google change management case study

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• Published: 19 December 2017

GOOGLE: a reflection of culture, leader, and management

• Sang Kim Tran 1 , 2  

International Journal of Corporate Social Responsibility volume  2 , Article number:  10 ( 2017 ) Cite this article

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This paper provides a viewpoint of the culture and subcultures at Google Inc., which is a famous global company, and has a huge engineering staff and many talented leaders. Through its history of development, it has had positive impacts on society; however; there have been management challenges. The Board of Directors (BoDs) developed and implemented a way to measure the abilities of their managers, which helped to identify problems. This paper will analyze the case study of Harvard Business Review, Oxygen Project, and clarify the management problem in Google’s organization. It will also compare Google with Zappos, a much smaller organization, and present how the BoDs of Zappos assesses its culture and subcultures. In this paper, we will recommend eight important points to building an organizational culture that is positive for stable growth of a company. We believe that much of what be learned could be useful to other business leaders, regardless of company scale.

Introduction

In a large society, each company is considered a miniature society (Mawere 2011 ). Similar to large societies with large cultures, small societies also need to build their own cultures. A culture is influenced by many factors and determines if it is a great culture. Corporate culture requires both the attention to the efficiency of production and business and to the relationship among people in the organization closely (Bhagat et al. 2012 ). Regardless if it is a large or a small organization, it must encounter issues of cooperation among individuals and groups. There are many factors leading to the success of business process re-engineering in higher education (BPR), the main four elements are culture, processes, structure, and technology. Culture is listed as number one (Ahmad et al. 2007 ). Hence, culture becomes the most important factor to the success of the development of a business. Organizational culture is the set of shared beliefs (Steiber and Alänge 2016 ), values, and norms that influence the way members think, feel, and behave. Culture is created by means of terminal and instrumental values, heroes, rites and rituals, and communication networks (Barman n.d. ). The primary methods of maintaining organizational culture are through the socialization process by which an individual learns the values, expected behaviors, and necessary social knowledge to assume their roles in the organization. In addition, (Gupta and Govindarajan 2000 ) and Fig.  1 in (Ismail Al-Alawi et al. 2007 ) illustrates that culture was established by six major factors, such as information systems, people, process, leadership, rewarding system, and organization structure. Therefore, there is a wide variety of combined and sophisticated cultures in the workplace, especially in big corporations like Google, Facebook, Proctor & Gamble, etc. Each organization tends to have a common goal, which is to create a culture that is different from other companies and to promote their teams to be creative in developing a distinctive culture (Stimpson and Farquharson 2014 ). Clearly, we can see that Google’s culture is different than others. What makes this company unique and different from others, as well as the dominant cultures and subcultures existing at this company? How do leadership behaviors impact the organizational culture? By operating a case study of a Harvard Business Review to analyze its organizational culture, subsequently, having compared it with Zappos’ culture, this paper will clarify the similarities and differences in managing organizational cultures between them and consider whether the solutions for the problems can be applied to other business models, and for tomorrow leaders or not?

Trends of using product by information searching

Company overview

This part shows how Google became famous in the world and its culture and subcultures made it a special case for others to take into consideration. Google is one of the few technology companies which continue to have one of the fastest growth rates in the world. It began by creating a search engine that combined PageRank system, developed by Larry Page (ranking the importance of websites based on external links), and Web search engine, created by Sergey Brin (accessing a website and recording its content), two co-founders of the company (Jarvis 2011 ; Downes 2007 ). Google’s achievements absolutely do not come from any luck. Google has made extra efforts in creating an index of a number of websites, which have been up to 25 billion websites. This also includes 17 million images and one billion messages to Usenet group (Downes 2007 ). Besides searching for websites, Google users are able to search for PDF files, PostScript, documents, as well as Microsoft, Lotus, PowerPoint and Shockwave files. Google processes nearly 50% of search queries all over the world. Moreover, it is the number one search option for web users and is one of the top five websites on the Internet, which have more than 380 million users and 28 billion visits every month, and more than 50% of access from countries outside the US (Desjardins 2017 ). Google’s technology is rather special: it can analyze millions of different variables of users and businesses who place advertisements. It then connects them with millions of potential advertisements and gives messages of advertisement, which is closest to objects in less than one second. Thus, Google has the higher rate of users clicking advertisements than its opponent Yahoo, from 50 to 100%, and it dominates over 70% market share of paid advertisements (Rosenberg 2016 ). Google’s self-stated mission: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful (Alves n.d. ).” Nowadays, it is believed that people in the world like “Google” with words “the useful-lively information storage”.

Predominant culture at Google

The dominant culture in the organization depends on the environment in which the company operates the organization’s objectives, the belief system of the employees, and the company’s management style. Therefore, there are many organizational cultures (Schein 2017 ). The Exhibit 3.1 at page 39 in (Schein 2009 ) provides what culture is about. For example, employee follows a standard procedure with a strict adherence to hierarchy and well-defined individual roles and responsibilities. Those in competitive environments, such as sales may forget strict hierarchies and follow a competitive culture where the focus is on maintaining strong relationships with external parties. In this instance, the strategy is to attain competitive advantages over the competition. The collaborative culture is yet another organizational way of life. This culture presents a decentralized workforce with integrated units working together to find solutions to problems or failure.

Why do many large companies buy its innovation? Because its dominant culture of 99% defect-free operational excellence squashes any attempts at innovation, just like a Sumo wrestler sitting on a small gymnast (Grossman-Kahn and Rosensweig 2012 ). They cannot accept failures. In fact, failure is a necessary part of innovation and Google took this change by Oxygen Project to measure the abilities of their multicultural managers. This means that Google itself possesses multiple different cultures (see Google’s clips). Like Zappos, Google had established a common, organizational culture for the whole offices that are distinctive from the others. The predominant culture aimed at Google is an open culture, where everybody and customer can freely contribute their ideas and opinions to create more comfortable and friendly working environment (Hsieh 2010a ).

The fig.  2 .1 in chapter two of (Schein 2009 ) and page 17 in part one of (Schein 2017 ) provide us three levels of culture which are Artifacts, Espoused values and Underlying assumptions helping us to understand the culture at Google. At page 84, in (Schein 2009 ), the “artifacts” are identified such as dress codes, level of formality in authority relationships, working hours, meeting (how often, how run, timing), how are decisions made, communication, social events, jargon, uniforms, identity symbols, rites and rituals, disagreements and conflicts, balance between work and family . It seems that Google is quite open in these artifacts by showing a respect for uniform and national culture of each staff individually and giving them the right to wear traditional clothes.

Ad Blocking Incidence

Working at Google, employees enjoy free food served throughout the day, a volleyball court, a swimming pool, a car wash, an oil change, a haircut, free health care, and many other benefits. The biggest benefit for the staff is to be picked up on the day of work. As assessed by many traffic experts, the system set up by Google is considered to be a great transport network. Tad Widby, a project manager and a traffic system researcher throughout the United States, said: “I have not seen any larger projects in the Bay Area as well as in urban areas across the country” (Helft 2007 ). Of course, it is impossible for Google to “cover up the sky”, so Yahoo also started implementing the bus project for employees in 2005. On peak days, Yahoo’s bus also took off. Pick up about 350 employees in San Francisco, as well as Berkeley, Oakland, etc. These buses run on biofuels and have Wi-Fi coverage. Yet, Danielle Bricker, the Yahoo bus coordinator of Yahoo, has also admitted that the program is “indirectly” inspired by Google’s initiative (Helft 2007 ). Along with that, eBay recently also piloted shuttle bus transfers at five points in San Francisco. Some other corporations are also emerging ideas for treatment of staff is equally unique. Facebook is an example, instead of facilitating employees far from the workplace; it helps people in the immediate neighborhood by offering an additional $10,000 for an employee to live close to the pillar within 10 miles, nearby the Palo Alto Department (Hall 2015 ).

When it comes to Google, people often ask what the formula for success is. The answer here is the employees of Google. They create their own unique workplace culture rules to create an effective work environment for their employees. And here are the most valuable things to learn from Google’s corporate culture (Scott 2008 ) that we should know:

Tolerate with mistakes and help staff correct

At Google, paying attention to how employees work and helping them correct mistakes is critical. Instead of pointing out the damage and blaming a person who caused the mistake, the company would be interested in what the cause of the problem was and how to fix it as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Also as its culture, we understand that if we want to make breakthroughs in the workplace, we need to have experimentation, failure and repeat the test. Therefore, mistakes and failures are not terrible there. We have the right to be wrong and have the opportunity to overcome failure in the support of our superiors and colleagues. Good ideas are always encouraged at Google. However, before it is accepted and put into use, there is a clear procedure to confirm whether it is a real new idea and practical or not?

Exponential thought

Google developed in the direction of a holding company - a company that does not directly produce products or provide services but simply invest in capital by buying back capital. In the company, the criteria for setting the ten exponential function in lieu of focusing only on the change in the general increase. This approach helps Google improve its technology and deliver great products to consumers continuously.

Of course, every company wants to hire talented people to work for them. However, being talented is an art in which there must be voluntary work and enthusiasm for the work of the devotees. At page 555 in (Saffold 1988 ) illustrated that distinctive cultures dramatically influencing performance do exist. Likewise, Google, Apple, Netflix, and Dell are 40% more productive than the average company which attracts top-tier employees and high performers (Vozza 2017 ). Recognizing this impact, Google created a distinctive corporate culture when the company attracted people from prestigious colleges around the world (West 2016 ; Lazear and Gibbs 2014 ).

Build a stimulating work environment

When it comes to the elements that create creativity and innovation, we can easily recognize that the working environment is one of the most important things. Google has succeeded in building an image of a creative working. Google offices are individually designed, not duplicated in any type of office. In fact, working environment at Google is so comfortable so that employees will not think of it as a working room, with a full area of ​​work, relaxation, exercise, reading, watching movies. Is the orientation of Google’s corporate culture to stimulate creativity and to show interest in the lives of employees so that volunteers contribute freely (Battelle 2011 )?

Subculture is also a culture, but for a smaller group or community in a big organization (Crosset and Beal 1997 ). Google, known as the global company with many more offices, so there are many subcultures created among groups of people who work together, from subcultures among work groups to subcultures among ethnic groups and nations, multi-national groups, as well as multiple occupations, functions, geographies, echelons in the hierarchy and product lines. For example, six years ago, when it bought 100 Huffys for employees to use around the sprawling campus, has since exploded into its own subculture. Google now has a seven-person staff of bicycle mechanics that maintains a fleet of about 1300 brightly-colored Google bikes. The company also encourages employees to cycle to work by providing locker rooms, showers and places to securely park bikes during working hours. And, for those who want to combine meetings with bike-riding, Googlers can use one of several seven-person (Crowley 2013 ).

Leadership influences on the culture at Google

From the definition of leadership and its influence on culture; so what does leader directly influence the culture existed? According to Schein, “culture and leadership are two sides of the same coin and one cannot understand one without the other”, page three in (Schein 2009 ). If one of us has never read the article “Google and the Quest to create a better boss” in the New York Times, it is listed in a priority reading. It breaks the notion that managers have no change. The manager really makes a difference (Axinn 1988 ; Carver 2011 ). In fact, a leader has a massive impact on the culture of the company, and Google is not an exception. The leaders of Google concerned more about the demands and abilities of each individual, the study of the nature of human being, an appreciation their employees as their customers. At Google, the founders thought they could create a company that people would want to work at when creating a home-like environment. It is real that they focus on the workplace brings the comfort to staff creatively and freely (Lebowitz 2013 ).

In my opinion, a successful business cannot be attributed solely from a single star; that needs the brightness of all employees. It depends very much on the capacity and ability to attract talented people. It is the way in which the leader manages these talents, is the cornerstone of corporate culture. One thing that no one can deny is that a good leader must be a creator of a corporate culture so that the employees can maximize capabilities themselves (Driscoll and McKee 2007 ; Kotter 2008 ).

To brief, through the view of Google’s culture, BoDs tended and designed to encourage loyalty and creativity, based on an unusual organizational culture because culture is not only able to create an environment, but it also adapts to diverse and changes circumstances (Bulygo 2013 ).

Company growth and its impact

“Rearrange information around the world, make them accessible everywhere and be useful.” This was one of the main purposes set by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they first launched Google on September 4th, 1998, as a private company (Schmidt and Rosenberg 2014 ). Since then, Google has expanded its reach, stepped into the mobile operating system, provided mapping services and cloud computing applications, launched its own hardware, and prepared it to enter the wearable device market. However, no matter how varied and rich these products are, they are all about the one thing, the root of Google: online searching.

1998–2001: Focus on search

In its early years, Google.com was simply one with extreme iconic images: a colorful Google logo, a long text box in the middle of the screen, a button to execute. One button for searching and the other button are “I’m feeling lucky” to lead users to a random Google site. By May 2000, Google added ten additional languages to Google.com , including French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian and Danish, etc. This is one of the milestones in Google’s journey into the world. Google.com is available in over 150 languages (Scott 2008 ; Lee 2017 ).

2001–2007: Interface card

A very important event with Google around this time was the sale of shares to the public (IPO). In October 2003, Microsoft heard news of the IPO, so it quickly approached Google to discuss a buyout or business deal. Nevertheless, that intention was not materialized. In 2004, it was also the time when Google held a market share of 84.7% globally through collaboration with major Internet companies, such as Yahoo, AOL, and CNN. By February 2004, Yahoo stopped working with Google and separately stood out for engine search. This has led Google to lose some market share, but it has shown the importance and distinctness of Google. Nowadays, the term “Google” has been used as a verb just by visiting Google.com and doing an online search (Smith 2010 ). Not stopping at the homepage search, Google’s interface tag began to be brought to Gmail and Calendar with the links at the top of the page. Google homepage itself continues to use this style.

In 2006, Google also made an important acquisition to buy YouTube for $1.65 billion (Burgess and Green 2013 ). However, the company decided to keep YouTube as a separate brand and not to include it in Google Video search. Thanks to the backing of an Internet industry giant, YouTube has grown to become the world’s largest online video sharing service (Cha et al. 2007 ).

2007–2012: Navigation bar, Google menu, Google now

Google began to deploy a new navigation bar located at the edge of the screen. It includes links to a place where to look for photos, videos, news, maps, as well as buttons to switch to Gmail, Calendar, and other services developed by the company. In the upper left corner, Google added a box displaying Google + notifications and user accounts’ image. Google Now not only appeared on Android and it’s also brought to Chrome on a computer as well as iOS. All have the same operating principle, and the interface card still appears as Android it is.

2013–2014: Simplified interface

Google has moved all of the icons that lead to its other applications and services to an App Drawer button in the upper right hand, at the corner of the screen. In addition, Google.com also supports better voice search through the Chrome browser. Google has experimented with other markets, such as radio and print publications, and in selling advertisements from its advertisers within offline newspapers and magazines. As of November 2014, Google operates over 70 offices over 40 countries (Jarvis 2011 ; Vise 2007 ).

2014–2017: Chrome development and facing challenges

In 2015, Google would turn HTTPS into the default. The better website is, the more users will trust search engine. In 2016, Google announced Android version 7, introduced a new VR platform called Daydream, and its new virtual assistant, Google Assistant.

Most of Google’s revenue comes from advertising (Rosenberg 2016 ). However, this “golden” business is entering a difficult period with many warning signs of its future. Google Search is the dominant strength of Google and bringing great revenue for the company. Nonetheless, when Amazon surpassed Google to become the world’s leading product in the search engine in last December, this advantage began to wobble. This is considered a fatal blow to Google when iOS devices account for 75% of their mobile advertising revenue (Rosenberg 2016 ).

By 2016, the number of people installing software to block ads on phones has increased 102% from 2015. Figure  1 illustrates that by the year’s end, about 16% of smart phone users around the world blocked their ads whilst surfing the web. These were also two groups having the most time on the Internet, high-earners and young people; however, these people have disliked ads (see Fig. 1 ).

Figure  2 shows the young people have the highest ad blocking rates. It is drawing a gloomy picture for the sustainable development of the online advertising industry in general and Google in particular. Therefore, in early 2017, Google has strategies to build an ad blocking tool, built into the Chrome browser. This tool allows users to access ads that have passed the “Coalition for Better Ads” filter so as to limit the sense of discomfort (see Fig. 2 ).

For the company impact, the history shows that speedy development of Google creates both economic and social impacts to followers in a new way of people connection (Savitz 2013 ). In this modern world, it seems that people cannot spend a day without searching any information in Google (Chen et al. 2014 ; Fast and Campbell 2004 ), a tool serves human information seeking needs. Even though when addressing this paper, it is also in need the information from Google search and uses it as a supporting tool. Nobody can deny the convenience of Google as a fast and easy way to search (Schalkwyk et al. 2010 ; Jones 2001 ; Langville and Meyer 2011 ).

