Change Management Plan Template

1

Establishment of the culture of innovation:

Any procedure of change is very difficult to manage as employees always have a habit of resisting it. Therefore, development of positive minds for responding to the changes easily is important for making the whole procedure simple as well as successful. Creating a change in the environment for establishing a culture of creativity as well as change acceptance in the organizational centre is important (Hayes, 2018). This makes it a very important goal for change management. Establishment of the culture that is not only creative but also accepts changes should be one of the highest priority objectives for change management practices.

2

Building of the employee morale:

When employees experience changes, even though smaller ones, they would like to know that the organizational had also thought of their benefits and have considered their needs in account. Therefore, one of the goal of any change management would be to ensure that employees do not feel at the receiving end as this might affect their morale and have the capability of affecting their productivity as well (Doppelt, 2017). An effective change management should have such a goal that would have the capability of shifting the disgruntled employees towards a set of employees who would be feeling energized as well as empowered by the changes.

3

Increasing the project return for the investment made:

When an organization is seen to make spend a huge amount of money for the development as well as the implement of a new business tool, it is natural for them to believe that the employees should be utilizing the tool in their activities and tasks (Kash et al., 2014). The investment becomes futile if the employees fail to use the tool. Therefore, the main important goal for the change management is to help the employees in incorporating a change into the different approaches by which they perform their work so that the implemented action can have a desired effect.

1

Organizational effectiveness and employee efficiency

One of the most important requirements in the healthcare industry is the safe and quality care of the service users and change management in such organizations should always ensure that it gives the scope to the healthcare professionals for enhancing their knowledge and skills and be up-to-date (Ginter, Duncan & Swayne, 2018). Introduction of policies and guidelines or introduction of new form of technologies can make it difficult for the employees to adapt to in the beginning months but in the end, it will ensure safe and quality care, error-free diagnosis and documentation and many others. Better patient satisfaction would be ensured which will bring in more business to the organization ensuring organizational effectiveness

Organizational culture is the system of shared values, beliefs as well as assumptions and norms that unite the different members of the organization. It helps in reflecting the views of employees regarding the things that are done and the approaches that are followed for completing the tasks, reaching the goals to meet the organizational mission and vision. In order to survive in the competitive world, it is important for every organization and their culture to continuously evolve and change (Lewis, Passmore &Cantore, 2016). Organization culture has the ability to facilitate or inhibiting the change in an organization. Often there are many situations where the current organizational culture might be hindering the attainment of the corporate goals and therefore, organizational culture in such situation needs to be altered to meet the goals through change management. For example, the organizational culture does not practice effective communication among the different levels and this might hinder the change management plan for patient safety. Therefore, the organizational culture needs to be modified ensuring smooth communication among all employees.

Stakeholder analysis is the procedure by which identification of the influence, position, significance as well as the behavior of the stakeholders takes place for determination of the necessary actions required for the success of ten tended program, project as well as the assignment. This is an important aspect for change management as it provides the scope for identification of every stakeholder who would be impacted by the change program (Wager, Lee & Glaser, 2017). This would also include the analysis of the ways by which each of the stakeholders would be impinging on the change program. It is important for the change leaders to consider the expectations and needs of all the stakeholders outside and inside the organization in relation to the potential change before undertaking change initiatives to prevent negative outcome.

Researchers are of the opinion that in absence of proper communication plan, the total change management plan might become a total failure. Over communication or no communication are both undesirable as they have the capability of destroying employee morale, misunderstanding, loss of trust and respect among the hierarchal levels, confusion among employees, poor work output and many others. When the communication plans are developed and designed efficiently, it helps in the building of the awareness as well as help in getting subsequent support for the entire programs. The communication plan should be such that it would address the questions of employees regarding “how, what, when and why” of the changes from people perspectives (Kuiper et al., 2014). These would ensure employee morale and lessened chances of conflicts.

The role of the leaders during the times of change management is to help people to buy in their visions for the organization. The leaders should not only communicate the changes but also ensure to provide himself as the role model to follow by the employees in aligning with change. They need to motivate them to work beyond their potential in the new environment to meet their change and for that they practice-individualized influence, they tend to attend on to the problems faced by each in the times of change management and accordingly provide options for overcoming the barriers. He also has to take on the role of being a sponsor where he should be taking the initiative of not letting the change initiative die from lack of attention (Al-Hadad & Kotnour, 2015). They need to use their political power for making the changes happen. They also need to be accountable and transparent. They need to foster a desire and commitment for fixing problems for yielding the best results and this will encourage employees to embrace a similar open and transparent no-blame attitude towards their performance.

An effective evaluation is important in change management as it helps in providing a framework as well as information for the strategic planning efforts. It also helps in analyzing that whether the actions that are being taken are providing effective outcome or are in need of adjustment. It also helps in identifying the different opportunities for new or increased improvements. It also helps in justification of actions to the others for validation, increased support as well as future responses (Yoder-Wise, 2014).  Evaluating the change initiatives help the change leaders to understand whether further improvements are required. If the change procedures had failed, it would also be helpful for the managers to evaluate the reasons for the fault of the program.

1

Improper organizational culture

Improper organizational culture is one of the barriers to change management success. Organizational culture has the capability of facilitating as well as inhibiting implementation of change initiatives. This should be explained with the help of an example. An organization might have a culture where employees do not want to take risks and believe in safe handling of tasks, activities and decisions. In such situation, such organizational culture might make the employees resistant to change resulting in high level of disruption of smooth flow of work and productivity (Kagermann, 2015). This resistance to change might simply come from the situation as employees in the organization had always enjoyed a culture of safety and stability that never encouraged them in risk-taking. Therefore, in this way, organizational culture might act as a barrier.

