How to Anchor Change on Organizational Culture and Processes

How to Anchor Change on Organizational Culture and Processes
Introduction
Health care professionals should recognize that change is inevitable in the workplace. Change presents many challenges that the nurse leader should manage strategically. Strategic leadership positions the health care organization to achieve its mission and vision, despite the challenges related to change adoption and implementation. Strategic change management includes periodically reinventing the organization and changing the services, processes, products, and stakeholder value to meet emergent demands in the health care delivery landscape. This paper explains why change is hard to implement for many facilities, the need to prepare for different change phases, how to anchor change on organizational culture and processes, and the best approach to include diversity awareness in the organization to enhance inclusivity. The report also incorporates a 30-question survey exploring change preparedness among health care leaders, stakeholders, and the entire organization.
Part 1 Response
Several factors make it increasingly challenging to implement change in health care organizations. First, change is difficult to implement due to a lack of shared understanding concerning its dynamics (Walston, 2018). For example, it becomes increasingly challenging to implement change when the organizational leaders fail to base it on environmental analysis, key stakeholders, and other sources to foster the need for such changes. Environmental pressures augment where structures lead to quality improvement expectations, reduced costs, and demands to meet the need of all the involved stakeholders. Second, stakeholder resistance is another crucial factor that makes change difficult to implement for health care organizations. However, staff resistance can be conceptualized as a normal reaction to strategic change (Walston, 2018). The organizational leaders should identify the source, the degree, and the depth of the resistance and eliminate other barriers to change.
According to Walston (2018), change entails three interrelated and sequential phases: (a) pre-change preparations, (b) implementation, and (c) maintenance or sustenance. Leaders should appropriately prepare their organization for strategic change in order to properly executive the change and embed such changes in the organizational culture and environmental context. Unfreezing enables the corporate members to recognize the need for change, share the vision and mission, create a sense of urgency, and cultivate enabling coalitions. Failure to prepare for the change implies that each stage will not be effectively completed, thus putting the strategic change efforts at risk (Walston, 2018). In addition, preparing for each changing phase ensure that the leaders identify and address resistance and obstacles to achieve short-term wins.
Change can be anchored on the facility’s processes and culture through communicating success milestones achieved. Demonstrating short-term wins motivates the organization to embrace the change and make it part and parcel of the overall culture and processes. It can also be embedded by making continuous efforts to ensure the benefits and anticipated outcomes of the change are visibl...