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 visible and understood. It was also necessary to track the change initiative implementation periodically while considering staff feedback (Walston, 2018). This allows staff to make essential alterations to the change and achieve the desired processes and organizational culture. Other approaches suggested by Walston to anchor change and track the milestones of the change effort include using visual management techniques and audits or checklists to establish necessary actions and ensure accountability (2018).
The best way to include diversity awareness for all organizational staff to make inclusivity a central component of the business model is to base such efforts on Lewin’s change model. This includes recognizing the need for diversity education, communicating the program’s objective, instilling a sense of urgency, and forming solid coalitions for the change as part of the unfreezing stage. In implementing the diversity education program, the nurse administrator should establish resistance, eliminate the obstacles, and document the short-term wins. Lastly, the nurse leader should anchor the diversity awareness program on the facility’s processes and culture to make it a central component of its business model (Walston, 2018).
Part 2 Response
After reviewing the second chapter of Cameron and Quinn’s (2011) book, and based on Inova Fairfax Hospital in Northern Virginia, the following survey questions exploring change preparedness among the facility leaders, stakeholders, and the overall organization emerged. In addition to addressing diversity and inclusion needs in healthcare, the survey questions are tailored to meet the Triple Aim framework to enhance patient care experiences, improve population health outcomes, and reduce health care costs (Obucina et al., 2018).
Change Preparedness Survey Questions for Inova Fairfax Hospital
* How often have you led diversity education programs to enhance the patient experience in the organization?
(a) Never (b) Once (c) Twice (d) Three to four times (e) Many times.
* How often have you led community health education programs?
(a) Never (b) Once (c) Twice (d) Three to four times (e) Many times.
* How often have you moved closer to the clients to reduce their costs of accessing health care?
(a) Never (b) Once (c) Twice (d) Three t...