Research question and methodology

In order to get the most comprehensive data and information for this case analysis, a number of methods are used, including:

Research data and collect information were mostly from the Harvard Study (Project Oxygen), which has been selected because it is related to the purpose of our study.

Data collection and analysis has been taken from Google Scholar and various websites related researches. We look at the history of appearance, development, and recognize the impacts of this company, as well as the challenges and the way the Board of Directors measures the abilities of their manager when the problem is found.

Analyzing: It was begun by considering expectations from the Harvard Study. Subsequently, considering the smaller organization (Zappos) in comparison of how its cultures and subcultures are accessed as well. Since then, the paper has clarified the management problem that Google and Zappos confront and deal with it so as to help other businesses apply this theoretical practice and achieve its goal beyond expectations.

In our paper, we mainly use the inductive method approach by compiling and describing the other authors’ theories of corporate culture, especially Google and Zappos in merging and comparing, analyzing them and making our own results.

From the aspects of the research, the questions are suggested as below:

What is the most instrumental element found from the Harvard study?

Is there any difference and similarity between a huge company and a smaller enterprise in perspective of culture and subculture?

What makes Google different from others, the dominant cultures as well as subcultures existing? How do leadership behaviors impact on the organizational culture?

How organizational culture impacts on business achievements?

The Harvard study

Project oxygen summary.

This project began in 2009 known as “the manager project” with the People and Innovation Lab (PiLab) team researching questions, which helped the employee of Google become a better manager. The case study was conducted by Garvin (2013) about a behavior measurement to Google’s manager, why managers matter and what the best manager s do. In early days of Google, there are not many managers. In a flat structure, most employees are engineers and technical experts. In fact, in 2002 a few hundred engineers reported to only four managers. But over time and out of necessity, the number of managers increased. Then, in 2009, people and team culture at Google noticed a disturbing trend. Exit interview data cited low satisfaction with their manager as a reason for leaving Google. Because Google has accessed so much online data, Google’s statisticians are asked to analyze and identify the top attributes of a good manager mentioned with an unsolved question: “Do managers matter?” It always concerns all stakeholders at Google and requires a data-based survey project called Project Oxygen to clarify employees’ concern, to measure key management behaviors and cultivate staff through communication and training (Bryant 2011 ; Garvin et al. 2013 ). Research −1 Exit Interviews, ratings, and semiannual reviews. The purpose is to identify high-scoring managers and low-scoring managers resulted in the former, less turnover on their teams, and its connection (manager quality and employee’s happiness). As for “what the best managers do”, Research-2 is to interview high and low scoring managers and to review their performance. The findings with 8 key behaviors illustrated by the most effective managers.

The Oxygen Project mirrors the managers’ decision-making criteria, respects their needs for rigorous analysis, and makes it a priority to measure impact. In the case study, the findings prove that managers really have mattered. Google, initially, must figure out what the best manager is by asking high and low scoring managers such questions about communication, vision, etc. Its project identifies eight behaviors (Bulygo 2013 ; Garvin et al. 2013 ) of a good manager that considered as quite simple that the best manager at Google should have. In a case of management problem and solution, as well as discussing four- key theoretical concepts, they will be analyzed, including formal organizational training system, how culture influences behavior, the role of “flow” and building capacity for innovation, and the role of a leader and its difference from the manager.

Formal organizational training system to create a different culture: Ethical culture

If the organizational culture represents “how we do things around here,” the ethical culture represents “how we do things around here in relation to ethics and ethical behavior in the organization” (Key 1999 ). Alison Taylor (The Five Levels of an Ethical Culture, 2017) reported five levels of an ethical culture, from an individual, interpersonal, group, intergroup to inter-organizational (Taylor 2017 ). In (Nelson and Treviño 2004 ), ethical culture should be thought of in terms of a multi-system framework included formal and informal systems, which must be aligned to support ethical judgment and action. Leadership is essential to driving the ethical culture from a formal and informal perspective (Schwartz 2013 ; Trevino and Nelson 2011 ). Formally, a leader provides the resources to implement structures and programs that support ethics. More informally, through their own behaviors, leadership is a role model whose actions speak louder than their words, conveying “how we do things around here.” Other formal systems include selection systems, policies and codes, orientation and training programs, performance management systems, authority structures, and formal decision processes. On the informal side are the organization’s role models and heroes, the norms of daily behavior, organizational rituals that support or do not support ethical conduct, the stories people tell about the organization and their implications for conduct, and the language people use, etc. Is it okay to talk about ethics? Or is ethical fading the norm?

The formal and informal training is very important. The ethical context in organizations helps the organizational culture have a tendency to the positive or negative viewpoints (Treviño et al. 1998 ). The leader should focus on providing an understanding of the nature and reasons for the organization’s values and rules, on providing an opportunity for question and challenge values for sincerity/practicality, and on teaching ethical decision-making skills related to encountered issues commonly. The more specific and customized training, the more effective it is likely to be. Google seemed to apply this theory when addressed the Oxygen Project.

How culture influences behavior

Whenever we approach a new organization, there is no doubt that we will try to get more about the culture of that place, the way of thinking, working, as well as behavior. And it is likely that the more diverse culture of a place is, the more difficult for outsiders to assess its culture becomes (Mosakowski 2004 ).

Realizing culture in (Schein 2009 ) including artifacts, espoused valued and shared underlying assumptions. It is easier for outsiders to see the artifacts (visual objects) that a group uses as the symbol for a group; however, it does not express more about the espoused values, as well as tacit assumptions. In (Schein et al. 2010 ), the author stated: “For a culture assessment to be valuable, it must get to the assumptions level. If the client system does not get to assumptions, it cannot explain the discrepancies almost always surface between the espoused values and the observed behavioral artifacts” (Schein et al. 2010 ). Hence, in order to be able to assess other cultures well, it is necessary for us to learn each other’s languages, as well as adapt to a common language. Moreover, we also need to look at the context of working, the solution for shared problems because these will facilitate to understand the culture better.

According to the OCP (Organizational Culture Profile) framework (Saremi and Nejad 2013 ), an organization is with possessing the innovation of culture, flexible and adaptable with fresh ideas, which is figured by flat hierarchy and title. For instance, Gore-Tex is an innovative product of W. L. Gore & Associates Inc., considered as the company has the most impact on its innovative culture (Boudreau and Lakhani 2009 ). Looking at the examples of Fast Company, Genentech Inc., and Google, they also encourage their employees to take challenges or risks by allowing them to take 20% of their time to comprehend the projects of their own (Saremi and Nejad 2013 ). In (Aldrich n.d. ), it is recorded that 25%–55% of employees are fully encouraged and giving a maximum value.

The famous quote by Peter Drucker , “Culture eats strategy for Breakfast” at page 67 has created a lot of interest in (Manning and Bodine 2012 ; Coffman and Sorensen 2013 ; Bock 2015 ). Despite we all know how important culture is, we have successively failed to address it (O'Reilly et al. 1991 ). The organizational research change process from the view of Schein ( 2009 ); it is a fact that whenever an organization has the intention of changing the culture, it really takes time. As we all acknowledge, to build an organizational culture, both leader and subordinate spend most of their time on learning, relearning, experiencing, as well as considering the most appropriate features. Sometimes, some changes are inevitable in terms of economic, political, technological, legal and moral threats, as well as internal discomfort (Kavanagh and Ashkanasy 2006 ; Schein 1983 ). As the case in (Schein 2009 ), when a CEO would like to make an innovation which is proved no effective response, given that he did not get to know well about the tacit implications at the place he has just come. It is illustrated that whatsoever change should need time and a process to happen (Blog 2015 ; Makhlouk and Shevchuk 2008 ). In conclusion, a new culture can be learned (Schein 1984 ), but with an appropriate route and the profits for all stakeholders should be concerned by the change manager (Sathe 1983 ).

It is true that people’s behavior managed by their types of culture (Kollmuss and Agyeman 2002 ). All tacit assumptions of insiders are not easy for outsiders to grasp the meaning completely (Schein 2009 ). It is not also an exception at any organization. Google is an example of the multicultural organization coming from various regions of the world, and the national or regional cultures making this multicultural organization with an official culture for the whole company.

In this case, the organizational culture of Google has an influence on the behaviors of manager and employee. In addition, as for such a company specializes in information technology, all engineers prefer to work on everything with data-evidence to get them involved in the meaningful survey about manager (Davenport et al. 2010 ). Eventually, Google discovered 8 good behaviors of manager, which effect to the role of “flow” also (Bulygo 2013 ; Garvin et al. 2013 ).

The role of the “flow” and building capacity for innovation

More and more people are using the term of “patient flow”. This overview describes patient flow and links to theories about flow. Patient flow underpins many improvement tools and techniques. The term “flow” describes the progressive movement of products, information, and people through a sequence of the process. In simple terms, flow is about uninterrupted movement (Nave 2002 ), like driving steadily along the motorway without interruptions or being stuck in a traffic jam. In healthcare, flow is the movement of patients, information or equipment between departments, office groups or organizations as a part of a patient’s care pathway (Bessant and Maher 2009 ). In fact, flow plays a vital role in getting stakeholders involved in working creatively and innovatively (Adams 2005 ; Amabile 1997 ; Forest et al. 2011 ). An effective ethical leader must create flow in work before transfer it to employees for changing the best of their effort to maintain, keep and develop “flow” in an engineering job, which job be easier to get stress. Definitely, Google gets it done very well.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the knowledge from my Master course, a credit of managing culture which helps me to write this paper. The author also gratefully acknowledges the helpful comments and suggestions of the reviewers and Associate Professor Khuong- Ho Van, who provided general technical help that all have improved the article.

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Sang Kim Tran

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Tran, S.K. GOOGLE: a reflection of culture, leader, and management. Int J Corporate Soc Responsibility 2 , 10 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40991-017-0021-0

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Received : 16 May 2017

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s40991-017-0021-0

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• Organizational culture
• Management style
• Oxygen project

Chapter 21 - Organizational Change Management in SRE

• Table of Contents
• Foreword II
• 1. How SRE Relates to DevOps
• Part I - Foundations
• 2. Implementing SLOs
• 3. SLO Engineering Case Studies
• 4. Monitoring
• 5. Alerting on SLOs
• 6. Eliminating Toil
• 7. Simplicity
• Part II - Practices
• 9. Incident Response
• 10. Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure
• 11. Managing Load
• 12. Introducing Non-Abstract Large System Design
• 13. Data Processing Pipelines
• 14. Configuration Design and Best Practices
• 15. Configuration Specifics
• 16. Canarying Releases
• Part III - Processes
• 17. Identifying and Recovering from Overload
• 18. SRE Engagement Model
• 19. SRE: Reaching Beyond Your Walls
• 20. SRE Team Lifecycles
• 21. Organizational Change Management in SRE
• Appendix A. Example SLO Document
• Appendix B. Example Error Budget Policy
• Appendix C. Results of Postmortem Analysis
• About the Editors

Organizational Change Management in SRE

By Alex Bramley, Ben Lutch, Michelle Duffy, and Nir Tarcic with Betsy Beyer

In the introduction to the first SRE Book , Ben Treynor Sloss describes SRE teams as “characterized by both rapid innovation and a large acceptance of change,” and specifies organizational change management as a core responsibility of an SRE team. This chapter examines how theory can apply in practice across SRE teams. After reviewing some key change management theories, we explore two case studies that demonstrate how different styles of change management have played out in concrete ways at Google.

Note that the term change management has two interpretations: organizational change management and change control. This chapter examines change management as a collective term for all approaches to preparing and supporting individuals, teams, and business units in making organizational change. We do not discuss this term within a project management context, where it may be used to refer to change control processes, such as change review or versioning.

SRE Embraces Change

More than 2,000 years ago, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus claimed change is the only constant. This axiom still holds true today—especially in regards to technology, and particularly in rapidly evolving internet and cloud sectors.

Product teams exist to build products, ship features, and delight customers. At Google, most change is fast-paced, following a “launch and iterate” approach. Executing on such change typically requires coordination across systems, products, and globally distributed teams. Site Reliability Engineers are frequently in the middle of this complicated and rapidly shifting landscape, responsible for balancing the risks inherent in change with product reliability and availability. Error budgets (see Implementing SLOs ) are a primary mechanism for achieving this balance.

Introduction to Change Management

Change management as an area of study and practice has grown since foundational work in the field by Kurt Lewin in the 1940s. Theories primarily focus on developing frameworks for managing organizational change. In-depth analysis of particular theories is beyond the scope of this book, but to contextualize them within the realm of SRE, we briefly describe some common theories and how each might be applicable in an SRE-type organization. While the formal processes implicit in these theoretical frameworks have not been applied by SRE at Google, considering SRE activities through the lens of these frameworks has helped us refine our approach to managing change. Following this discussion, we will introduce some case studies that demonstrate how elements of some of these theories apply to change management activities led by Google SRE.

Lewin’s Three-Stage Model

Kurt Lewin’s “unfreeze–change–freeze” model for managing change is the oldest of the relevant theories in this field. This simple three-stage model is a tool for managing process review and the resulting changes in group dynamics. Stage 1 entails persuading a group that change is necessary. Once they are amenable to the idea of change, Stage 2 executes that change. Finally, when the change is broadly complete, Stage 3 institutionalizes the new patterns of behavior and thought. The model’s core principle posits the group as the primary dynamic instrument, arguing that individual and group interactions should be examined as a system when the group is planning, executing, and completing any period of change. Accordingly, Lewin's work is most useful for planning organizational change at the macro level.

McKinsey’s 7-S Model

McKinsey’s seven S’s stand for structure, strategy, systems, skills, style, staff, and shared values. Similar to Lewin’s work, this framework is also a toolset for planned organizational change. While Lewin’s framework is generic, 7-S has an explicit goal of improving organizational effectiveness. Application of both theories begins with an analysis of current purpose and processes. However, 7-S also explicitly covers both business elements (structure, strategy, systems) and people-management elements (shared values, skills, style, staff). This model could be useful for a team considering change from a traditional systems administration focus to the more holistic Site Reliability Engineering approach.

Kotter’s Eight-Step Process for Leading Change

Time magazine named John P. Kotter’s 1996 book Leading Change (Harvard Business School Press) one of the Top 25 Most Influential Business Management Books of all time . Figure 21-1 depicts the eight steps in Kotter’s change management process.

Kotter’s process is particularly relevant to SRE teams and organizations, with one small exception: in many cases (e.g., the upcoming Waze case study), there’s no need to create a sense of urgency. SRE teams supporting products and systems with accelerating growth are frequently faced with urgent scaling, reliability, and operational challenges. The component systems are often owned by multiple development teams, which may span several organizational units; scaling issues may also require coordination with teams ranging from physical infrastructure to product management. Because SRE is often on the front line when problems occur, it is uniquely motivated to lead the change needed to ensure products are available 24/7/365. Much of SRE work (implicitly) embraces Kotter’s process to ensure the continued availability of supported products.

The Prosci ADKAR Model

The Prosci ADKAR model focuses on balancing both the business and people aspects of change management. ADKAR is an acronym for the goals individuals must achieve for successful organizational change: awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement.

In principle, ADKAR provides a useful, thoughtful, people-centric framework. However, its applicability to SRE is limited because operational responsibilities quite often impose considerable time constraints. Proceeding iteratively through ADKAR’s stages and providing the necessary training or coaching requires pacing and investment in communication, which are difficult to implement in the context of globally distributed, operationally focused teams. That said, Google has successfully used ADKAR-style processes for introducing and building support for high-level changes—for example, introducing global organizational change to the SRE management team while preserving local autonomy for implementation details.

Emotion-Based Models

The Bridges Transition Model describes people’s emotional reactions to change. While a useful management tool for people managers, it’s not a framework or process for change management. Similarly, the Kübler-Ross Change Curve describes ranges of emotions people may feel when faced with change. Developed from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s research on death and dying, 1 it has been applied to understanding and anticipating employee reactions to organizational change. Both models can be useful in maintaining high employee productivity throughout periods of change, since unhappy people are rarely productive.

The Deming Cycle

Also known as the Plan-Do-Check-Act (or PDCA) Cycle, this process from statistician Edward W. Deming is commonly used in DevOps environments for process improvements—for example, adoption of continuous integration/continuous delivery techniques. It is not suited to organizational change management because it does not cover the human side of change, including motivations and leadership styles. Deming’s focus is to take existing processes (mechanical, automated, or workflow) and cyclically apply continuous improvements. The case studies we refer to in this chapter deal with larger, organizational changes where iteration is counterproductive: frequent, wrenching org-chart changes can sap employee confidence and negatively impact company culture.

