
Adobe

• Adobe is a company that has built a culture on trust. They go out of their way to give
employees challenging projects, but then they take the next step to provide the trust and
support so employees can succeed.
• Adobe purposefully built a culture that avoids micromanaging. Rather, they trust
employees to manage and complete their projects in a way they feel is best.
• The company’s history of innovative and successful products shows the fruits of their
culture.
 Organizational Culture Change Example
Zappos

• Online shoe company Zappos has developed a culture others want to mirror. In fact,
Zappos has become such a culture change model that they offer a three-day “culture
camp” to teach HR professionals how to build a culture like theirs.
• Their secret is that culture is their number one priority, from the CEO down. They have an
intense focus on customer service and build a culture that fosters that.
• In fact, culture is a large part of their interview process.
 Types of Organizational Change Initiatives

Leadership Change

• New leadership may mean many changes to come for an organization

• The need for new leadership at the top of an organization happens for many reasons, but
primarily because the company simply needed a change.
• In some cases, CEO transition is orderly and carefully managed, but in many other cases
the new CEO comes in to fix problems.
• In this latter case, one can expect the new leader to rapidly get to know the company,
make changes as quickly as possible and likely change his or her top management team.
 Types of Organizational Change Initiatives

Leadership Change

• Once the new leader is in place, you are likely to see some or many changes in corporate
culture.
• In many cases, the new CEO was hired because the company was struggling to grow,
perhaps may have had a legal or regulatory problem, or the company's strategy was not
producing the right results.
 Types of Organizational Change Initiatives

New leadership should understand how change affects employees

• One of the most stressful issues for employees to deal with might be the fact that their role,
position and internal network may suddenly disappear overnight once a new CEO takes hold and
starts making changes.
• They will need to have trust that the new leadership can steer them through uncharted territories.
• Only with that kind of confidence can employees feel safe enough to let go of some old biases
about how the company should operate, quickly become comfortable with new product and go-
to-market strategies and humble themselves to the fact that much of the reputation and
relationships they've built before may have to be rebuilt.
 Types of Organizational Change Initiatives

New leadership should understand how change affects employees

• These are difficult issues to deal with and are often why many employees consider leaving
when a new CEO and regime change takes place.
• On the positive side, however, a new CEO often means new energy, business growth and
opportunities to move in new directions.
• Gain the trust and confidence of employees and they will be energized with new
possibilities.
 Types of Organizational Change Initiatives

New leadership should understand how change affects employees

• Perhaps the most important thing to understand is that, in many cases, a new CEO will be
disruptive and unexpected, and employees will have to deal with the uncertainty that that
can cause.
• New leadership should make sure that they take the time to communicate how and why
new decisions have been made.
• If employees find the new leadership impossible to accept or understand, the company
may soon find itself facing the costly consequence of high turnover.
 Types of Organizational Change Initiatives

Quality Change
• Quality management helps companies improve their products' reliability, durability and
performance. These factors help differentiate a business from its competitors.
• Better products equal happier customers and higher revenue.
• “Quality means doing it right when no one is looking”. Henry Ford
• Change itself may be exceedingly difficult for an organization and the people employed
there.
• Quality initiatives often fail because leadership cannot accurately identify what problem
needs to change, instead jumping to immediate fixes that don’t truly address the
underlying issue.
 Types of Organizational Change Initiatives

• Lack of knowledge and skill among employees may also influence the success of quality
initiatives.
• Successful programs require advanced skills in navigating various levels of the
organization, and employees have not been adequately prepared to do so.
• Failure to allow enough time for a quality process to work usually results in project
failure.
• Successful changes require time to think and plan, and, in many cases, the planning phase
of the project is rushed.
• There should also be enough time to implement, evaluate, and rework any parts of the
quality initiative which don’t help the organization meet its goals.
 What is VUCA?

• Rapid advances in technology created an environment where the internet, smartphones,

and social media are ubiquitous, and global events such as the 2008 financial crisis, the
COVID pandemic, and, most recently, conflict in Ukraine, have increased the sense of
turbulence, danger and unpredictability.
• A state of flux has replaced the sense of certainty, stability and familiarity that people
were used to.
 What is VUCA?
This type of environment can be described using the "VUCA" acronym, which stands for
"Volatile," "Uncertain," "Complex," and "Ambiguous."
• The United States Army War College was one of the first organizations to use the VUCA
acronym, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.
• Military planners were worried about the radically different and unfamiliar international
security environment that had emerged, so they used VUCA to describe it.
 What is VUCA?
Why Is VUCA Important?

