Kotter’s Eight Steps of Change Management are used to implement and manage the changes within the organization. Dr. Kotter’s orderly steps identify and extract the critical success factors required to implement the change across the organization. These critical factors combine with stepwise procedures to develop these eight steps to lead the change. For the sake of discussion, we will select work from home strategy to be implemented at the organization due to the recent pandemic COVID-19, which has created the demand for social distancing.
Step 1 Prepare a sense of urgency among the staff members.
Employees of organizations only adopt the changes when they realize the sense of urgency and its positive impacts. Initial motivations among the team members help move the matter in the desired direction for implementation changes. Further, there may be an honest and persuasive discussion about the current situation in the market place. For such implementation, at least 70% of the staff members agree with the urgency needs.
Concerning the implementation of work from home strategy, the staff member needs to realize the importance of social distancing. Such distancing will enable to prevention spread of this pandemic and ensure employee health safety.
Step 2 Prepare an influential coalition
Convincing the employees of the organization for the necessary implementation of change is the key to success. For such purpose, the leaders need to identify the influential people at the organization. These people need to be influenced by emotional commitments towards coalition change. They will work for the building team and make sure that they have the right combination of people from different departments and levels within the organization (Haas et al., 2020).
Work from the home strategy will require implementing different levels and departments such as marketing, operations, Accounts, finance, and customer services. Each department shall have one focal point that will facilitate the employees of their department to adopt this strategy while working from home. These focal persons will report to the project head of work from the home strategy for any problem resolution changes.
Step 3 Creation of vision for change implementation
A vision statement guides staff members to where the organization is supposed to reach. Such a vision will require a detailed plan to reach to vision destination. The details plan will be formed after applying the filter to different thoughts and resolutions. Staff members will consider the impact of change over these plans for vision destination. The impact of change over the organizational vision needs to address by focal coalition people. These people shall enable the staff member to realize that change is desirable for its vision and mission statement.
Focal persons of each department shall carry out the meeting with staff members to display the importance of such change by demonstrating change with the organization’s vision. The organizational priority is to reach the vision goals, and for such goals, it is essential to staff members’ health safety. Such social distancing while work from home will reduce the impact of COVID over employees’ health and enable them to work efficiently.
Step 4 Effective communication of organizational vision behind change
Communication of organizational vision behind the implementation of desire change will determine the success of the implementation. The leaders shall repetitively emphasize substantial completion to enable staff to realize the real heat for a change. Any distress, anxieties, and troubles for staff shall be discussed with leaders to adopt rapid solutions across the organization. Team leaders shall demonstrate the example for communication of organizational vision (Baloh et al., 2018)
The human resource department can play a role in the implementation of work from the home strategy. Staff communications via emails shall emphasize work as it was carried out while sitting at the office. Procedures such as login to the system during the office timing with proper dressing shall be communicated to employees via email and other means of communication. The focal person shall use walk the talk strategy as actions speak louder than words.
step 5 Remove obstacles
It is assumed that after the realization of change and vision communication to staff members, there may be certain obstacles and problems that may arrive during the implementation phase. To remove the barriers of resistance or problems, the team leaders shall hire the change leader’s professionals whose primary responsibility is to review the structure at the organization, describe the job, and staff performance towards change implementation. Identifying reasons for the barriers in implementation and eliminating those goals is the primary motive of these change leader professionals.
Working from home may have certain hurdles, such as the availability of internet connections and working devices such as laptops to connect virtually from home. Information technology problems related to employee training shall be addressed to provide manual guides to implement work strategy work. Softwares such as Zoom or Teams shall be used to have inter-department video communications. The focal person of each department shall be responsible for removing the obstacles.
Step 6 Short term target wins.
Significant implementation required long term commitments from the staff. It usually required more than one year to implement. Create several short term targets in order to have a taste of victory to staff members. Employees’ resistance can be eliminated through celebration and reward compensation for short term targets accomplishment. For these purposes, team leaders shall opt small and easily target first. Avoid the selection of challenging targets initially (Rajan and Ganesan, 2017).
The team leadership shall implement wise department implementation of work from the home strategy. Departments which are having fewer employees shall immediately shift to this strategy. Those departments with several remote locations shall be implemented at a later stage. Such implementations shall be communicated via the human resource department and the announcement of reward to a staff member.
Step 7 Celebration before victory
Dr. Kotter suggests that the celebration of small targets is beneficial to staff motivation towards change implementation. However, harmful if the impression of victory has been declared before the completion of the entire implementation. Therefore every small success shall be backed by details gap analysis and further recommendations. The organization shall apply the use of the Kaizen concept of continuous improvement.
After implementing work from home strategy at any department, leaders shall focus on mistakes and gaps that are needed to be addressed for further implementation of strategies at other departments. These gaps may include laptops, internet connecting devices, security firewalls, and VPN licenses for further utilizations.
Step 8 Embed these changes in the corporate culture of the organization
Dr. Kotter Senior Management, including a board member, shall embed the change in the organization’s corporate culture. Repetitive progress reports and sharing the success stories to various platforms encourage motivation among staff members. Change implementation shall become part of the induction pack of new hiring staff. The staff members and team leaders who played a vital role shall be remembered at a public gathering and recognize their efforts. Succession planning shall be implemented to intact the implementation of corporate culture via upcoming leaders.
The organization shall ensure the work from strategy shall become part of training for new staff. Schedules shall be developed for different staff members to work from home and ensure compliance with management’s standardized procedure. Internal Audit shall ensure the checking of compliance with the change in implementations.
References
Haas, M.R., Munzer, B.W., Santen, S.A., Hopson, L.R., Haas, N.L., Overbeek, D., Peterson, W.J., Cranford, J.A. and Huang, R.D., 2020. # DidacticsRevolution: Applying Kotter’s 8-Step Change Management Model to Residency Didactics. Western Journal of Emergency Medicine, 21(1), p.65.
Baloh, J., Zhu, X. and Ward, M.M., 2018. Implementing team huddles in small rural hospitals: How does the Kotter model of change apply?. Journal of nursing management, 26(5), pp.571-578.
Rajan, R., and Ganesan, R., 2017. A critical analysis of John P. Kotter’s change management framework. Asian Journal of Research in Business Economics and Management, 7(7), pp.181-203.