2

Poor communication

Poor communication is another barrier as it directly affects the employee morale. Many organizations are seen to believe in passing of information in top-down manner that affects the morale of employees. They feel that the authorities regarding the change management do not address their suggestions, opinions and queries. They feel that their suggestions are not respected and in this way, on-way communication impedes change management. Many of them become anxious and fearful, as they believe that such changes might create instability in the system that makes them uncomfortable and weary (Burke, 2017). Therefore effective feedback exchange and two way communication is extremely important in this situations.

3

Improper leadership

Improper leadership might impede change management by directly affecting employee morale. Leaders of autocratic nature can never lead changes successfully as they lack the eligibility to motivate employees and align them with the organizational goals. Strictness and firm behaviors along with reward-punishment attributes can never ensure employee productivity in such change management situations (Finkler, Ward &Calabrese, 2018). Employees remain anxious and concerned about their stability and in such situation transformational leadership is important. Taking individual control over all decisions with little input from employees affects their morale and they might feel lack of guidance and empathy. This would have negative outcomes.

1

Healthcare professionals:

the initiatives would be highly beneficial for the healthcare workers. This is mainly because they would get the scope of learning new things about handling their patients in a much better way. They would be not only ensuring safe practices but they would be also practicing evidence based care that would increase the quality of the service to patients. In this way, a safety culture would be developed which would ensure patient satisfaction.

2

Healthcare authority

This change management would ensure safe care for patients. This would result in patient satisfaction and word of mouth publicity. This in turn helps in increasing the revenue collection, profitability and meeting the organizational goals and vision (Koesek et al., 2015).

1

Force field analysis

This is one of the most important tools that help in providing an initial view of the change problems that need to be tackled. This is mainly useful in highlighting the driver for the change as well as the change inhibitors. This tool was developed by a social psychologist that put forward the idea that for change to be successful the driving forces need to be strengthened and resisting forces need to be weakened. Therefore, force field analysis would help leaders during the planning phase to understand the different strong inhibitors and accordingly they would focus on the benefits of the new changes to get support for employees.

2

Flow-charting

It is important for the leaders to make a flow-chart for all the different organizational procedures. It mainly helps in serving as a visual sketch mainly for those in the organization who does not have broader view of some of the key processes in the organization. This is one of the simplest way for getting people on board with where a company is at ad where it should be. One useful exercise is having the managers all draw important what they consider the current organizational flowchart to be like. It is often found that huge variety in how different people perceive the key procedures of the organizations. These misunderstandings are easily dealt with this tool before moving on the next stage, which is implementation.

1

Culture mapping:

One of the most important tools which is used in the management execution step is the culture mapping. Every organization has their own culture and their own ways of doing things. They have their own ways of executing values, concepts, practices and norms. The change leaders should undertake culture mapping effectively and devise out plans before hand for implementing the changes so that resistance can be avoided. At times, resistance of the employees to anything new is so strong that planned initiatives might fail (Bloom et al., 2015). Therefore, professionals would be mapping the culture and change exiting paradigms and thereby maintain the organizational culture so that chances initiatives do not fail.

2

Conflict resolution tool:

Often during management and execution of the change initiatives, often researchers have noticed the presence of “us and them” mentality. Therefore, it is important for the leaders to develop good conflict management techniques for understanding and resolving such issues. Therefore strategies need to be adopted which results in win-win situations where both the parties would be gaining without massive loss on each side and small amount of compromises than lose-lose or lose-win situations. In such situations, leaders need to have good critical reasoning skills, negotiation skills as well as decision-making skills in order to understand the rationale of the conflicts and accordingly try to implement initiatives to overcome the barriers (Barr & Dowding, 2015).

1

Surveys and questionnaires:

This tool is mainly a research-based method for collecting information from the employees after the change initiatives had been already implemented. It helps in identifying the stakeholder’s expectations and thereby help to understand the satisfaction levels of the employees. This tool also helps in understanding the specific areas of the improvement and thereby takes initiatives for reconsidering the change-management steps and the ways to help the employees to achieve the goals successfully. These are seen to be great tools for accumulation of information from a diverse as well as the large audiences for standard list of questions successfully.

2

Interviews

Interviews are another change management tool that is important for soliciting information about specific issues faced by the professionals in the change management. This should be taken when the leaders want to collect quality information. It might happen that the change management plan had not become successful due to employee non-compliance. In such arenas, it is very important for the leaders to know what the employees actually feel and why they have not helped with the initiatives. In such arenas, it is important for the interviewers to understand the reasons for failure of the work so that accordingly they can take actions for the future (Borkowski, 2015).

Change management is one of the most important aspects of management. Every organization needs to develop effective strategies by which they can keep up with the present competition in the market and provide the best services to the service users. In the healthcare industry, it is very important to ensure safe and quality practice by the healthcare organizations and accordingly higher authorities should initiate change management by which they can ensure best service to patient and increase their revenues. In case of maintenance of safety standards, effective team working, proper meeting of patient requirements, utilization of technologies in the healthcare and many others, often change management is important. Therefore, I would try to ensure undertaking of actions that would help me to ensuring change management successfully. Effective leadership, proper communication planning, showing of empathy, motivating the employees, establishing tow way communication and many others are the effective ways by which I can ensure effective change management. Previously, I was not aware of the different tools that I should us in the different phases of change management. With the help of the assignment, I had been able to come across a number of tools that I can use successfully when I become the change leaders. It would help me in uninterrupted management of the change initiatives helping the organization to meet its goal.