How These Theories Apply to SRE

No change management model is universally applicable to every situation, so it’s not surprising that Google SRE hasn’t exclusively standardized on one model. That said, here’s how we like to think about applying these models to common change management scenarios in SRE:

• Kotter’s Eight-Step Process is a change management model for SRE teams who necessarily embrace change as a core responsibility.
• The Prosci ADKAR model is a framework that SRE management may want to consider to coordinate change across globally distributed teams.
• All individual SRE managers will benefit from familiarity with both the Bridges Transition Model and the Kübler-Ross Change Curve , which provide tools to support employees in times of organizational change.

Now that we’ve introduced the theories, let’s look at two case studies that show how change management has played out at Google.

Case Study 1: Scaling Waze—From Ad Hoc to Planned Change

Waze is a community-based navigation app acquired by Google in 2013. After the acquisition, Waze entered a period of significant growth in active users, engineering staff, and computing infrastructure, but continued to operate relatively autonomously within Google. The growth introduced many challenges, both technical and organizational.

Waze’s autonomy and startup ethos led them to meet these challenges with a grassroots technical response from small groups of engineers, rather than management-led, structured organizational change as implied by the formal models discussed in the previous section. Nevertheless, their approach to propagating changes throughout the organization and infrastructure significantly resembles Kotter’s model of change management. This case study examines how Kotter’s process (which we apply retroactively) aptly describes a sequence of technical and organizational challenges Waze faced as they grew post-acquisition.

The Messaging Queue: Replacing a System While Maintaining Reliability

Kotter’s model begins the cycle of change with a sense of urgency . Waze’s SRE team needed to act quickly and decisively when the reliability of Waze’s message queueing system regressed badly, leading to increasingly frequent and severe outages. As shown in Figure 21-2 , the message queueing system was critical to operations because every component of Waze (real time, geocoding, routing, etc.) used it to communicate with other components internally.

As throughput on the message queue grew significantly, the system simply couldn’t cope with the ever-increasing demands. SREs needed to manually intervene to preserve system stability at shorter and shorter intervals. At its worst, the entire Waze SRE team spent most of a two-week period firefighting 24/7, eventually resorting to restarting some components of the message queue hourly to keep messages flowing and tens of millions of users happy.

Because SRE was also responsible for building and releasing all of Waze’s software, this operational load had a noticeable impact on feature velocity—when SREs spent all of their time fighting fires, they hardly had time to support new feature rollouts. By highlighting the severity of the situation, engineers convinced Waze’s leadership to reevaluate priorities and dedicate some engineering time to reliability work. A guiding coalition of two SREs and a senior engineer came together to form a strategic vision of a future where SRE toil was no longer necessary to keep messages flowing. This small team evaluated off-the-shelf message queue products, but quickly decided that they could only meet Waze’s scaling and reliability requirements with a custom-built solution.

Developing this message queue in-house would be impossible without some way to maintain operations in the meantime. The coalition removed this barrier to action by enlisting a volunteer army of developers from the teams who used the current messaging queue. Each team reviewed the codebase for their service to identify ways to cut the volume of messages they published. Trimming unnecessary messages and rolling out a compression layer on top of the old queue reduced some load on the system. The team also gained some more operational breathing room by building a dedicated messaging queue for one particular component that was responsible for over 30% of system traffic. These measures yielded enough of a temporary operational reprieve to allow for a two-month window to assemble and test a prototype of the new messaging system.

Migrating a message queue system that handles tens of thousands of messages per second is a daunting task even without the pressure of imminent service meltdown. But gradually reducing the load on the old system would relieve some of this pressure, affording the team a longer time window to complete the migration. To this end, Waze SRE rebuilt the client libraries for the message queue so they could publish and receive messages using either or both systems, using a centralized control surface to switch the traffic over.

Once the new system was proven to work, SRE began the first phase of the migration: they identified some low-traffic, high-importance message flows for which messaging outages were catastrophic. For these flows, writing to both messaging systems would provide a backup path. A couple of near misses, where the backup path kept core Waze services operating while the old system faltered, provided the short-term wins that justified the initial investment.

Mass migration to the new system required SRE to work closely with the teams who use it. The team needed to figure out both how to best support their use cases and how to coordinate the traffic switch. As the SRE team automated the process of migrating traffic and the new system supported more use cases by default, the rate of migrations accelerated significantly .

Kotter’s change management process ends with instituting change . Eventually, with enough momentum behind the adoption of the new system, the SRE team could declare the old system deprecated and no longer supported. They migrated the last stragglers a few quarters later. Today, the new system handles more than 1000 times the load of the previous one, and requires little manual intervention from SREs for ongoing support and maintenance.

The Next Cycle of Change: Improving the Deployment Process

The process of change as a cycle was one of Kotter’s key insights. The cyclical nature of meaningful change is particularly apparent when it comes to the types of technical changes that face SRE. Eliminating one bottleneck in a system often highlights another one. As each change cycle is completed, the resulting improvements, standardization, and automation free up engineering time. Engineering teams now have the space to more closely examine their systems and identify more pain points, triggering the next cycle of change.

When Waze SRE could finally take a step back from firefighting problems related to the messaging system, a new bottleneck emerged, bringing with it a renewed sense of urgency : SRE’s sole ownership of releases was noticeably and seriously hindering development velocity. The manual nature of releases required a significant amount of SRE time. To exacerbate an already suboptimal situation, system components were large, and because releases were costly, they were relatively infrequent. As a result, each release represented a large delta, significantly increasing the possibility that a major defect would necessitate a rollback.

Improvements toward a better release process happened incrementally, as Waze SRE didn’t have a master plan from square one. To slim down system components so the team could iterate each more rapidly, one of the senior Waze developers created a framework for building microservices. This provided a standard “batteries included” platform that made it easy for the engineering organization to start breaking their components apart. SRE worked with this developer to include some reliability-focused features—for example, a common control surface and a set of behaviors that were amenable to automation. As a result, SRE could develop a suite of tools to manage the previously costly parts of the release process. One of these tools incentivized adoption by bundling all of the steps needed to create a new microservice with the framework.

These tools were quick-and-dirty at first—the initial prototypes were built by one SRE over the course of several days. As the team cleaved more microservices from their parent components, the value of the SRE-developed tools quickly became apparent to the wider organization. SRE was spending less time shepherding the slimmed-down components into production, and the new microservices were much less costly to release individually.

While the release process was already much improved, the proliferation of new microservices meant that SRE’s overall burden was still concerning. Engineering leadership was unwilling to assume responsibility for the release process until releases were less burdensome.

In response, a small coalition of SREs and developers sketched out a strategic vision to shift to a continuous deployment strategy using Spinnaker , an open source, multicloud, continuous delivery platform for building and executing deployment workflows. With the time saved by our bootstrap tooling, the team now was able to engineer this new system to enable one-click builds and deployments of hundreds or thousands of microservices. The new system was technically superior to the previous system in every way, but SRE still couldn’t persuade development teams to make the switch. This reluctance was driven by two factors: the obvious disincentive of having to push their own releases to production, plus change aversion driven by poor visibility into the release process.

Waze SRE tore down these barriers to adoption by showing how the new process added value. The team built a centralized dashboard that displayed the release status of binaries and a number of standard metrics exported by the microservice framework. Development teams could easily link their releases to changes in those metrics, which gave them confidence that deployments were successful. SRE worked closely with a few volunteer systems-oriented development teams to move services to Spinnaker. These wins proved that the new system could not only fulfill its requirements, but also add value beyond the original release process. At this point, engineering leadership set a goal for all teams to perform releases using the new Spinnaker deployment pipelines.

To facilitate the migration, Waze SRE provided organization-wide Spinnaker training sessions and consulting sessions for teams with complex requirements. When early adopters became familiar with the new system, their positive experiences sparked a chain reaction of accelerating adoption . They found the new process faster and less painful than waiting for SRE to push their releases. Now, engineers began to put pressure on dependencies that had not moved, as they were the impediment to faster development velocity—not the SRE team!

Today, more than 95% of Waze’s services use Spinnaker for continuous deployment, and changes can be pushed to production with very little human involvement. While Spinnaker isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, configuring a release pipeline is trivial if a new service is built using the microservices framework, so new services have a strong incentive to standardize on this solution.

Lessons Learned

Waze’s experience in removing bottlenecks to technical change contains a number of useful lessons for other teams attempting engineering-led technical or organizational change. To begin with, change management theory is not a waste of time! Viewing this development and migration process through the lens of Kotter’s process demonstrates the model’s applicability. A more formal application of Kotter’s model at the time could have helped streamline and guide the process of change.

Change instigated from the grass roots requires close collaboration between SRE and development, as well as support from executive leadership. Creating a small, focused group with members from all parts of the organization—SRE, developers, and management—was key to the team’s success. A similar collaboration was vital to instituting the change. Over time, these ad hoc groups can and should evolve into more formal and structured cooperation, where SREs are automatically involved in design discussions and can advise on best practices for building and deploying robust applications in a production environment throughout the entire product lifecycle.

Incremental change is much easier to manage. Jumping straight to the “perfect” solution is too large a step to take all at once (not to mention probably infeasible if your system is about to collapse), and the concept of “perfect” will likely evolve as new information comes to light during the change process. An iterative approach can demonstrate early wins that help an organization buy into the vision of change and justify further investment. On the other hand, if early iterations don’t demonstrate value, you’ll waste less time and fewer resources when you inevitably abandon the change. Because incremental change doesn’t happen all at once, having a master plan is invaluable. Describe the goals in broad terms, be flexible, and ensure that each iteration moves toward them.

Finally, sometimes your current solutions can’t support the requirements of your strategic vision. Building something new has a large engineering cost, but can be worthwhile if the project pushes you out of a local maxima and enables long-term growth. As a thought experiment, figure out where bottlenecks might arise in your systems and tooling as your business and organization grow over the next few years. If you suspect any elements don’t scale horizontally, or have superlinear (or worse, exponential) growth with respect to a core business metric such as daily active users, you may need to consider redesigning or replacing them.

Waze’s development of a new in-house message queue system shows that it is possible for small groups of determined engineers to institute change that moves the needle toward greater service reliability. Mapping Kotter’s model onto the change shows that some consideration of change management strategy can help provide a formula for success even in small, engineering-led organizations. And, as the next case study also demonstrates, when changes promote standardizing technology and processes, the organization as a whole can reap considerable efficiency gains.

Case Study 2: Common Tooling Adoption in SRE

SREs are opinionated about the software they can and should use to manage production. Years of experience, observing what goes well and what doesn’t, and examining the past through the lens of the postmortem, have given SREs a deep background coupled with strong instincts. Specifying, building, and implementing software to automate this year’s job away is a core value in SRE. In particular, Google SRE recently focused our efforts on horizontal software. Adoption of the same solution by a critical mass of users and developers creates a virtuous cycle and reduces reinvention of wheels. Teams who otherwise might not interact share practices and policies that are automated using the same software.

This case study is based on an organizational evolution, not a response to a systems scaling or reliability issue (as discussed in the Waze case study). Hence, the Prosci ADKAR model (shown in Figure 21-3 ) is a better fit than Kotter’s model, as it recognizes both explicit organizational/people management characteristics and technical considerations during the change.

Problem Statement

A few years ago, Google SRE found itself using multiple independent software solutions for approximately the same problem across multiple problem spaces: monitoring, releases and rollouts, incident response, capacity management, and so on.

This end state arose in part because the people building tools for SRE were dissociated from their users and their requirements. The tool developers didn’t always have a current view of the problem statement or the overall production landscape—the production environment changes very rapidly and in new ways as new software, hardware, and use cases are brought to life almost daily. Additionally, the consumers of tools were varied, sometimes with orthogonal needs (“this rollout has to be fast; approximate is fine” versus “this rollout has to be 100% correct; okay for it to go slowly”).

As a result, none of these long-term projects fully addressed anyone’s needs, and each was characterized by varying levels of development effort, feature completeness, and ongoing support. Those waiting for the big use case—a nonspecific, singing-and-dancing solution of the future—waited a long time, got frustrated, and used their own software engineering skills to create their own niche solution. Those who had smaller, specific needs were loath to adopt a broader solution that wasn’t as tailored to them. The long-term, technical, and organizational benefits of more universal solutions were clear, but customers, services, and teams were not staffed or rewarded for waiting. To compound this scenario, requirements of both large and small customer teams changed over time.

What We Decided to Do

To scope this scenario as one concrete problem space, we asked ourselves: What if all Google SREs could use a common monitoring engine and set of dashboards, which were easy to use and supported a wide variety of use cases without requiring customization?

Likewise, we could extend this model of thinking to releases and rollouts, incident response, capacity management, and beyond. If the initial configuration of a product captured a wide representation of approaches to address the majority of our functional needs, our general and well-informed solutions would become inevitable over time. At some point, the critical mass of engineers who interact with production would outgrow whatever solution they were using and self-select to migrate to a common, well-supported set of tools and automation, abandoning their custom-built tools and their associated maintenance costs.

SRE at Google is fortunate that many of its engineers have software engineering backgrounds and experience. It seemed like a natural first step to encourage engineers who were experts and opinionated about specific problems—from load balancing to rollout tooling to incident management and response—to work as a virtual team, self-selected by a common long-term vision. These engineers would translate their vision into working, real software that would eventually be adopted across all of SRE, and then all of Google, as the basic functions of production.

To return to the ADKAR model for change management, the steps discussed so far—identifying a problem and acknowledging an opportunity—are textbook examples of ADKAR’s initiating awareness step. The Google SRE leadership team agreed on the need ( desire ) and had sufficient knowledge and ability to move to designing solutions fairly quickly.

Our first task was to converge upon a number of topics that we agreed were central, and that would benefit greatly from a consistent vision: to deliver solutions and adoption plans that fit most use cases. Starting from a list of 65+ proposed projects, we spent multiple months collecting customer requirements, verifying roadmaps, and performing market analysis, ultimately scoping our efforts toward a handful of vetted topics.

Our initial design created a virtual team of SRE experts around these topics. This virtual team would contribute a significant percentage of their time, around 80%, to these horizontal projects. The idea behind 80% time and a virtual team was to ensure we did not design or build solutions without constant contact with production. However, we (maybe predictably) discovered a few pain points with this approach:

• Coordinating a virtual team—whose focus was broken by being on-call regularly, across multiple time zones—was very difficult. There was a lot of state to be swapped between running a service and building a serious piece of software.
• Everything from gathering consensus to code reviews was affected by the lack of a central location and common time.
• Headcount for horizontal projects initially had to come from existing teams, who now had fewer engineering resources to tackle their own projects. Even at Google, there’s tension between delegating headcount to support the system as is versus delegating headcount to build future-looking infrastructure.

With enough data in hand, we realized we needed to redesign our approach, and settled on the more familiar centralized model. Most significantly, we removed the requirement that team members split their time 80/20 between project work and on-call duties. Most SRE software development is now done by small groups of senior engineers with plenty of on-call experience, but who are heads-down focused on building software based on those experiences. We also physically centralized many of these teams by recruiting or moving engineers. Small group (6–10 people) development is simply more efficient within one room (however, this argument doesn’t apply to all groups—for example, remote SRE teams). We can still meet our goal of collecting requirements and perspectives across the entire Google engineering organization via videoconference, email, and good old-fashioned travel.

So our evolution of design actually ended up in a familiar place—small, agile, mostly local, fast-moving teams—but with the added emphasis on selecting and building automation and tools for adoption by 60% of Google engineers (the figure we decided was a reasonable interpretation of the goal of “ almost everyone at Google”). Success means most of Google is using what SRE has built to manage their production environment.

The ADKAR model maps the implementation phase of the change project between the people-centric stages of knowledge and ability . This case study bears out that mapping. We had many engaged, talented, and knowledgeable engineers, but we were asking people who had been focused on SRE concerns to act like product software development engineers by focusing on customer requirements, product roadmaps, and delivery commitments. We needed to revisit the implementation of this change to enable engineers to demonstrate their abilities with respect to these new attributes.

Implementation: Monitoring

To return to the monitoring space mentioned in the previous section, Chapter 31 in the first SRE book described how Viceroy—Google SRE’s effort to create a single monitoring dashboard solution suitable for everyone—addressed the problem of disparate custom solutions. Several SRE teams worked together to create and run the initial iteration, and as Viceroy grew to become the de facto monitoring and dashboarding solution at Google, a dedicated centralized SRE development team assumed ownership of the project.

But even when the Viceroy framework united SRE under a common framework, there was a lot of duplicated effort as teams built complex custom dashboards specific to their services. While Viceroy provided a standard hosted method to design and build visual displays of data, it still required each team to decide what data to display and how to organize it.

