Changing the Culture

Creating and sustaining the long-term adjustments that come with culture change is often most challenging. The change will demand new behaviours from team members and that often don’t feel right, almost as if it is at odds with established corporate culture norms—especially if your company historically focused on operational predictability and efficiency.

A culture change doesn’t happen overnight, though. Behaviours are embedded deeply in people and moving your employees toward the vision you have requires an understanding of what motivates people to change.

It is therefore important for you as the manager to understand how to change work, how people respond to change and how to implement a change process.

Change

Change is an integral part of our society. For business organisations, change often comes so rapidly that they scarcely adjusted before even more change takes place. The challenge for management is to recognise when change is necessary and even more important, the ability to make changes when it is necessary to do so. This implies that change is not only something that an organisation should react to, but that organisations could and should anticipate when change is essential, and then implement pro-active or planned changes. Balogun & Hailey argue that organisational change has three components:

• The changing context, which refers to the why of change,
• The change content, referring to what of change, and
• The change process refers to the how of change.