CHANGE MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES

Change Management Strategies

Change Management Strategies

Scenario

A registered nurse (RN) who recently commenced work in the paediatric ward of a regional hospital was asked by the Director of Nursing to review and rewrite the hospital's Paediatric Gastroenteritis Policy. The RN was interested in revising the policy as they had a sound background in paediatric nursing having worked in a Children's Hospital in a metropolitan area for the past three years. They had also noted that the regional Hospital's current gastroenteritis policy was lacking when compared to evidence based practice and major tertiary paediatric policies. The revised policy has been approved and introduced into the ward for implementation however the RN has noticed there is resistance to its use from the paediatric ward's long term staff.

Introduction

Organizational change can be described as the process of moving away from a current condition to realize some future state.  Change management involves managing the process of achieving this future state. (Nickols, 2004)   Change can be viewed from two vantage points, that of the people making the changes and that of the people experiencing the changes. In the top-down, or strategic viewpoint associated with management, the focus is on technical issues such as the investment required, the processes for implementing the change, how soon the change can be realized, and the outcome.  In the bottom-up viewpoint of the employee, the focus is on what the change means to the individual, how they can cope with the change, and also how management can assist them through the transition.  In this context, effective change management should be able to help individuals evolve from negative feelings such as fear and anxiety towards positive feelings about the changes being made. Effective change management deals with diagnosing problems and determining an alternative that involves changing the organizational structure or processes.  It also identifies and deals with the individual responses to change that can hinder the success of the project.  To understand change management better, we need to understand the various models and strategies that managers may follow. 

The emphasis placed on the three types of questions just mentioned reflects the management mindset, that is, the tendency to think along certain lines depending on where one is situated in the organization. A person's placement in the organization typically defines the scope and scale of the kinds of changes with which he or she will become involved, and the nature of the changes with which he or she will be concerned. Thus, the systems people tend to be concerned with technology and technological developments, the marketing people with customer needs and competitive activity, the legal people with legislative and other regulatory actions, and so on. Also, the higher up a person is in the hierarchy, the longer the time perspective and the wider the range of issues with which he or she must be concerned.

For the most part, changes and the change problems they present are problems of adaptation, that is, they require of the organization only that it adjust to ...