The now-centralized software development team began a second parallel effort to provide common dashboards, building an opinionated zero-config system on top of the lower-level “custom” system. This zero-config system provided a standard set of comprehensive monitoring displays based on the assumption that a given service was organized in one of a handful of popular styles. Over time, most services migrated to using these standard dashboards instead of investing in custom layouts. Very large, unique, or otherwise special services can still deploy custom views in the hosted system if they need to.

Returning to the ADKAR model, the consolidation of monitoring tools at Google began as a grassroots effort, and the resulting improvements in operational efficiencies provided a quantifiable basis ( awareness and desire ) to initiate a broader effort: SRE self-funded a software development team to build production management tooling for all of Google.

Designing a migration of interdependent pieces is often more complicated than a blank-sheet design. But in real life, the hardest engineering work ends up being the evolution of many small/constrained systems into fewer, more general systems—without disturbing already running services that many customers depend on. In the meantime, alongside the existing systems, new small systems are added—some of which eventually surprise us by growing into large systems. There is an intellectual attraction to starting anew with the big design, only backing into constraints that are really necessary, but the migration of systems and teams turns out to be the most difficult work by far .

Designing horizontal software requires a lot of listening to prospective end users, and, in many ways, the tasks of building and adoption look much like the role of a product manager. In order for this effort to achieve success, we had to make sure that we absorbed and prioritized priorities. Meeting customer needs—of both SREs and other production users—was also a critical element of success. It is important to acknowledge that the move toward common tooling is still a work in progress. We iterated on the structure and staffing of the teams building our shared technologies to better enable meeting customer needs, and we added product management and user experience talent (addressing missing knowledge ).

In the past year or two, we have seen uptake of these SRE-designed and -built products across a broad swath of teams at Google. We have learned that to achieve success, the cost of migration (from older, fragmented but specialized solutions) needs to be small relative to the net benefits of the new common solution. Otherwise, the migration itself becomes a barrier to adoption. We continue to work with the individual teams building these products to reinforce the behaviors needed to delight customers with the common solutions the teams are delivering.

One common theme we discovered across horizontal software development projects was that no matter how good new software and products were, the cost of migration—away from something that was already working to something new—was always perceived as very high. Despite the allure of easier management and less specific deep knowledge, the costs of migrating away from the familiar (with all its warts and toil) were generally a barrier. In addition, individual engineers often had a similar internal monologue: “I’m not improving or changing the system; I’m swapping out one working piece for another working piece.” ADKAR describes this resistance as the “knowledge-to-ability gap.” On the human side, in order to recognize and embrace change, people need time, coaching, and training in new tools and skills. On the technical side, implementing change requires understanding adoption costs and including work to minimize these costs as part of the launch process.

As a result, migration costs need to be nearly zero (“just recompile and you pick up new $thing”) and the benefits need to be clear (“now you’re protected from $foo vulnerability”) to the team, to individuals, and to the company.

SRE commonly used to build products that we committed to in a “best effort” way, meaning that the amount of time we gave the product fit into the cracks between everything else we were doing (managing primary services, capacity planning, dealing with outages, etc.). As a result, our execution was not very reliable; it was impossible to predict when a feature or service would be available. By extension, consumers of our products had less trust in the end result since it felt perpetually delayed and was staffed by a rotating cast of product managers and individual engineers. When individual SREs or SRE teams built tools for their own use, the focus was on solving individual problems to reduce the cost of maintaining SLOs for supported systems. In endeavoring to build common tooling for most use cases at Google, we needed to shift the focus to measuring the success of this effort in terms of product adoption.

Owing to both our organizational culture and our wealth of resources, we approached this project in a bottom-up, rather than top-down, fashion. Instead of mandating that users migrated to our new monitoring system, we sought to win over users by demonstrating that our new offering was better than existing solutions.

Over time, we learned that how we conducted our development process would inform how potential internal users perceived the end result. These projects gained real traction only when staffed by production-experienced engineers 100% dedicated to building software, with schedules and support identical to the rest of Google’s software development. Building common software transparently, like clockwork, with great communication (“We’ll have X done by Y date”), greatly improved the speed of migration to the new system. People already trusted the new system because they could observe how it was developed from an early stage. Perceptions of how the sausage is made turned out to be more important than we anticipated from the get-go . Our initial thought that “if you build something great, people will naturally flock to it” didn’t hold true. Rather, these projects had to be clearly defined, well advertised in advance, evaluated against a multitude of user cases (targeted to the grumpiest adopters first), leaps and bounds better than existing options, and adoptable with little to no effort.

The more consumers you have for common tooling and adoption, the more time you actually have to spend doing things other than writing code. This may sound obvious in retrospect, but clear end goals, believable dates, regular updates, and constant contact with consumers is paramount. Often skeptical consumers will ask, “If my current one-off shell script works okay, do I really need this?” Adoption of common software or processes is analogous to reliability as a feature—you may build the best thing in the world, but if people don’t adopt it (or can’t use it if it’s not reliable), it’s not useful to anyone. Having a plan for adoption—from champions to beta testers to executive sponsors to dedicated engineers who understand the importance of minimizing barriers to adoption—is both the end goal and the starting point when it comes to building and adopting common tools and practices.

This is because adoption drives a network effect: as the scale and reach of common software tools increases, incremental improvements to those tools are more valuable to the organization. As the value of the tools increases, development effort dedicated to them also tends to increase. Some of this development effort naturally goes toward further reducing migration costs, incentivizing greater adoption. Broad adoption encourages building organization-wide improvements in a consistent, product-like fashion, and justifies staffing full teams to support the tools for the long term. These tools should be characterized by rapid development, feature stability, common control surfaces, and automatable APIs.

When it comes to measuring the impact of such efforts, we can ask questions similar to the following:

• How quickly can a new product developer build and manage a world-scale service?
• Enabled by common tools and practices, how easily can an SRE in one domain move to another domain?
• How many services can be managed with the same primitives, as end-to-end user experiences versus separate services?

These are all possible and highly valuable ways to measure impact, but our first measurement must be adoption.

As demonstrated by the Waze and horizontal software case studies, even within a single company, SRE change management may need to tackle a variety of problem spaces and organizational context. As a result, there’s likely no single formal model of change management that will neatly apply to the spectrum of changes any given organization may tackle. However, these frameworks, particularly Kotter’s eight-step process and the Prosci ADKAR model, can provide useful insights for approaching change. One commonality across any change necessary in an environment as dynamic as SRE is constant reevaluation and iteration. While many changes may start organically in a grassroots fashion, most can benefit from structured coordination and planning as the changes mature.

1 Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy and Their Own Families (New York: Scribner, 1969).

Chapter 20 - SRE Team Lifecycles

Copyright © 2018 Google, Inc. Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

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Change Management: From Theory to Practice

Jeffrey phillips.

1 University Libraries, Florida State University, 116 Honors Way, Tallahassee, FL 32306 USA

James D. Klein

2 Department of Educational Psychology & Learning Systems, College of Education, Florida State University, Stone Building-3205F, Tallahassee, FL 32306-4453 USA

This article presents a set of change management strategies found across several models and frameworks and identifies how frequently change management practitioners implement these strategies in practice. We searched the literature to identify 15 common strategies found in 16 different change management models and frameworks. We also created a questionnaire based on the literature and distributed it to change management practitioners. Findings suggest that strategies related to communication, stakeholder involvement, encouragement, organizational culture, vision, and mission should be used when implementing organizational change.

Organizations must change to survive. There are many approaches to influence change; these differences require change managers to consider various strategies that increase acceptance and reduce barriers. A change manager is responsible for planning, developing, leading, evaluating, assessing, supporting, and sustaining a change implementation. Change management consists of models and strategies to help employees accept new organizational developments.

Change management practitioners and academic researchers view organizational change differently (Hughes, 2007 ; Pollack & Pollack, 2015 ). Saka ( 2003 ) states, “there is a gap between what the rational-linear change management approach prescribes and what change agents do” (p. 483). This disconnect may make it difficult to determine the suitability and appropriateness of using different techniques to promote change (Pollack & Pollack, 2015 ). Hughes ( 2007 ) thinks that practitioners and academics may have trouble communicating because they use different terms. Whereas academics use the terms, models, theories, and concepts, practitioners use tools and techniques. A tool is a stand-alone application, and a technique is an integrated approach (Dale & McQuater, 1998 ). Hughes ( 2007 ) expresses that classifying change management tools and techniques can help academics identify what practitioners do in the field and evaluate the effectiveness of practitioners’ implementations.

There is little empirical evidence that supports a preferred change management model (Hallencreutz & Turner, 2011 ). However, there are many similar strategies found across change management models (Raineri, 2011 ). Bamford and Forrester’s ( 2003 ) case study showed that “[change] managers in a company generally ignored the popular change literature” (p. 560). The authors followed Pettigrew’s ( 1987 ) suggestions that change managers should not use abstract theories; instead, they should relate change theories to the context of the change. Neves’ ( 2009 ) exploratory factor analysis of employees experiencing the implementation of a new performance appraisal system at a public university suggested that (a) change appropriateness (if the employee felt the change was beneficial to the organization) was positively related with affective commitment (how much the employee liked their job), and (b) affective commitment mediated the relationship between change appropriateness and individual change (how much the employee shifted to the new system). It is unlikely that there is a universal change management approach that works in all settings (Saka, 2003 ). Because change is chaotic, one specific model or framework may not be useful in multiple contexts (Buchanan & Boddy, 1992 ; Pettigrew & Whipp, 1991 ). This requires change managers to consider various approaches for different implementations (Pettigrew, 1987 ). Change managers may face uncertainties that cannot be addressed by a planned sequence of steps (Carnall, 2007 ; Pettigrew & Whipp, 1991 ). Different stakeholders within an organization may complete steps at different times (Pollack & Pollack, 2015 ). Although there may not be one perspective change management approach, many models and frameworks consist of similar change management strategies.

Anderson and Ackerman Anderson ( 2001 ) discuss the differences between change frameworks and change process models. They state that a change framework identifies topics that are relevant to the change and explains the procedures that organizations should acknowledge during the change. However, the framework does not provide details about how to accomplish the steps of the change or the sequence in which the change manager should perform the steps. Additionally, Anderson and Ackerman Anderson ( 2001 ) explain that change process models describe what actions are necessary to accomplish the change and the order in which to facilitate the actions. Whereas frameworks may identify variables or theories required to promote change, models focus on the specific processes that lead to change. Based on the literature, we define a change strategy as a process or action from a model or framework. Multiple models and frameworks contain similar strategies. Change managers use models and frameworks contextually; some change management strategies may be used across numerous models and frameworks.

The purpose of this article is to present a common set of change management strategies found across numerous models and frameworks and identify how frequently change management practitioners implement these common strategies in practice. We also compare current practice with models and frameworks from the literature. Some change management models and frameworks have been around for decades and others are more recent. This comparison may assist practitioners and theorists to consider different strategies that fall outside a specific model.

Common Strategies in the Change Management Literature

We examined highly-cited publications ( n  > 1000 citations) from the last 20 years, business websites, and university websites to select organizational change management models and frameworks. First, we searched two indexes—Google Scholar and Web of Science’s Social Science Citation Index. We used the following keywords in both indexes: “change management” OR “organizational change” OR “organizational development” AND (models or frameworks). Additionally, we used the same search terms in a Google search to identify models mentioned on university and business websites. This helped us identify change management models that had less presence in popular research. We only included models and frameworks from our search results that were mentioned on multiple websites. We reached saturation when multiple publications stopped identifying new models and frameworks.

After we identified the models and frameworks, we analyzed the original publications by the authors to identify observable strategies included in the models and frameworks. We coded the strategies by comparing new strategies with our previously coded strategies, and we combined similar strategies or created a new strategy. Our list of strategies was not exhaustive, but we included the most common strategies found in the publications. Finally, we omitted publications that did not provide details about the change management strategies. Although many of these publications were highly cited and identified change implementation processes or phases, the authors did not identify a specific strategy.

Table ​ Table1 1 shows the 16 models and frameworks that we analyzed and the 15 common strategies that we identified from this analysis. Ackerman-Anderson and Anderson ( 2001 ) believe that it is important for process models to consider organizational imperatives as well as human dynamics and needs. Therefore, the list of strategies considers organizational imperatives such as create a vision for the change that aligns with the organization’s mission and strategies regarding human dynamics and needs such as listen to employees’ concerns about the change. We have presented the strategies in order of how frequently the strategies appear in the models and frameworks. Table ​ Table1 1 only includes strategies found in at least six of the models or frameworks.

Common strategies in the change management literature

A = ADKAR (Hiatt, 2006 ); AA = Ackerman Anderson and Anderson ( 2001 ); B = Bridges ( 1991 ); BB = Buchanan and Boddy ( 1992 ); BH = Beckhard and Harris ( 1987 ); C = Carnall ( 2007 ); CW = Cummings and Worley ( 1993 ); FB = French and Bell ( 1999 ); GE = GE CAP model (Neri et al., 2008 ; Polk, 2011 ); K = Kotter ( 2012 ); KSJ = Kanter et al. ( 1992 ); L = Lewin’s Three-step model (Bakari et al., 2017 ; Lewin, 1951 ); LK = Luecke ( 2003 ); M = McKinsey’s 7-S framework (Cox et al., 2019 ; Waterman et al., 1980 ); N = Nadler and Tushman ( 1997 ); PW = Pettigrew and Whipp (1993)

Strategies Used by Change Managers

We developed an online questionnaire to determine how frequently change managers used the strategies identified in our review of the literature. The Qualtrics-hosted survey consisted of 28 questions including sliding-scale, multiple-choice, and Likert-type items. Demographic questions focused on (a) how long the participant had been involved in the practice of change management, (b) how many change projects the participant had led, (c) the types of industries in which the participant led change implementations, (d) what percentage of job responsibilities involved working as a change manager and a project manager, and (e) where the participant learned to conduct change management. Twenty-one Likert-type items asked how often the participant used the strategies identified by our review of common change management models and frameworks. Participants could select never, sometimes, most of the time, and always. The Cronbach’s Alpha of the Likert-scale questions was 0.86.

The procedures for the questionnaire followed the steps suggested by Gall et al. ( 2003 ). The first steps were to define the research objectives, select the sample, and design the questionnaire format. The fourth step was to pretest the questionnaire. We conducted cognitive laboratory interviews by sending the questionnaire and interview questions to one person who was in the field of change management, one person who was in the field of performance improvement, and one person who was in the field of survey development (Fowler, 2014 ). We met with the reviewers through Zoom to evaluate the questionnaire by asking them to read the directions and each item for clarity. Then, reviewers were directed to point out mistakes or areas of confusion. Having multiple people review the survey instruments improved the reliability of the responses (Fowler, 2014 ).

We used purposeful sampling to distribute the online questionnaire throughout the following organizations: the Association for Talent Development (ATD), Change Management Institute (CMI), and the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI). We also launched a call for participation to department chairs of United States universities who had Instructional Systems Design graduate programs with a focus on Performance Improvement. We used snowball sampling to gain participants by requesting that the department chairs forward the questionnaire to practitioners who had led at least one organizational change.

Table ​ Table2 2 provides a summary of the characteristics of the 49 participants who completed the questionnaire. Most had over ten years of experience practicing change management ( n  = 37) and had completed over ten change projects ( n  = 32). The participants learned how to conduct change management on-the-job ( n  = 47), through books ( n  = 31), through academic journal articles ( n  = 22), and from college or university courses ( n  = 20). The participants had worked in 13 different industries.

Characteristics of participants

( n  = 49)

Table ​ Table3 3 shows how frequently participants indicated that they used the change management strategies included on the questionnaire. Forty or more participants said they used the following strategies most often or always: (1) Asked members of senior leadership to support the change; (2) Listened to managers’ concerns about the change; (3) Aligned an intended change with an organization’s mission; (4) Listened to employees’ concerns about the change; (5) Aligned an intended change with an organization’s vision; (6) Created measurable short-term goals; (7) Asked managers for feedback to improve the change, and (8) Focused on organizational culture.

Strategies used by change managers

Table ​ Table4 4 identifies how frequently the strategies appeared in the models and frameworks and the rate at which practitioners indicated they used the strategies most often or always. The strategies found in the top 25% of both ( n  > 36 for practitioner use and n  > 11 in models and frameworks) focused on communication, including senior leadership and the employees in change decisions, aligning the change with the vision and mission of the organization, and focusing on organizational culture. Practitioners used several strategies more commonly than the literature suggested, especially concerning the topic of middle management. Practitioners focused on listening to middle managers’ concerns about the change, asking managers for feedback to improve the change, and ensuring that managers were trained to promote the change. Meanwhile, practitioners did not engage in the following strategies as often as the models and frameworks suggested that they should: provide all members of the organization with clear communication about the change, distinguish the differences between leadership and management, reward new behavior, and include employees in change decisions.