• Many people predict that volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity are going to
become more and more prevalent in the business world.

• To manage teams in the VUCA age, you should be aware of the changes that this kind of
environment can cause.
A VUCA environment can:
• Destabilize people and make them anxious.
• Sap their motivation.
• Thwart their career moves.
 What is VUCA?
Why Is VUCA Important?

A VUCA environment can:

• Make constant retraining and reshaping a necessity.

• Take huge amounts of time and effort to fight.
• Increase the chances of people making bad decisions.
• Paralyze decision-making processes.
• Jeopardize long-term projects, developments and innovations.
 What is VUCA?
Why Is VUCA Important?

A VUCA environment can:

• Overwhelm individuals and organizations.

• Take its toll on internal culture.
• "Bleed" inwards and create VUCA environments within organizations.
• If your industry or organization is affected by this environment, you have to reconsider the
way you and your business operate.
 What is VUCA?

VUCA stands for:

• Volatile – change is rapid and unpredictable in its nature and extent.

• Uncertain – the present is unclear, and the future is uncertain.
• Complex – many different, interconnected factors come into play, with the potential to
cause chaos and confusion.
• Ambiguous – there is a lack of clarity or awareness about situations.
How HRM can Help Businesses to Navigate the VUCA Environment
• HRM can recruit, select, develop and promote people who thrive in VUCA environments.
These people are likely collaborative, comfortable with ambiguity and change, and have
complex thinking skills.
• Encourage employees to think and work outside of their usual functional areas, to increase
their knowledge and experience. Job rotation and cross training can be excellent ways to
improve team agility.
• Reward team members who demonstrate vision, understanding, clarity, and agility.
• Embrace an "ideas culture.“ Kevin Roberts, of advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi,
coined this alternative VUCA definition: "Vibrant, unreal, crazy, and astounding." This
describes the kind of energetic culture that can give teams and organizations a creative,
agile edge in uncertain times.
 Barriers to Managing in a VUCA World

• One of the biggest challenges of managing in a VUCA world is team members who resist
change. They may refuse to accept that the world has evolved, want to stick with "tried
and tested" methods, or simply fail to see the full picture. They might even be paralyzed
by fear and fail to take action.
• The unpredictability of VUCA often renders traditional, top-down organizational
structures obsolete, so avoid using an inflexible, autocratic leadership style.
• In a VUCA world, collaboration, participation, debate, and even dissent are more
important than obedience, command and groupthink – they allow you to remain flexible
and to take action quickly.
 Review Activity
• Quizziz.com
 Reference

• 360 Training. (2022). Change Initiative: Keys to Change in Your Organization.

https://www.360training.com/blog/change-initiative#:~:text=The%20change%20initiative
%20definition%20includes,Take%20advantage%20of%20an%20opportunity
• Bennett. N., Lemoine G.J. (2014). What VUCA Really Means for You
https://hbr.org/2014/01/what-vuca-really-means-for-you
• Bersin. J. (2017). What to Expect from Leadership Changes at the Top. What to Expect From
Leadership Changes at the Top | Entrepreneur
• Mind Tools Content Team. (2022). https://www.mindtools.com/asnydwg/managing-in-a- vuca-
world
• Indeed Editorial Team. (2022). What is process change in change management? (With
tips)https://uk.indeed.com/career- advice/career- development/process-
change#:~:text=Process%20change%20refers%20to%20the,its%20equipment%20or%2
0handles%20data.
 Reference

• MrSimplify. (2023 January 23). What is VUCA? How is it countered?- Simplest Explanation
Eve.r. (Video.) YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJszAeamSGw
• Perrucci. D. (2023). How to Successfully Manage Culture Change in the Workplace.
https://www.bamboohr.com/blog/how-to-manage-culture-change
• QI Roadmap. (2023). Change Management. https://virtualcommunities.naccho.org/qi-
roadmap/changemanagement#:~:text=Culture%20of%20Quality%20and%20Ch ange
%20Management&text=Quality%20improvement%20(QI)%20i s%20about,goals%2C
%20practices%2C%20and%20processes.