Page 683 - Business Principles and Management

Unit 7

25.2 Managing Organizational Change

Goals Terms
• Summarize the major steps in plan- • performance • job enlargement
ning and implementing an organi- standards • cross training
zational development program. • job design • job enrichment
• Discuss three job design strategies
that can increase employee
satisfaction.

Planning Organizational Development Programs

As soon as the company identifies a problem or a need for change, it should plan
and implement an organizational development program. Because almost all im-
portant changes in a business involve or affect employees, the human resources
department should have an important role in the program. The changes may
involve developing new employee skills or increasing or decreasing the size of the
workforce. A change or major reorganization may affect management-employee
relationships. The company may decide to change the pay or benefits plans to
encourage employee participation or to reduce costs.
The major steps in planning and implementing an organizational development
program are the following:
1. Affirm the mission and goals of the organization. There must be agreement
within the company about the purpose of the business and the criteria used
to determine if the company is successful. A company should not easily
change its mission or goals but may need to change them in response to the
external and internal environment.
2. Identify the important markets that will be the company’s primary focus
and the products and services needed to serve those markets. This step
will require establishing customer service standards. You have learned
that a standard is a specific measure against which something is judged.
Customer service standards, then, are measures against which the com-
pany judges its performance in meeting customer expectations. Those
standards may include the minimum acceptable levels of product quality,
delivery speed, order-fulfillment accuracy, and customer support and
follow-up.
3. Determine the organizational changes required to achieve the company’s
mission, goals, and customer service standards, and prepare a plan for
implementing the changes. These will usually involve one or more of the
following factors: work processes, the organizational structure, work rela-
tionships, and employee skills. Also, the plan should include performance
standards, which are specific statements of the expected results from crit-
ical business activities. Most organizational development changes require
a long time to implement successfully. Implementation may take many
months, and the company may not see results for a year or more.

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