A comparison of the strategies used by practitioners to the strategies found in the literature

Common Strategies Used by Practitioners and Found in the Literature

The purpose of this article was to present a common set of change management strategies found across numerous models and frameworks and to identify how frequently change management practitioners implement these common strategies in practice. The five common change management strategies were the following: communicate about the change, involve stakeholders at all levels of the organization, focus on organizational culture, consider the organization’s mission and vision, and provide encouragement and incentives to change. Below we discuss our findings with an eye toward presenting a few key recommendations for change management.

Communicate About the Change

Communication is an umbrella term that can include messaging, networking, and negotiating (Buchanan & Boddy, 1992 ). Our findings revealed that communication is essential for change management. All the models and frameworks we examined suggested that change managers should provide members of the organization with clear communication about the change. It is interesting that approximately 33% of questionnaire respondents indicated that they sometimes, rather than always or most of the time, notified all members of the organization about the change. This may be the result of change managers communicating through organizational leaders. Instead of communicating directly with everyone in the organization, some participants may have used senior leadership, middle management, or subgroups to communicate the change. Messages sent to employees from leaders can effectively promote change. Regardless of who is responsible for communication, someone in the organization should explain why the change is happening (Connor et al., 2003 ; Doyle & Brady, 2018 ; Hiatt, 2006 ; Kotter, 2012 ) and provide clear communication throughout the entire change implementation (McKinsey & Company, 2008 ; Mento et al., 2002 ).

Involve Stakeholders at All Levels of the Organization

Our results indicate that change managers should involve senior leaders, managers, as well as employees during a change initiative. The items on the questionnaire were based on a review of common change management models and frameworks and many related to some form of stakeholder involvement. Of these strategies, over half were used often by 50% or more respondents. They focused on actions like gaining support from leaders, listening to and getting feedback from managers and employees, and adjusting strategies based on stakeholder input.

Whereas the models and frameworks often identified strategies regarding senior leadership and employees, it is interesting that questionnaire respondents indicated that they often implemented strategies involving middle management in a change implementation. This aligns with Bamford and Forrester’s ( 2003 ) research describing how middle managers are important communicators of change and provide an organization with the direction for the change. However, the participants did not develop managers into leaders as often as the literature proposed. Burnes and By ( 2012 ) expressed that leadership is essential to promote change and mention how the change management field has failed to focus on leadership as much as it should.

Focus on Organizational Culture

All but one of the models and frameworks we analyzed indicated that change managers should focus on changing the culture of an organization and more than 75% of questionnaire respondents revealed that they implemented this strategy always or most of the time. Organizational culture affects the acceptance of change. Changing the organizational culture can prevent employees from returning to the previous status quo (Bullock & Batten, 1985 ; Kotter, 2012 ; Mento et al., 2002 ). Some authors have different views on how to change an organization’s culture. For example, Burnes ( 2000 ) thinks that change managers should focus on employees who were resistant to the change while Hiatt ( 2006 ) suggests that change managers should replicate what strategies they used in the past to change the culture. Change managers require open support and commitment from managers to lead a culture change (Phillips, 2021 ).

In addition, Pless and Maak ( 2004 ) describe the importance of creating a culture of inclusion where diverse viewpoints help an organization reach its organizational objectives. Yet less than half of the participants indicated that they often focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Change managers should consider diverse viewpoints when implementing change, especially for organizations whose vision promotes a diverse and inclusive workforce.

Consider the Organization’s Mission and Vision

Several of the models and frameworks we examined mentioned that change managers should consider the mission and vision of the organization (Cummings & Worley, 1993 ; Hiatt, 2006 ; Kotter, 2012 ; Polk, 2011 ). Furthermore, aligning the change with the organization’s mission and vision were among the strategies most often implemented by participants. This was the second most common strategy both used by participants and found in the models and frameworks. A mission of an organization may include its beliefs, values, priorities, strengths, and desired public image (Cummings & Worley, 1993 ). Leaders are expected to adhere to a company’s values and mission (Strebel, 1996 ).

Provide Encouragement and Incentives to Change

Most of the change management models and frameworks suggested that organizations should reward new behavior, yet most respondents said they did not provide incentives to change. About 75% of participants did indicate that they frequently gave encouragement to employees about the change. The questionnaire may have confused participants by suggesting that they provide incentives before the change occurs. Additionally, respondents may have associated incentives with monetary compensation. Employee training can be considered an incentive, and many participants confirmed that they provided employees and managers with training. More information is needed to determine why the participants did not provide incentives and what the participants defined as rewards.

Future Conversations Between Practitioners and Researchers

Table ​ Table4 4 identified five strategies that practitioners used more often than the models and frameworks suggested and four strategies that were suggested more often by the models and frameworks than used by practitioners. One strategy that showed the largest difference was provided employees with incentives to implement the change. Although 81% of the selected models and frameworks suggested that practitioners should provide employees with incentives, only 25% of the practitioners identified that they provided incentives always and most of the time. Conversations between theorists and practitioners could determine if these differences occur because each group uses different terms (Hughes, 2007 ) or if practitioners just implement change differently than theorists suggest (Saka, 2003 ).

Additionally, conversations between theorists and practitioners may help promote improvements in the field of change management. For example, practitioners were split on how often they promoted DEI, and the selected models and frameworks did not focus on DEI in change implementations. Conversations between the two groups would help theorists understand what practitioners are doing to advance the field of change management. These conversations may encourage theorists to modify their models and frameworks to include modern approaches to change.

Limitations

The models and frameworks included in this systematic review were found through academic research and websites on the topic of change management. We did not include strategies contained on websites from change management organizations. Therefore, the identified strategies could skew towards approaches favored by theorists instead of practitioners. Additionally, we used specific publications to identify the strategies found in the models and frameworks. Any amendments to the cited models or frameworks found in future publications could not be included in this research.

We distributed this questionnaire in August 2020. Several participants mentioned that they were not currently conducting change management implementations because of global lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Because it can take years to complete a change management implementation (Phillips, 2021 ), this research does not describe how COVID-19 altered the strategies used by the participants. Furthermore, participants were not provided with definitions of the strategies. Their interpretations of the strategies may differ from the definitions found in the academic literature.

Future Research

Future research should expand upon what strategies the practitioners use to determine (a) how the practitioners use the strategies, and (b) the reasons why practitioners use certain strategies. Participants identified several strategies that they did not use as often as the literature suggested (e.g., provide employees with incentives and adjust the change implementation because of reactions from employees). Future research should investigate why practitioners are not implementing these strategies often.

Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic may have changed how practitioners implemented change management strategies. Future research should investigate if practitioners have added new strategies or changed the frequency in which they identified using the strategies found in this research.

Our aim was to identify a common set of change management strategies found across several models and frameworks and to identify how frequently change management practitioners implement these strategies in practice. While our findings relate to specific models, frameworks, and strategies, we caution readers to consider the environment and situation where the change will occur. Therefore, strategies should not be selected for implementation based on their inclusion in highly cited models and frameworks. Our study identified strategies found in the literature and used by change managers, but it does not predict that specific strategies are more likely to promote a successful organizational change. Although we have presented several strategies, we do not suggest combining these strategies to create a new framework. Instead, these strategies should be used to promote conversation between practitioners and theorists. Additionally, we do not suggest that one model or framework is superior to others because it contains more strategies currently used by practitioners. Evaluating the effectiveness of a model or framework by how many common strategies it contains gives an advantage to models and frameworks that contain the most strategies. Instead, this research identifies what practitioners are doing in the field to steer change management literature towards the strategies that are most used to promote change.

Declarations

This research does not represent conflicting interests or competing interests. The research was not funded by an outside agency and does not represent the interests of an outside party.

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Contributor Information

Jeffrey Phillips, Email: ude.usf@spillihpbj .

James D. Klein, Email: ude.usf@nielkj .

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Home » Management Case Studies » Case Study: Analysis of Organizational Culture at Google

Case Study: Analysis of Organizational Culture at Google

Google Inc came to life with the two brilliant people as the founder of the company. Those two were Larry Page and Sergey Brin . Both of them are a PhDs holder in computer science in Stanford University California. In their research project, they came out with a plan to make a search engine that ranked websites according to the number of other websites that linked to that site. Before Google was established, search engines had ranked site simply by the number of times the search term searched for appeared on the webpage. By the brilliant mind of Larry and Sergey, they develop the technology called PageRank algorithm . PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of document, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of measuring its relative importance within the set. All this in-depth research leads to a glorious day which is on September 15, 1997 where Google.com domain was registered. Soon after that, on September 4, 1998, they formally incorporated their company, Google Inc, at a friend’s garage in Menlo Park California. The name Google originates from “Googol” which refers to the mathematical equivalent of the number one followed by a hundred zeros. In March 1999, the company moved into offices at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto. After that, the company leased a complex of buildings in Mountain View. Ever since then, the location of the headquarter remain unchanged.

Google’s core business is to provide a search engine for the cyber user who would like to go to their desire site. The Google search engine attracted a number of internet users by its sleek and simple design but result in amazing search result. After the initial stage of Google establishing itself in the world, it began selling advertisements associated with the search keywords. The advertisements were text-based in order to maximize the page loading speed. Most of the Google Inc revenue relies on the advertisement and they had been successfully with the help of AdWords and AdSense in their system. After having some experience in the industry, Google itself launched its own free web-based email service, known as Gmail in 2004. This service is established to meet the need of the cyber user in order to store and send their document through online. In the same year, one of the most captivating technologies that Google had launched is the Google Earth. Google Earth is an amazing creation that is a map of the earth based on the satellite image. It requires you to type the desire location that you want to view and it will process the image for you. Furthermore, Google Inc made a new partnership with NASA with even enhances the Google technologies. Google also had its own Google Video which allows user to search the internet for videos. One of the most important things in the Google Inc is that they have a strong organizational culture which brings them closer and stronger compare with other firms. The values that they emphasis on are creativity, simplicity and innovation in order to gain competitive advantage against their competitor.

The Google Culture

Google is well known for their organizational cultures distinctiveness and uniqueness compared to their immediate competitors. On the Google corporate website, they have listed down 10 core principles that guide the actions of the entire organization. These are the values and assumptions shared within the organization. These values are also termed as ‘espoused values’, where it is not necessarily what the organization actually values even though the top executives of the company embrace them.

In Google, the daily organizational life is distinctive and is one that thrives on informal culture. The rituals that portray the organization’s culture as unique and possesses a small-company feel are portrayed daily at lunchtime, where almost all employees eat together at the many various office cafes while at the same time having an open, relaxed conversations with fellow Googlers that come from different teams. Also, because one of the Google culture’s main pillars are the pillar of innovation, every Googler are very comfortable at sharing ideas, thoughts, and opinions with one another in a very informal working environment. Every employee is a hands-on contributor and everyone wears several hats. Sergey and Brin also plays a big part of laying the foundation on what the Google culture is and the founders have continued to maintain the Google Way by organizing a weekly all-hands “TGIF” meetings for employees to pose questions directly at them.

Here are some of a few of their core principles which will provide a look into Google’s management philosophy and the type of culture they want to possess:

In Google, the motivated employees who ‘live’ the Google brand and are aligned to the company call themselves ‘Googlers’. Even former employees of Google have a name which they refer to themselves as ‘Xooglers’. This shows that in Google, their employees are so involved in the organization that they have their own symbolic name that mirrors the organization’s name and image, which is a sure sign of existing strong cultural values that are present within the company.

After tremendous growth in Google, the organization moved from a humble office building in Palo Alto, California back in its early days to its current office complex bought over from Silicon Graphics. The complex is popularly known as the Googleplex, which is a blend of the word ‘Google’ and ‘complex’. Googleplex is the result of a careful selection that serves to establish Google’s unique and individualistic culture in the eyes of the employees and the public. The corporate campus is built to provide a very fun, relaxed and colorful environment both inside and outside. Innovative design decisions provides Google employees 2000 car lots underground so that open spaces above and surrounding the building are filled with unique and interesting architectures that includes an on-site organic garden that supplies produces for Google’s various cafes, a bronze casting of a dinosaur fossil, a sand volleyball court, heated “endless pools” and also electric scooters along with hundreds of bikes scattered throughout the complex for Googlers to get to meetings across campuses. Googleplex is a significant departure from typical corporate campuses, challenging conventional thinking about private and public space. This also points out the alignment of values that are present in Google’s culture such as innovation, fun, laid-back, creativity and uniqueness that clearly shows that their organizational culture is truly unique and different from that of their competitors and other organizations.

Within the Googleplex, a truly attractive, fun and extraordinary workplace environment exists for Google employees. The interior of the headquarters is furnished with items like lava lamps and giant rubber balls while sofas, Google color coded chairs, and pool tables can be found at lounges and bar counters to express Google’s laid-back working atmosphere. The lobby contains a grand piano and a projection of current live Google search queries. The employees’ various needs are also taken care of by facilities such as the 19 cafes on campus which serves a variety of food choices for their diverse workforce, a gym, massage parlor, laundromats, and even micro kitchens, which provides snacks for employees who want a quick bite. This ensures that employees can be more productive and happy without ever leaving the workplace. A manifestation of Google’s creative and innovative culture is shown by the unconventional building design with high ceilings to let natural light in, durable floors made of tiny quartz stones, working British phone booths splashed in Google colors, and lounges that also serve as DIY libraries with cleverly placed low-reach book racks adorned with colorful Lego sets and cubes. All these innovative, creative and colorful designs are symbols of Google’s unique organizational culture that emphasizes on continuous innovation.

Google engages their employees by applying adaptive culture in the organization. From their core competency in search engine technology, Google has responded to customers change in needs by expanding onto the mobile market. The employees analyze, anticipate and seek out the opportunities to improve the organization’s performance by being proactive and quick in coming out with new technologies and solutions for mobile services. It aims to help people all over the world to do more tasks on their phone, not to mention the several different ways to access their Google search engine on a mobile phone. In addition, Google recently entered the smartphone market by launching the Google Nexus One smartphone in response to customer’s increasing need for smartphones, which is gaining ground on popularity because everyone is going mobile in the Information Age. This is the result of Google employees’ common mental model that the organization’s success depends on continuous change to support the stakeholders and also that they are solely responsible for the organization’s performance. The employees also believe that by entering into other markets beyond their core competency, the change is necessary and inevitable to keep pace with an ever changing and volatile technological market.

Google’s organizational culture places a huge importance of trust and transparency by having an informal corporate motto namely “Don’t be evil”. This slogan has become a central pillar to their identity and a part of their self-proclaimed core principles. It also forms the ethical codes of the organization where Google establishes a foundation for honest decision-making that disassociates Google from any and all cheating. Its ethical principles means that Google sets guiding principles for their advertising programs and practices, which is where most of their revenues come from. Google doesn’t breach the trust of its users so it doesn’t accept pop-up advertising, which is a disruptive form of advertisement that hinders with the user’s ability to see the content that they searched. And because they don’t manipulate rankings to put any of their partners higher in their search results or allow anyone to buy their way up the PageRank, the integrity of their search results are not compromised. This way, users trust Google’s objectivity and their ethical principles is one of the reasons why Google’s ad business had become so successful. The founders of Google believe strongly that ‘in the long term we will be better served, as shareholders and in all other ways, by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains.’

Analysis of Google Culture

Satisfied employees not only increase productivity and reduce turnover, but also enhance creativity and commitment. Google is already having a playful variation culture in the organization for the employees. This can enable the employees to have an enjoyment environment and this will be able enhance the relationship between the employees and strengthen their bond to work as a team. An enjoyment environment definitely can let the employees to feel satisfied and subsequently will increase productivity. Apart from that, this will shape a convenient work process for the employees that will smoothen the decision making process for the management team. Google already identified the employees are the organization’s internal customers and this is the reason why it has been constantly giving employees a sense of purpose, enhancing their self-esteem and sense of belonging for being a part of the organization. The company was reorganized into small teams that attacked hundreds of projects all at once. The founders give the employees great latitude, and they take the same latitude for themselves. Eric Schmidt says that Google merely appears to be disorganized. “We say we run the company chaotically. We run it at the edge. This can adapt the culture Google and therefore they can individually to generate the ideas on their own.

On the other hand, Google hires employees that have good academic results but without practical experience and this will be a threat to Google in terms of their organization’s operation. Google is a results-driven organization and if employees with only creative ideas but lacking of skills to realize the ideas they have initially planned, this will absolutely reduce the productivity of the organizations. Google had been public listed on year 2004 and therefore Google had to take the shareholders’ views into consideration before making any decision. The shareholders had been strongly emphasizing on reducing the employee benefits due to the high cost invested on it. This leads to the organizational culture would be degraded and the employees would feel less satisfied and affect their produced results. Employees are very important asset the Google while the shareholders also the contributor of funds for Google. The management team has to weight the importance of both of the stakeholders for the Google as this will create a different organizational culture .

