Organizational culture and organizational change are complex concepts that can be difficult to distinguish, yet they are undeniably intertwined.
During my consulting career, I’ve seen many corporate leaders react with surprise when presented with a recommendation to embark on a culture transformation program. They are often under the impression that since, for example, a business transformation program has a change manager resource budgeted for, any change resistance (whether project-specific or cultural) would be identified and managed as well. This assumption often arises because an organization’s change management framework and methodology are indeed applicable to support both cultural behavioral change and organizational situational change.
To cause further confusion, organizational culture can both enhance and impede organizational change depending on the situation. Change management anticipates uncertainty and handles resistance to new ways of working by actioning a strategy for maximum adoption of the change being delivered. Yet some barriers to adoption are embedded in the organization’s social norms and therefore are cultural at a macro level.
To begin to articulate how organizational change, culture change, and change management intersect and weave harmoniously together, it helps to start with their definitions.
What is change management?
Change management is the term used to describe a structured approach to helping individuals, teams, and organizations understand, prepare, support, and embed changes being implemented to processes, systems, policies, and people. In short, its aim is to get people ready for their changing world.
What is organizational change management?
While change management refers to a process followed to ensure a smooth and successful transition, organizational change management (OCM) considers the full enterprise change portfolio in the context of the business transformation strategy.
What is culture change?
On the other hand, culture change involves looking at the underlying decision-making DNA of the company members and aligning what is deeply embedded in staff values, assumptions, behaviors, and attitudes with the company’s unique purpose and strategy and vice-versa.
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# When to use what — and how are change management, organization change management, and culture change all related?
When conducting change management activities for a project, teams often uncover systemic behavioral issues (culture weaknesses) affecting change adoption, and likely also affecting the organization’s overall performance. In this instance, we would use our project’s risk management process to highlight the issue and its likely consequences to the leadership team who then has the power and influence to understand and act on this information. Of course, we would also use our culture transformation skills to influence the behavior at the project stakeholder level, but we cannot expect the project to take on the entire organization’s cultural shift as additional scope. Plus, that’s not the project change manager’s role.
Related Content: How to Win at Organizational Change Management
For example, I previously worked for a utility company whose goal was to link the city’s entire water and sewer network to the geographical information system by 2019. They set out to be leaders in disaster management as the city was experiencing increased flooding over time. It was a $21 million dollar project spanning three years. Once the technology was implemented, the outdoor workforce members were given tablets and tasked with collecting location and condition data for all assets within the water and sewer network.
Unfortunately, nobody assessed the cultural impacts of the change prior to delivery. Most of the outdoor workforce were expert sewer maintenance workers, plumbers, and engineers in the fifty-plus age demographic. They were highly skilled at their physical work however technology was not their forte and neither was adaptability. Additionally, most of them were not mobile phone users, so introducing mobile devices to their everyday work processes caused an immense amount of distress and frustration. Asking people with no prior experience with data to trust the dots they see on a screen rather than going to look inside their underground network was completely unrealistic, especially knowing peoples’ lives were at stake in a flood emergency. High-performing teams became demotivated under-performers lacking confidence and expertise.
The change program failed, resulting in huge financial losses. If the mindset shift had been addressed prior to the delivery of mobile devices, they could have implemented strategies to handle these impacts long before embarking on the data capture stage.
Additionally, utilizing the organization’s change management framework to manage the culture change would have provided a change management methodology and toolkit, as well as a realistic timeframe, budget, and resources to deal with the risk in advance.
# In Summary
Change management is a process for smoothly transitioning people from an existing to a new way of working, as well as for transitioning people from an existing organizational culture to a new culture that better supports the current and future business strategy. In some instances, the culture change is confined to the project stakeholders and relates specifically to the broader change project, in which case the change manager can manage it as part of the project’s adoption strategy. However, where the culture gap is systemic and exists at the macro level, a culture transformation program would likely mitigate or negate the harmful effects on staff well-being and performance and help retain the organization’s good people.
Learn more about the value of culture change and how to get leaders to invest in it in the second part of this blog series.
