In today’s business environment with so much uncertainty, it is certain that if organisations do not change, they risk closing shop. Depending on industry of operation, change can be triggered by a number of things. In the development sector, changes in a planning periods for example, end of a quadrennial plan can trigger changes when businesses will have to focus on new areas in response to the global trends or other millennial development goals. In the manufacturing sector, the need to satisfy customers more may be a trigger while in the banking sector; technological advancements have become constant drivers of change.

It has been observed that in response to the various change drivers, Managers are known for melding multiple functions in response to new business needs. There is an assumption by some Managers that a change in one structure will naturally create a common understanding of a collective responsibility that will result in the needed change. The procedural requirement is that managers need to define the type of collaboration they want to achieve, let alone the means to be employed to encourage such collaboration. Consider an example of a company that restructured its Procurement and Manufacturing by melding the two functions into a team responsible for the entire process from price quotation to delivery. In this case managers only broadened the jobs of these two Departments but did not create the enabling environment necessary for the merger. Resultantly Procurement continued to spend their time buying parts and manufacturing continued with the designing and manufacturing of products. As a result, the two groups did not feel jointly responsible. Such a situation is not unusual. There is a tendency when implementing business changes to underestimate the difficulty of breaking the functional mindset. Often a lot of time and money is spent defining which tasks the changed units should perform and which people should be assigned to those units to drive change. Relatively, little thought is given to reconfiguring the work space, redesigning jobs, imparting new skills/knowledge required and restructuring procedures to encourage collaboration and collective responsibility as well as aligning performance management systems to the new configuration. Managers also give little thoughts to their own jobs despite doing away with functions. Under such change processes, some Managers continue to act as Functional Chiefs even though the functions no longer formally exist.

Can any major change be effected without taking a closer look at the organisational culture? Remember collective responsibility is an attitude, a value and concern. Change is not linear. It is not a top down thing; it should happen from every angle of the organisation. Change is a personal decision; people do not want to be changed by others. Changes happen from within.

Culture change implementation becomes easy if organisations introduce clearly stated outcome-based performance criteria. Individuals will need to be periodically invited for milestone review meetings. Such processes will go a long way in making employees feel collectively responsible for producing the outcomes required.

An international research done in USA showed that companies reap greater benefits by strengthening the ties among their functions than bringing a lot of changes that lack a collaborated culture. The same research has focussed on four critical means to building a collaborative culture. Making responsibilities overlap: 1) organisations should do this by designing jobs with a relatively broad range of duties as well as assigning people to multiple teams and rotating assignments. If skills are not made to overlap an organisation will end up with a set of specialised jobs by default, inadvertently creating the same problems that bedevil organisations with units operating in silos.

2) Base rewards on unit performance: these may take the form of bonuses or non-financial recognitions. Rewarding unit performance is important because it prevents employees from placing their individual needs above the team. 3) Change the physical layout: work layout can either prohibit or promote collective responsibility. Units with layouts that permit people to see others work had faster cycle times than those that did not. Layouts also help information sharing and the trying out of new ideas openly.

4) Redesign work procedures: in a research done on culture change, researchers asked employees to tell them what extent their units’ formal or informal work procedures encouraged them to share ideas, involving everyone who would be affected by that decision and also, they will help others do their work.

As part of the culture change process managers should practically be committed to change by making themselves available for informal discussions for example in the canteen with all interested employees.

In conclusion, notably for any business change process there is no single cookie cutter. It also does not matter how many different methods are used. Managers need not be overly influenced by what others did but should ask their own employees what they would need in order to work well together. Change is effective when it’s tailor made for an organisation. Finally, communication must be at the heart of any change initiative, to ensure staff buy-in, ownership of the process and to encourage a participatory approach.

Emmanuel Jinda is the Managing Consultant of PROSERVE Consulting Group, a leading supplier of Professional Human Resources and Management services locally, regionally and internationally. He can be contacted at Tel: 263 773004143 or 263 242 772778 or visit our website at www.proservehr.com