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Google’s Secret Formula for Management? Doing the Basics Well

• Raffaella Sadun

Employees learn how to run meetings, have conversations, and set goals.

Google has opened its trove of management processes to one and all, for free. It might not feel that surprising – after all, Google has created plenty of other free tools for the world to use. And it also follows Google’s many years of work in people analytics. But in fact, there is something surprising in the details of what they revealed: Their management tools focus on some pretty basic stuff like how to run meetings, have conversations, and set goals. As basic and unsurprising as some of these practices may look, they are really hard to do well on a consistent basis. Reasons for that include a lack of awareness that better processes are needed, a lack of the skills needed to do those processes, and organizational politics.

Basic management fundamentals are hard to implement. It’s part of the reason you can’t just copy another company’s management practices (even Google’s) and simply sit back and wait for success. Companies still have to do the hard work of addressing the essential ways their management practices function.

Google has opened its  trove of management processes  to one and all, for free. It might not feel that surprising — after all, Google has created plenty of free tools for the world to use, from internet search to email. Management tools may not seem that different. And it also follows Google’s many years of work in  people analytics .

But, in fact, there is something surprising in the details of what Google revealed. Turns out a lot of its management tools focus on some pretty basic stuff, like how to run meetings, have conversations, and set goals.

Why would Google release its management processes? I see three reasons.

First, the company has nothing to lose by doing it. That’s because as basic and unsurprising as some of these practices may look, they are really hard to do well on a consistent basis. My coauthors and I explore this in detail as part of a  study of how well 12,000 firms in 34 countries performed 18 core management practices . We found many reasons for weak adoption of basic things like target setting and talent management, but some of the most prominent ones include:

• A lack of awareness that better processes may be needed
• A lack of the skills needed to adopt those better processes
• Organizational politics — but more generally a lack of trust within the organization to adopt new processes. Taking steps like standardizing the way interviews are conducted, for example, may be perceived as excessive bureaucracy by some employees even if they are beneficial to the organization as a whole.

These hurdles are hard to overcome — because of them, even basic management fundamentals are hard to implement. It’s part of the reason why you can’t just copy another company’s management practices (even Google’s) and simply sit back and wait for success. Without building the core competencies that allow those practices to work, all you’ve got is something that sounds good on paper.

Consider the difficulties researchers find in  replicating lab experiments . It turns out that even the small differences in methods led to failure for efforts to replicate certain results. Management practices have a similar flavor — you need a whole set of practices, and standards around those practices, to be in place for them to be effective. So in this light, there’s very little downside to Google being “open source” about management; it’s so hard to copy good management that the company isn’t risking much.

Research Shows Good Management Is Incredibly Hard to Copy

The second reason Google might choose to release these practices exists in some tension with the first: When really implemented, even simple management practices can have a  huge  payoff. In other words, because basic management practices are difficult to adopt, the firms that manage to do so see a major impact on organizational performance. Any company that successfully adopted Google’s management tools would be likely to see huge gains.

In our sample, the average firm that managed to improve from the bottom 10% to the top 10% in management skill would see a $15 million increase in profits, 25% faster annual growth, and 75% higher productivity. To see why, consider something as basic as process implementation. Adherence to a common set of processes is a way to remove common biases in an organization and to  focus on objective results  rather than  gut feelings . It’s an important part of teamwork, especially when very skilled individuals  with complementary specialties  have to work together. Surgeon Atul Gawande’s  focus on simple checklists  as a way to reduce errors in the operating room is an example of this; his checklist is a common process that helps keep teams of diverse and highly skilled people focused on the job at hand. Basic practices like the ones Google focuses on are often the  glue and cohesiveness  needed across all sectors, including tech. As  Google CEO Sundar Pichai said : “I also value teamwork quite a bit and I think it’s really important to build organisations where people really want to work together. Everything comes out of that. So, setting up collaborative cultures is another big thing I’ve been trying to focus on.” Management practices are an essential ingredient in building culture.

Third, and finally, Google might also choose to release its management tools because doing so could help macroeconomic growth. When firms grow, the economy grows. We’ve found that better-managed firms spend 10 times as much on R&D as poorly managed ones and also increase their patenting by a factor of 10. All that innovation is good for the broader economy. Indeed, in our study the average management quality in a country was strongly correlated with standard measures of economic growth.

While they may not always feel glamorous, strong managerial processes really matter. It’s great that Google made its public, but companies still have to do the hard work of addressing the essential ways that their management practices function.

• Raffaella Sadun is the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

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Case study: examining failure in change management

Journal of Organizational Change Management

ISSN : 0953-4814

Article publication date: 21 February 2020

Issue publication date: 22 April 2020

This case study aims to shed light on what went wrong with the introduction of new surgical suture in a Dutch hospital operating theatre following a tender. Transition to working with new surgical suture was organized in accordance with legal and contractual provisions, and basic principles of change management were applied, but resistance from surgeons led to cancellation of supplies of the new suture.

Design/methodology/approach

Researchers had access to all documents relevant to the tendering procedure and crucial correspondence between stakeholders. Seventeen in-depth, 1 h interviews were conducted with key informants who were targeted through maximum variation sampling. Patients were not interviewed. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and analysed by discourse analysis. A trial session and workshop were participatively observed. A cultural psychological perspective was adopted to gain an understanding of why certain practices appear to be resistant to change.

For the cardiothoracic surgeons, suture was more than just stitching material. Suture as a tactile element in their day-to-day work environment is embedded within a social arrangement that ties elements of professional accountability, risk avoidance and direct patient care together in a way that makes sense and feels secure. This arrangement is not to be fumbled with by outsiders.

Practical implications

By understanding the practical and emotional stakes that medical professionals have in their work, lessons can be learned to prevent failure of future change initiatives.

Originality/value

The cultural psychological perspective adopted in this study has never been applied to understanding failed change in a hospital setting.

• Operating theatre
• Cultural psychological perspective
• Failed change
• Surgical suture

Graamans, E. , Aij, K. , Vonk, A. and ten Have, W. (2020), "Case study: examining failure in change management", Journal of Organizational Change Management , Vol. 33 No. 2, pp. 319-330. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOCM-06-2019-0204

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2020, Ernst Graamans, Kjeld Aij, Alexander Vonk and Wouter ten Have

Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode .

Introduction

In the Netherlands, and more broadly in Europe, the cost of health care is rising and is expected to continue to rise ( Jenkner and Leive, 2010 ; Mot et al. , 2016 ). In light of this development, the challenge for those managing healthcare institutions is to spend smartly and cut costs where possible, while at the same time meeting changing patient demands (e.g. Dent and Pahor, 2015 ; Thistlethwaite and Spencer, 2008 ). The fact that managing the work and practices of medical professionals has always been difficult (e.g. Andri and Kyriakidou, 2014 ; Kennerley, 1993 ; Kirkpatrick et al. , 2005 ) adds to the complexity of meeting this challenge. Furthermore, health workers increasingly are held accountable for and are expected to be transparent about the outcomes of their work (e.g. Exworthy et al. , 2019 ; Genovese et al. , 2017 ). Although this trend is generally expected to lead to improved results, for medical professionals it also creates a sense of being under constant scrutiny. The emotions and feelings that are triggered in these kinds of processes have a substantial impact, which is acknowledged by both management practitioners and social scientists working in health care (e.g. Kent, 2006 ; Mark, 2005 ; Sebrant, 2014 ). In this case study, emotions and feelings are addressed by adopting a specific cultural psychological perspective. Cultural psychologists Paul Voestermans and Theo Verheggen (2013) call for more detailed psychological investigations into how people acquire embodied skills and mannerisms that are in line with professional demands, preferences and tastes. When emotions and feelings are felt or displayed, this is seen as an indication that something “real” is at stake that deeply involves professionals into their group, department or speciality. This paper demonstrates that this deep involvement can affect the success or failure of a change initiative, in this case the introduction of new surgical suture material in the operating theatre. This affective aspect may be underestimated in change management or only addressed in rather abstract fashion; by prematurely explaining resistance to change with the help of notions as professional autonomy, entitlement, stubbornness, culture and so on. The epistemological problem of discursively turning a descriptive label into an explanation or operational determinant of behaviour has been addressed particularly by discursive psychologists (e.g. Potter and Wetherell, 1987 , 1995a ) and cultural psychologists (e.g. Valsiner, 2014 ; Verheggen, 2005 ; Verheggen and Baerveldt, 2007 ). Although the concerns in this paper are practical and empirical, they can be traced back to the same problem. In management practice, and especially in the management of medical professionals, certain abstract characterizations of behaviour and change resistance can become problematic when they are no longer just employed as general, imprecise descriptions, but are reified and employed as stopgaps. As such, they preclude deeper and more detailed investigations into what is at stake for the people behind these abstractions. The added value of the approach adopted in this case study is that it does not need the reification and superimposition of notions such as shared values, culture or even professional autonomy, but allows for more holistic, or contextualized investigations into the social patterning of behaviour within professional groups or specialities. Truly delving into the tenacity of certain medical professional practices goes further than positing professional autonomy or entitlement as a cause, for instance. Earlier, this particular cultural psychological approach has successfully been adopted to describe psychological dynamics within the boardroom of a large healthcare organization ( Graamans et al. , 2014 ) and, more recently, to better understand and contribute to more effective interventions against the culturally embedded practice of female circumcision ( Graamans et al. , 2019a , 2019b ).

The case: resistance to new surgical suture in the operating theatre of a Dutch hospital

At the end of 2014, a large university hospital in the Netherlands launched a procurement tender exercise for surgical suture material. The rationale for hospital management to initiate this procedure was cost-cutting and standardization. The award criteria were focussed on the most economically advantageous tender. There were different suppliers on the market that were able to produce and deliver high-quality surgical suture material for a lower price than was currently being paid. Consequently, the tender was awarded to a new supplier. The top managers and purchasing manager who initiated the tender trod carefully and implemented this relatively small-scale change initiative according to some basic change management principles (e.g. Kotter, 2012 ): they built a guiding coalition that incorporated renowned medical specialists, they consulted department heads and they communicated the change to surgeons through different channels. Furthermore, it was recorded in the tender that the new supplier should provide value-adding services such as e-learning modules for surgeons, facilitate lengthy trial-use periods and offer workshops and support to the operating theatre. Hospital management conceived this first initiative as a test case for more extensive cost-cutting operations that were to follow. This project was supposed to be relatively easy, both in scale and in complexity. However, in the preparations ahead of the trial phase, a concern was raised by the cardiac surgeons to one part of the tender package involving sutures specifically used for cardiac surgery. Nevertheless, surgeons were forced to participate in testing the products supplied in the whole tender, including those products used in their specific specialities. Meanwhile, the initiators of the project felt that careful preparations of the testing phase had been made.

So, what went wrong? In mid-2015 – when this research project started – hospital management eventually met with fierce resistance from some of the hospital's cardiothoracic surgeons. They adamantly refused to work with the new suture material. The resistance took the form of surgeons expressing anger at management, stockpiling their own supplies of surgical suture, refusing to operate, holding managers accountable for patient deaths that could arise from use of the new suture and threatening to go to the press if such a thing indeed were to happen. Hospital management had anticipated some resistance, but not of this intensity. The end result was that the contract was eventually cancelled for sutures specifically used in cardiac surgery.

This research paper sets out to answer the following question: why are some medical professional practices so difficult to change, and what can we learn from this failed test case?

Theoretical background

As mentioned earlier, to better understand the entrenched nature of professional practices and the emotional stakes involved, we adopted a particular cultural psychological perspective. Following Voestermans' and Verheggen's approach ( 2013 ), we explicitly take the position that people are embodied and expressive beings who over time attune their emotions, feelings, preferences and tastes to the groups they belong to. People naturally feel more compelled to act in accordance with these preferences than to act upon abstract ideas, rules and protocols superimposed upon them from outside their group. Evidently, medical professionals are not exempt from feeling more compelled to act in accordance with these preferences just because they are a highly educated group of people. To the contrary, as a result of being members of their professional group for so long – through medical school, surgical residency, PhD studies and so on – they have learned to coordinate their actions on the basis of complex sets of agreements, conventions and arrangements that characterize their professional group.

Whereas agreements are easy to articulate, such as taking an oath, Voestermans and Verheggen (2013) reserve the term “arrangement” for the way members of exclusive and often elite groups coordinate their behaviour almost automatically within their own specifically cultivated environments, following deeply embodied patterns. These patterns and practices are group-typical due to the mutual attunement of emotions, feelings, preferences and taste that has taken place over time. The resulting automaticity makes that they do not need articulation, whereas practices based on agreements do. Evidently, medical professionals have practices founded on highly specialized scholarship and evidence-based research. But it is a mistake to think of their work as a purely cognitive, rather mechanistic affair. These practices are enacted and reenacted in the minutest interactions on an ongoing basis, and get more refined over time, until at one point they are felt and experienced more than that they are talked about . It is predicted that groups formed on the basis of such arrangements are particularly difficult to change. The apprehension that is triggered by attempts to change even the smallest element of such an arrangement is immediately felt.

Data collection

Data collection took place in a year starting from mid-2015. In total, 17 in-depth interviews were conducted that each lasted approximately 1 h. The respondents were targeted through maximum variation sampling until saturation was achieved and are listed in Table I . Patients were excluded beforehand. The interviews were audio-recorded after verbal consent was given. All but one interviewee agreed to be audio-recorded. This interviewee was comfortable, though, with the interviewer (EG) taking notes. The interviews were transcribed and anonymized. Apart from formal interviewing, extensive informal conversations on the topic took place with surgeons from different medical specialities.

Field notes were made on the observations of a trial session and a workshop facilitated by the new supplier. These notes were divided into four categories: observational notes, theoretical notes, methodological notes and reflective notes ( Baarda et al. , 2013 ).

Data analysis

To gain an understanding of the different positions people can take up in relation to the introduction of new surgical suture and underlying social arrangements, the interview transcripts were analysed by means of discourse analysis following the example and guidelines of critical psychologist Carla Willig (1998 , 2008) . Her particular approach to discourse analysis was chosen because it allows for a discursive psychological reading of the interview transcripts whereby interviewees as active agents justify, blame, excuse, request or obfuscate to achieve some objective: the “action orientation” of talking ( Edwards and Potter, 1992 , 2001 ; Potter and Wetherell, 1995b ). Her approach also allows for a more Foucauldian, or post-structuralist reading whereby inferences are made on how the discourses interviewees draw upon delimit and facilitate behavioural opportunities and experience ( Davies and Harré, 1990 , 1999 ; Henriques et al. , 1984 ; Parker, 1992 ). The latter approach assumes that discourses, on the one hand, and practices, on the other, are closely tied and reinforce each other. Discourse from this perspective is not so much a matter of talking about things, but is conceived as an expressive practice in itself. Conceptualized as such discourses can hint at underlying social arrangements in which certain practices, such as operating with tangible surgical suture material, are performed. To come to such a conclusion with a greater amount of certainty, we contend, the inferences made on the basis of discourse analysis must always be triangulated with data from participant observations and cross-checked with key informants.

In October 2017, the findings were tentatively fed back to the management board in a plenary session and to department heads in several individual conversations. Extensive peer debriefing sessions within our multi-disciplinary research team in which both the medical professional and managerial perspectives were represented by its members took place to help with cross-checking and interpreting the data.

Conducting discourse analysis ( Willig, 2008 ) on the interview transcripts revealed several discourses that interviewees drew upon when they talked about the transition to working with the new surgical suture and surgical suture more generally. The main constructions, discourses and implications in relation to the interviewees themselves – in discourse analytic terms called “subject positions” – are summarized in Table II .

Economic/managerial discourse

We are confronted with an enormous challenge. We have to drastically cut costs. This was an important test case, because more and bigger cuts are pending. This appeared to us as an easy win. However, … [1] . (Head of operating theatres)

Not only with surgical suture, but in general medical specialists resist change. That is because these suppliers have a powerful and very effective sales force. It is what we call vendor lock-in . (Purchasing manager)

I get that those boys [cardiothoracic surgeons] … what they are doing is very precise and technical. And surgical suture and needles are of crucial importance. On the other hand, there are always these sentiments. I mean, there are many medical centres, also abroad, where cardiothoracic surgeons suture with XXX [brand name of new supplier] and it is not turned into a complicated affair. But you cannot take away these sentiments just like that. We took note of these feelings, and nudged our staff to give it [the new surgical suture] a try and comply as much as possible. But to be honest, according to me at cardiac surgery there is a lot of emotion involved surrounding suture, … and it is not working for me. (Department head, surgery)

The initiator – the manager that came up with the idea to supposedly cut costs – does not know that suture curls and curls more-or-less depending on the brand. He does not know whether needles are round or angular. And he doesn't care. But for my work this is very relevant. It has nothing to do with professional autonomy. (Cardiothoracic surgeon)

One might argue with this cardiothoracic surgeon that this is exactly what the notion of professional autonomy refers to; in this case, the autonomy to decide for yourself, as a medical professional, which materials to work with. But that is not the point this cardiothoracic surgeon is making per se . Apparently, in the daily jargon of healthcare managers, the notion of professional autonomy is employed as a stopgap explanation for resistance so often that this surgeon anticipated its negative connotation related to changing surgical suture and change more general. For him at least, the superimposition of professional autonomy as an explanation does not do justice to how he relates to the issue of changing surgical suture. For him it is not an abstract affair, but genuinely felt, both in a tactile and in an emotional sense. Also note that academic definitions of professional autonomy (conceptual) do not always correspond to how such notions are employed in daily usage (performative). The cardiothoracic surgeons spoken to frequently drew upon a competitive/professional discourse in relation to surgical suture, enriched with examples and in far less abstract manner than those that posited professional autonomy as the main cause of change resistance.

Competitive/professional discourse

He [Roger Federer] goes down in the history books as the best professional tennis player ever. And that is because he has spent endless hours on the court practising and refining his skills. His tennis racket has become a natural extension of his arm. His tennis racket is his instrument. My instrument is my suture … suture and needles. (Cardiothoracic surgeon)

I didn't just go to medical school. After that I have done my residency, with a Ph.D., et cetera . All in all an extra 10 years. Everything that you are supposed to do, I did that, to become the best possible professional and to be able to deliver the best possible care for the patient. This is not some quick course. This is really … six years of medical school and then postgraduate for another six years. That isn't nothing. You have to be motivated, driven and persistent. And you hope to end up working for an institution that enables you to profess your passion. (Cardiothoracic surgeon)

It is important to note that the cardiothoracic surgeons quoted here did not exclusively drew upon this competitive/professional discourse that implies sacrifice, persistence and drive. But when they did, they challenged the economic/managerial discourse without actually talking about finances. In a way, to put it bluntly, money from this perspective should not be an object, or, at least, it should never be a priority.

Discourse on patient care

Let's say … I am going to operate your father with XXX [brand name of new supplier], but I am not used to working with that suture. It curls more and the needles go blunt quicker and the needles are square and therefore more difficult to position in the needle holder. So I need to focus more and I need to stress … I need to work [with the utmost precision]. Well, I am curious whether that manager would let me operate on his father. (Cardiothoracic surgeon)

Surgical suture was constructed as a lifeline on which the cardiothoracic surgeon relies on behalf of the patient. Replacing surgical suture is perceived as an unacceptable potential cause of failure. So whereas the competitive/professional discourse places the concerns and aspirations of the medical professional front and centre, this discourse on patient care places the concerns of the patient front and centre by means of the medical professional as his advocate. Implicit in both discourses, though, is that money should not be an object. As such, these discourses are counter-discourses to the economic/managerial discourse that legitimizes replacing surgical suture by that of a cheaper brand.

Discourse on safety and quality

So many things can go wrong. So changing surgical suture presents an additional risk. We prefer to operate a patient's heart only once and then never again. (Cardiothoracic surgeon)

If medical specialists use the argument of safety, patient safety, then you are finished. As an executive it is over. You start thinking, what if he is right; and I force him to work with this suture and something goes horribly wrong. He only has to say: “I told you it wasn't safe!” And then you, as an executive, are gone. Of course, you have to challenge and not be naive, but ultimately it is a show stopper … that safety argument. Another factor was, that my colleague in the Executive Board and I are not [cardiothoracic] surgeons. So we could not weigh in from our own experience. (Chairman of the Board)

The best of the best: being part of an elite professional group

Those boys [cardiothoracic surgeons] – or men I should say – are so bloody good in what they do. And you [as a nurse operating theatre] also want to be part of that, to pass cum laude . They stand for their profession, each time they give it a hundred and ten percent. And they perform procedures that no one else dares to perform. For us it is a joy to assist them. You share in the pride and get into that special workflow. (Nurse, operating theatre)

Well, our group of cardiac surgeons consists of individuals with a unique history at this hospital. They are not known to be particularly dynamic or flexible. Let's keep it at that. So, to get them on board with our plans requires some extra effort on our part. (Chairman of the Board)

I have studied and practiced endlessly. And we [other cardiothoracic specialists] frequently consult one another. But sometimes when I have to decide fast, during a very complex operation, medicine is almost more like an art-form. I feel when something might go wrong and I anticipate what to do. And when someone later asks me: “Why did you do this or that?”, of course I will formulate an answer, but in reality I acted upon the experience I have and on what I have learned from my mentors. In these moments everyone in my team knows what to do. I do not even have to tell them. However, I cannot accept that someone who has no idea what we are doing, decides that I have to work with that suture. (Cardiothoracic surgeon)

The prediction that deeply embodied practices that are learned over time through mentorship, explicit instruction and implicit attunement of the senses are not to be changed by outsiders in a pick-and-choose manner (e.g. Voestermans and Verheggen, 2013 ) is confirmed by this surgeon.

As Willig noted: “It is important to examine the relationship between a source's and a recipient's discursive frames in order to understand the impact of a message” ( 1998 , p. 385). This paper is not intended as a reproach to either hospital management or those working within the cardiac surgery department. On the one hand, hospital management was faced with the challenge of cutting costs and making the provision of good health care sustainable. On the other hand, cardiothoracic surgeons were trying to keep the environment of the operation room as controlled and predictable as possible. They do not want any additional risks, especially if they feel that the risks have been imposed upon them. Just the fact that the new surgical suture had slightly different qualities – on which everyone agreed – made it an unacceptable change for the surgeons. Both perspectives make sense and, surprisingly, almost all research participants were able to eloquently elaborate on the opposing perspectives. However, it appeared as if the emotions and feelings that were immediately triggered within particular arrangements prevented the research participants from acting upon those insights. The result was a power struggle, and eventually management gave in to the cardiac surgeons by accepting a different supplier.

The failure described probably could have been prevented if those who initiated the change and implemented the transition had accounted for the particular social arrangements in which surgeons from different specialities operate. It could probably also have been prevented if the emotions and feelings that were expressed were acted upon in a timely manner, instead of being dismissed by implicitly juxtaposing emotional expression against rational decision-making. Cardiothoracic surgeons constitute a group with a distinct history and responsibility and to whom surgical suture is a crucial tool. Suture as a tactile element in their day-to-day work environment is embedded within a complex social arrangement that ties elements of risk avoidance, professional accountability and direct patient care together in a way that feels secure. The feelings triggered within this arrangement are genuinely felt and, therefore, are as real as the financial cost of surgical suture and evidence-based standards of its quality. These feelings need to be accounted for with the same managerial fervour. For hospital management this means that in planning a consistent overall approach to change in their institution, they must consider exceptions to that approach. It might be an uncomfortable message, but managers here to some extent reached the limits of changeability; the thinnest of sutures used to operate on people's hearts are beyond their reach, so to speak.

There are other aspects that need to be accounted for, that fall beyond the immediate scope of this research, but which nonetheless need to be mentioned to give a more complete picture. First, the main channel by which hospital management communicated about the tendering procedure, the verification process, the actual introduction, trial sessions and workshops was by email. One surgeon confided that he was too busy to systematically go through his emails and, due to a recent reorganization, had lost his personal secretary. The annoyances arising from different cost-cutting operations were thus accumulating. Secondly, although hospital management assumed that it had adequately communicated about and during the transition to new suture, some surgeons felt being presented with a fait accompli . Management had failed to ensure that the surgeons had received the necessary communications, and the surgeons did not acknowledge that they had indeed received them. This led to miscommunication and to further polarization. This was especially relevant because cardiothoracic surgeons had previously mentioned their concerns about the use of specific cardiac surgical sutures and were nevertheless then confronted with the new suture. The surgeons felt overpowered and had the impression of not being listened to. This resulted in some cardiothoracic surgeons deciding to present hospital management with a fait accompli in return by framing suture as a life-or-death matter and making the management responsible for the possibility of bad results that could be related to the sutures. Lastly, because of this escalation, emotions ran even higher, and interviewees on both sides frequently blamed each other for not having their facts straight. Change practitioners would do well to acknowledge these emotions and feelings, without dismissing them or juxtaposing them against reason and facts. It is a big mistake to view addressing feelings and emotions as simply the “soft” side of change management (see also: Steigenberger, 2015 ) or to superimpose labels on them too quickly.

In conclusion, we have demonstrated that even if all basic principles of change management have been applied in the usual way, procedures may escalate to an emotional level, eventually leading to a counterproductive deadlock. These emotions and feelings should be anticipated by thorough communication between all parties involved. Should they still arise, these emotions need to be accounted for and acted upon bilaterally in a non-judgemental and empathic manner to make informed decisions about pushing forward with a change initiative and, if so, guide its further implementation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Respondents targeted through maximum variation sampling

Summary discursive constructions, discourses and subject positions

The quotations are translated as the interviews were conducted in Dutch.

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Acknowledgements

We thank all research subjects, on both sides of the aisle, for their participation in this case study on a topic that involves them deeply into their professional groups. Also, we thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback on an earlier draft.

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Starbucks Change Management Case Study

Change is a constant in any business, and successful organizations must adapt to changes in the industry, market, and consumer preferences to remain competitive. 

The ability to manage change is crucial to the survival of businesses in today’s dynamic market environment. 

This is why change management is a vital aspect of business operations. 

In this blog post, we will explore the case study of Starbucks’ change management, discussing their need for change, strategies implemented, challenges faced, and the results of the change. 

We will also examine the lessons learned from this experience and the importance of change management in businesses. 

So let’s dive into the Starbucks change management case study and see how it can inform our understanding of successful change management. 

History and Growth of Starbucks

Starbucks is an American multinational coffee company founded in Seattle, Washington, in 1971. The founders of Starbucks were three friends, Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker.

Starbucks initially started as a single store selling high-quality coffee beans and equipment. It was only in the early 1980s that Howard Schultz joined Starbucks as the Director of Retail Operations and Marketing. It was his vision of a coffeehouse culture that transformed Starbucks into the iconic brand it is today.

Schultz convinced the founders to test a coffeehouse concept in downtown Seattle, and in 1984, the first Starbucks Coffeehouse was opened. The concept was an immediate success, and Starbucks quickly expanded throughout Seattle and the United States.

In 1992, Starbucks went public, and by 2000, the company had over 3,000 stores worldwide. By 2018, Starbucks had more than 30,000 stores across 80 countries.

Starbucks faced numerous challenges and crisis during its journey but it sailed through the tough times and surfaced as a text book examples of crisis management.

The need for change at Starbucks

 Despite its growth and success, Starbucks faced significant challenges in the late 2000s. In 2007-2008, the global financial crisis impacted Starbucks, leading to the closure of several underperforming stores. Furthermore, the company’s rapid expansion had led to a loss of focus on its core business, and the quality of its products had suffered. Starbucks’ profitability and customer satisfaction were on the decline, and the company needed to make significant changes to survive in the highly competitive coffee industry. In response, the company realized the need for change and embarked on a comprehensive change management program.

Reasons for the change

The need for change at Starbucks was evident, and the company identified several key areas that needed improvement. Firstly, Starbucks needed to streamline its operations to reduce costs and increase efficiency. Secondly, it needed to refocus on its core business of selling high-quality coffee and related products. Thirdly, Starbucks needed to improve its customer service and store experience to boost customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Strategies implemented by Starbucks

To achieve its goals, Starbucks implemented several strategies. Firstly, it closed underperforming stores and streamlined its operations to reduce costs. Secondly, it refocused on its core business by introducing new blends and improving the quality of its products. Thirdly, Starbucks launched a customer feedback program to understand customers’ needs and preferences better. Fourthly, Starbucks introduced new store designs and layouts to improve the in-store experience. Finally, Starbucks invested heavily in training its employees to provide excellent customer service and maintain the high standards of its products.

Challenges faced by Starbucks during the change

The change management process at Starbucks was not without challenges. Firstly, some employees resisted the changes, and there was a need to ensure that everyone was on board with the new direction of the company. Secondly, there was a need to balance the introduction of new products and store designs with maintaining the company’s core values and identity. Thirdly, there was a risk of losing customers during the change process, and Starbucks had to ensure that it maintained its customer base while attracting new customers.

Results of the change management at Starbucks

The change management program at Starbucks was successful, and the company saw significant improvements in its financial performance and customer satisfaction. Firstly, Starbucks’ profitability improved significantly, and the company’s share price increased. Secondly, the quality of Starbucks’ products improved, and the company introduced new blends and products that were well-received by customers. Thirdly, the in-store experience was improved, and the new store designs and layouts were well-received by customers. Finally, customer satisfaction and loyalty increased, and Starbucks regained its position as a leading brand in the coffee industry

05 Factors that explained successful implementation of change management at Starbucks

There were several factors that contributed to the successful implementation of change management at Starbucks. Here are five key factors:

1. Strong Leadership 

Starbucks’ success in implementing change management can be attributed to the strong leadership of the company. The leaders at Starbucks had a clear vision of what changes were needed, and they were committed to making those changes happen. They communicated the need for change effectively to all stakeholders and provided the resources and support necessary for the change process to succeed.

The leadership team also ensured that everyone in the organization understood their roles in the change process and provided guidance and direction throughout the implementation. Their leadership helped to create a sense of urgency and momentum, which was critical for the success of the change management program

2. Effective Communication 

Effective communication was a crucial factor in the success of Starbucks’ change management program. The company communicated the changes to employees, customers, and stakeholders effectively, ensuring that everyone was informed and understood the changes. Starbucks used a variety of communication channels, including town hall meetings, newsletters, and training sessions, to ensure that information was disseminated widely and consistently.

By keeping everyone informed and engaged, Starbucks was able to create a shared understanding of the changes and gain buy-in from employees, customers, and stakeholders. Effective communication also helped to build trust and credibility with stakeholders, which was essential for the success of the change management program

3. Employees Engagement 

Employee engagement played a critical role in the success of Starbucks’ change management program. The company engaged its employees in the change process by involving them in planning and implementation and ensuring that they had the necessary training and resources to implement the changes effectively. Starbucks also recognized and rewarded employees who embraced the changes and demonstrated excellent customer service.

This approach helped to create a sense of ownership and accountability among employees, which was essential for the success of the change management program. By empowering employees and recognizing their contributions, Starbucks was able to create a culture of continuous improvement and innovation, which helped to sustain the changes over time.

4. Customer Focus 

Putting the customer at the center of its change management program was a key factor in Starbucks’ success. The company listened to customer feedback and made changes to its products and services to meet their needs and preferences. Starbucks also focused on improving the in-store experience to enhance customer satisfaction. By focusing on the customer, Starbucks was able to improve its products and services, which led to increased customer loyalty and retention.

By enhancing the in-store experience, Starbucks was able to create a more inviting and comfortable environment for its customers, which helped to increase sales and revenue. By making the customer a priority, Starbucks was able to build a strong brand and create a loyal customer base, which was essential for the success of its change management program

5. Flexibility

Flexibility was a critical factor in the success of Starbucks’ change management program. The company was flexible and adaptable during the change process, making adjustments to its strategies and plans as needed. Starbucks was open to feedback and suggestions from employees and customers, which helped the company to identify areas for improvement and make changes accordingly.

Starbucks recognized that change was an ongoing process and continued to make improvements over time. This approach helped Starbucks to stay ahead of the curve and remain competitive in a rapidly changing market. By being flexible and adaptable, Starbucks was able to anticipate and respond to changes in the market, which was essential for the success of its change management program. 

Final Thoughts on Starbucks Change Management Experience 

The Starbucks change management experience offers valuable insights into how companies can successfully navigate and implement change. Through strong leadership, effective communication, employee engagement, customer focus, and flexibility, Starbucks was able to successfully implement changes that resulted in improved performance, increased customer loyalty, and sustained growth.

Starbucks’ approach to change management shows that it is possible to implement significant changes while still maintaining the core values and identity of a company. By keeping the customer at the center of its change management program and engaging its employees, Starbucks was able to create a culture of continuous improvement and innovation, which helped to sustain the changes over time.

Overall, the Starbucks change management experience serves as a valuable case study for companies seeking to implement change and improve their performance. By following the lessons learned from Starbucks, companies can increase the likelihood of successful implementation of change management and create a culture of innovation and continuous improvement that can drive sustained growth and success.

About The Author

Tahir Abbas

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The Domino’s effect

Change is the only constant.

Copper Consultancy has launched its revitalised change management offer. In this blog, we take a look at what change management is and how it has been successfully implemented outside the built environment industry. 

Organisations are constantly changing. Whether you’re adapting ways of working to address modern challenges , such as climate change and digitalisation, or improving stakeholder engagement methods to become more efficient.

The principles of change management are widely accepted within the practice, however each change programme is unique. Therefore, the implementation is a constant evolution.

To maximise benefits of change initiatives, it is crucial to always learn from change theory and industry best practice. That’s why, nearly one year on from the original launch, we have refreshed our change management offer.  

In our renewed offer, we consider:  

• change theory from the likes of John Kotter and Prosci
• our own experiences in undertaking change projects
• even Domino’s Pizza

These learnings have all been fed into our renewed C:change offer. So, our offer is built on the key principle that, to create lasting change, you must build with people, not for them.  

Regardless of sector, change management is largely about using techniques to teach and alter behaviours and practices. For example, transitioning an organisation to a new IT system requires employees to buy into the benefits of the new system. So, to successfully implement a new stakeholder engagement process requires senior management to prove their genuine advocacy of the scheme – often through their behaviour.  

What is change management?  

Firstly, what are we talking about when we say “change management”?   

To Copper, change management is the process of planning for and rolling out an initiative or programme. This could include developing something that you already have in place, such as improving stakeholder engagement processes or introducing something entirely new to your team or business.  

Ultimately, this initiative or programme will cause employees and those affected by the change to do something differently. This could range from changing behaviour to operational job changes.  

In fact, to prove how universal change is, we have explored a fascinating change campaign that took place in the food and drink industry.  

Case study: Domino’s Pizza  

Back in 2008, Domino’s was struggling to stay relevant and maintain its brand reputation. By implementing a successful change management programme, the company started to turn around.  

Uncovering the change  

Having the foresight to address change in customer behaviour differentiates businesses from their competitors. Therefore, identifying a change that is happening in the industry then adapting to benefit from it, is arguably the most important step in the process.  

Through market research and analysis, Domino’s identified that more orders were being completed online. Not only were management convinced to focus business development on enhancing the online-ordering experience. But, this change in direction was due to market research and being in-tune with changes happening in the wider industry, taking into account trends.  

Proving the power of senior buy-in  

Meanwhile, the enthusiasm and support for digitalising their ordering system was filtering from the top down through the entire business. Once momentum was built and excitement spread through the business, Domino’s was able to implement new technology. This helped to support the shift to online ordering.  

Indeed, this demonstrates the importance of gaining backing from senior teams in driving change forward. Of course, senior buy-in encourages advocates from across the business to collaborate, champion and grow the new initiative. This helps in creating a snowball effect of positive support. In fact it even inspires innovation and lets stakeholders feel like change is being done with them, not to them.  

Using data to drive change  

Finally, the company leveraged customer data collected through their ordering system which helped them develop customer loyalty programs that continued to increase sales.   

Utilising data to your advantage increases the chances of a successful change initiative. Copper’s bespoke data tool Communify Insight enables us to use real-time insight in order to identify key issues, questions and challenges to develop highly targeted narratives and communication channels for stakeholders who are impacted by the change.  

Change and beyond  

Notably, Domino’s is still embracing change to this day; it has recently tested drone and robot delivery and is partnering with Ford on self-driving delivery options.  

Keeping your brand and business offer aligned with changing customer needs and priorities is a common challenge that many businesses face. Copper’s work as a part of the Towns Fund Delivery Partner taught towns how to leverage branding to create a lasting legacy through the changes that the project lifecycle brings and beyond.  

In conclusion, some of the key considerations for implementing successful change are:  

• Identifying and taking advantage of any changes happening within your organisation or wider industry  
• Gaining buy-in from senior teams and advocates across the business  
• Using data to enhance your change initiative  

In fact, perhaps the built environment needs to take a slice of knowledge from Domino’s pizza. Ultimately, in every industry, successful organisations constantly evolve and redefine business models. But change requires careful communication and management.  

If you have a change happening at your business, contact Ronan Cloud , Director of Economic Development at Copper to discuss how we can help you.  

Click here to find out more about Copper’s change management offer, C:change.  

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Explore the Levels of Change Management

9 Successful Change Management Examples For Inspiration

Updated: February 9, 2024

Published: January 3, 2024

Welcome to our guide on change management examples, pivotal for steering through today's dynamic business terrain. Immerse yourself in the transformative power of change management, a tool for resilience, growth, innovation, and employee morale enhancement.

This guide equips you with strategies to promote an innovative, adaptable work environment and boost employee morale for lasting organizational success.

Uncover diverse types of change management with Prosci's established methodology and explore real-world examples that illustrate these principles in action.

What is Change Management?

Change management is a strategy for guiding an organization and its people through change. It goes beyond top-down orders, involving employees at all levels. This people-focused approach encourages everyone to participate actively, helping them adapt and use changes in their everyday work.

Effective change management aligns closely with a company's culture, values, and beliefs.

When change fits well with these cultural aspects, it feels more natural and is easier for employees to adopt. This contributes to smoother transitions and leads to more successful and lasting organizational changes.

Why is Change Management Important?

Change management is pivotal in guiding organizations through transitions, ensuring impactful and long-lasting results.

For example, a $28B electronic components and services company with 18,000 employees realized the importance of enhancing its processes. They knew to adopt more streamlined, efficient approaches, known as Lean initiatives .

However, they encountered challenges because they needed a more structured method for effectively managing the human aspects of these changes.

The company formed a specialized group focused on change to address their challenges and initiate key projects. These projects aligned with their culture of innovation and precision, which helped ensure that the changes were well-received and effectively implemented within the organization.

Matching change management to an organization's unique style and structure contributes to more effective transformations and strengthens the business for future challenges.

What Are the Main Types of Change Management?

Discover Prosci's change management models: from individual application and organizational strategies to enterprise-wide integration and effective portfolio management, all are vital for transformative success.

Individual change management

At Prosci, we understand that change begins with the individual.

The Prosci ADKAR ® Model ( Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement ) is expertly designed to equip change leaders with tools and strategies to engage your team.

This model is a framework that will guide and support you in confidently navigating and adapting to new changes.

Organizational change management

In organizational change management , we focus on the core elements of your company to fully understand and address each aspect of the change.

Our approach involves creating tailored strategies and detailed plans that benefit you and manage you to manage challenges effectively, which include:

• Clear communication
• Strong leadership support
• Personalized coaching
• Practical training

Our strategies are specifically aimed at meeting the diverse needs within your organization, ensuring a smooth and well-supported transition for everyone involved.

Enterprise change management capability

At the enterprise level, change management becomes an embedded practice, a core competency woven throughout the organization.

When you implement change capabilities:

• Employees know what to ask during change to reach success
• Leaders and managers have the training and skills to guide their teams during change
• Organizations consistently apply change management to initiatives
• Organizations embed change management in roles, structures, processes, projects and leadership competencies

It's a tactical effort to integrate change management into the very DNA of an organization—nurturing a culture that's ready and able to adapt to any change.

Change portfolio management

While distinct from project-level change management, managing a change portfolio is vital for an organization to stay flexible and responsive.

9 Dynamic Change Management Success Stories to Revolutionize Your Business

Prosci case studies reveal how diverse organizations spanning different sectors address and manage change.  These cases illustrate how change management can provide transformative solutions from healthcare to finance:

1. Hospital system

A major healthcare organization implemented an extensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and adapted to healthcare reform. This case study highlights overcoming significant challenges through strategic change management:

Industry: Healthcare Revenue: $3.7 billion Employees: 24,000 Facilities: 11 hospitals

Major changes:

• Implemented a new ERP system across all hospitals
• Prepared for healthcare reform

Challenges:

• Managing significant, disruptive changes
• Difficulty in gaining buy-in for change management
• Align with culture: Strategically implemented change management to support staff, reflecting the hospital's core value of caring for people
• Focus on a key initiative: Applied change management in the electronic health record system implementation
• Integrate with existing competencies: Recognized change leadership as crucial at various leadership levels

This example shows that when change management matches a healthcare organization's values, it can lead to successful and smooth transitions.

2. Transportation department

A state government transportation department leveraged change management to effectively manage business process improvements amid funding and population challenges. This highlights the value of comprehensive change management in a public sector setting:

Industry: State Government Transportation Revenue: $1.3 billion Employees: 3,000 Challenges:

• Reduced funding
• Growing population
• Increasing transportation needs

Initiative:

• Major business process improvement

Hurdles encountered:

• Change fatigue
• Need for widespread employee adoption
• Focus on internal growth
• Implemented change management in process improvement

This department's experience teaches us the vital role of change management in successfully navigating government projects with multiple challenges.

3. Pharmaceuticals

A global pharmaceutical company navigated post-merger integration challenges. Using a proactive change management approach, they addressed resistance and streamlined operations in a competitive industry:

Industry: Pharma (Global Biopharmaceutical Company) Revenue: $6 billion Number of employees: 5,000

Recent activities: Experienced significant merger and acquisition activity

• Encountered resistance post-implementation of SAP (Systems, Applications and Products in Data Processing)
• They found themselves operating in a purely reactive mode
• Align with your culture: In this Lean Six Sigma-focused environment, where measurement is paramount, the ADKAR Model's metrics were utilized as the foundational entry point for initiating change management processes.

This company's journey highlights the need for flexible and responsive change management.

4. Home fixtures

A home fixtures manufacturing company’s response to the recession offers valuable insights on effectively managing change. They focused on aligning change management with their disciplined culture, emphasizing operational efficiency:

Industry: Home Fixtures Manufacturing Revenue: $600 million Number of employees: 3,000

Context: Facing the lingering effects of the recession

Necessity: Need to introduce substantial changes for more efficient operations

Challenge: Change management was considered a low priority within the company

• Align with your culture: The company's culture, characterized by discipline in projects and processes, ensured that change management was implemented systematically and disciplined.

This company’s experience during the recession proves that aligning change with company culture is key to overcoming tough times.

5. Web services

A web services software company transformed its culture and workspace.  They integrated change management into their IT strategy to overcome resistance and foster innovation:

Industry : Web Services Software Revenue : $3.3 billion Number of employees : 10,000

Initiatives : Cultural transformation; applying an unassigned seating model

Challenges : Resistance in IT project management

• Focus on a key initiative: Applied change management in workspace transformation
• Go where the energy is:  Establishing a change management practice within its IT department, developing self-service change management tools, and forming thoughtful partnerships
• I ntegrate with existing competencies:  "Leading change" was essential to the organization's newly developed leadership competency model.

This case demonstrates the importance of weaving change management into the fabric of tech companies, especially for cultural shifts.

6. Security systems

A high-tech security company effectively managed a major restructuring.  They created a change network that shifted change management from HR to business processes:

Industry : High-Tech (Security Systems) Revenue : $10 billion Number of employees: 57,000

Major changes : Company separation; division into three segments

Challenge : No unified change management approach

• Formed a network of leaders from transformation projects
• Go where the energy is:  Shifted change management from HR to business processes
• Integrate with existing competencies:  Included principles of change management in the training curriculum for the project management boot camp.
• Treat growing your capability like a change:  Executive roadshow launch to gain support for enterprise-wide change management

This company’s innovative approach to restructuring shows h ow reimagining change management can lead to successful outcomes.

7. Clothing store

A major clothing retailer’s journey to unify its brand model.  They overcame siloed change management through collaborative efforts and a community-driven approach:

Industry : Retail (Clothing Store) Revenue : $16 billion Number of employees : 141,000

Major change initiative : Strategic unification of the brand operating model

Historical challenge : Traditional management of change in siloes

• Build a change network :  This retailer established a community of practice for change management, involving representatives from autonomous units to foster consensus on change initiatives.

The story of this retailer illustrates how collaborative efforts in change management can unify and strengthen a brand in the retail world.

A major Canadian bank initiative to standardize change management across its organization.  They established a Center of Excellence and tailored communities of practice for effective change:

Industry : Financial Services (Canadian Bank) Revenue : $38 billion Number of employees : 78,000

Current state : Absence of enterprise-wide change management standards

Challenge :

• Employees, contractors, and consultants using individual methods for change management
• Reliance on personal knowledge and experience to deploy change management strategies
• Build a change network:  The bank established a Center of Excellence and created federated communities of practice within each business unit, aiming to localize and tailor change management efforts.

This bank’s journey in standardizing change management offers valuable insights for large organizations looking to streamline their processes.

9. Municipality

You can learn from a Canadian municipality’s significant shift to enhance client satisfaction. They integrated change management across all levels to achieve profound organizational change and improved public service:

Industry : Municipal Government (Canadian Municipality) Revenue : $1.9 billion Number of employees : 3,000

New mandate:

• Implementing a new deliberate vision focusing on each individual’s role in driving client satisfaction

Nature of shift : 

• A fundamental change within the public institution

Scope of impact :

•  It affected all levels, from leadership to front-line staff

Solution : 

• Treat growing your capability like a change: Change leaders promoted awareness and cultivated a desire to adopt change management as a standard enterprise-wide practice.

The municipality's strategy shows us how effective change management can significantly improve public services and organizational efficiency.

6 Tactics for Growing Enterprise Change Management Capability

Prosci's exploration with 10 industry leaders uncovered six primary tactics for enterprise change growth , demonstrating a "universal theme, unique application" approach.

This framework goes beyond standard procedures, focusing on developing a deep understanding and skill in managing change. It offers transformative tactics, guiding organizations towards excelling in adapting to change.  Here, we uncover these transformative tactics, guiding organizations toward mastery of change.

1. Align with Your culture

Organizational culture profoundly influences how change management should be deployed.

Recognizing whether your organization leans towards traditional practices or innovative approaches is vital. This understanding isn't just about alignment; it's an opportunity to enhance and sometimes shift your cultural environment.

When effectively combined with an organization's unique culture, change management can greatly enhance key initiatives. This leads to widespread benefits beyond individual projects and promotes overall growth and development within the organization.

Embrace this as a fundamental tool to strengthen and transform your company's cultural fabric.

2. Focus on key initiatives

In the early phase of developing change management capabilities, selecting noticeable projects with executive backing is important.

This helps demonstrate the real-world impact of change management, making it easier for employees and leadership to understand its benefits. This strategy helps build support and maintain the momentum of change management initiatives within your organization.

Focus on capturing and sharing these successes to encourage buy-in further and underscore the importance of change management in achieving organizational goals.

3. Build a change network

Building change capability isn't just about a few advocates but creating a network of change champions across your organization.

This network, essential in spreading the message and benefits of change management, varies in composition but is universally crucial. It could include departmental practitioners, business unit leaders, or a mix of roles working together to enhance awareness, credibility, and a shared purpose.

Our Best Practices in Change Management study shows that 45% of organizations leverage such networks. These groups boost the effectiveness of change management and keep it moving forward.

4. Go where the energy is

To build change capabilities throughout an organization effectively, the focus should be on matching the organization's current readiness rather than just pushing new methods.

Identify and focus on parts of your organization that are ready for change. Align your change initiatives with these sectors. Involve senior leaders and those enthusiastic about change to naturally generate demand for these transformations.

Showcasing successful initiatives encourages a collaborative culture of change, making it an organic part of your organization's growth.

5. Integrate with existing competencies

Change management is a vital skill across various organizational roles.

Integrating it into competency models and job profiles is increasingly common, yet often lacks the necessary training and tools.

When change management skills expand beyond the experts, they become an integral part of the organization's culture—nurturing a solid foundation of effective change leadership.

This approach embeds change management deeper within the company and cultivates leaders who can support and sustain this essential practice.

6. Treat growing your capability like a change

Growing change capability is a transformative journey for your business and your employees. It demands a structured, strategic approach beyond telling your network that change is coming.

Applying the ADKAR Model universally and focusing on your organization's unique needs is pivotal. It's about building awareness, sparking a desire for change across the enterprise, and equipping employees with the knowledge and skills for effective, lasting change. 

Treating capability-building like a change ensures that change management becomes a core part of your organization's fabric, benefitting every team member.

These six tactics are powerful tools for enhancing your organization's ability to adapt and remain resilient in a rapidly changing business environment.

Comprehensive Insights From Change Management Examples

These diverse change management examples provide field-tested savvy and offer a window into how varied organizations successfully manage change.

Case studies , from healthcare reform to innovative corporate restructuring, exemplify how aligning with organizational culture, building strong change networks, and focusing on tactical initiatives can significantly impact change management outcomes.

This guide, enriched with real-world applications, enhances understanding and execution of effective change management, setting a benchmark for future transformations.

To learn more about partnering with Prosci for your next change initiative, discover Prosci's Advisory services and enterprise training options and consider practitioner certification .

Founded in 1994, Prosci is a global leader in change management. We enable organizations around the world to achieve change outcomes and grow change capability through change management solutions based on holistic, research-based, easy-to-use tools, methodologies and services.

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