Background
HealthSouth is a leading healthcare public healthcare firm, started in 1984 and with its headquarters in Birmingham, Alabama. The firm operates in 26 states in the United States and has branches in the United Kingdom and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Within the United States, this firm has 99 inpatient rehabilitation hospitals 29 outpatient satellite clinics and 25 home-based health agencies. This hospital is known to offer a very high level of care for patients who are recovering from such conditions as cardiac or pulmonary conditions, brain or spinal code injuries, amputations and orthopedic. The firm has been lauded as being very effective in offering its services to its customers.
The chief executive of this firm, Richard Scrushy, has been keen on implementing change to ensure that the firm remains competitive. Change is the most permanent factor in a business environment, as Kotler (2003) says, and therefore, the management of various firms must learn how to deal with this change if good results are to be achieved. This firm has taken keen steps in ensuring that change is implemented in the firm to reflect the current state of affairs. To understand change as it is undertaken by this firm,
John Kotter’s Eight-Step Model for Creating Change and Sustaining Large-Scale Change
Step One: Create Urgency
This firm has been keen to employ this strategy in bringing change to the firm. The management has taken the initiative to invite customers to participate in improving the services of the hospitals; by contributing their thoughts on how best, the firm can operate. The management, in convincing the staff on the need for change, uses this message from the customers, coupled with the research on the market competition. This creates some form of urgency on the need for change, which would push the concerned stakeholders to spring into action.
Step Two: Formation of a Powerful Coalition
Formation of a coalition within the firm is one of the best strategies that would help ensure that a given company reaches its desired goal within the shortest time possible. This hospital has developed teams within various departments of the firms, each assigned specific duties. Each team coordinates with others in order to ensure that they adopt various changes within the firm. Individual employees also coordinate amongst themselves. Teambuilding has been a lifelong tradition of this firm.
Step Three: Creating a Vision for Change
Barthe (2010) says that change should always be coined in a vision that would help employees see where the organization is headed. When the management considers coming up with some changes, they should develop a vision that would steer this change amongst the employees. The vision would give a sense of purpose for all the activities involving this change that the employees would be implementing.
Step Four: Communicating the Vision
It is not enough to develop a vision and post it in memos or other communication channels of the organization. Employees must be made to understand this vision in a clear way. This may involve organizing retreats and other get-together forums where the management would have time to explain in detail, the need for change, and how this change would be in line with the new vision created for the firm. The employees should be made to appreciate the new changes of the firm.
Step Five: Remove Obstacles
Change is always painful, especially to large organizations. It is painful because it brings new approaches to doing things, which the firm was not using before. It may even involve increased costs to the management as it tries to put up structures to support change. As such, a section of the employees may try to resist this change. The resistance to change may even come from the management, which may feel that it is not ready to meet extra costs that change demands. The agents of change should move with speed and ensure that these individuals are convinced of the need to implement change. The management should then work as a unit to eliminate any form of obstacles that may hinder change developments.
Step Six: Create Short-term Wins
It is always very important that an organization sets up short-term objectives that should be accomplished and success measured within a given time span. This is important because it would enable the firm to determine the effectiveness of the apparatus put in place to implement change. In its quest to manage change, HealthSouth has been developing short-term objectives with each department of the firm and each unit in the departments given a particular task to accomplish within the duration. The departments would report to the management of the firm, which would determine success made by the firms. The management would then give recommendations on how each department should undertake its duties. This way, the firm would find it easy to determine the success of the overall objective of the firm, through the performance of each department of the firm.
Step Seven: Build on the Change
A firm must follow the path the proven acceptable by all the concerned stakeholders of the firm in the process of implementing change. It would require the firm to take note of the gains made at every stage of implementing change. The firm should then make all the concerned parties appreciate the gains made in implementing change, so that they may appreciate the need to push even further. This is what this firm has been doing with its employees in its various branches.
Step Eight: Anchor the Changes in Corporate Culture
The last stage in implementing change according to this model is to ensure that the changes made are turned into the day-to-day activities of the organization. In Huber and William’s (1993) words, the activities should turn into culture of the organization. This way, the firm would sustain the changes made.
Job Reduction Because Of Restructuring and its Effect on Staff Morale
The changes, especially the use of new technologies at the cash unit, and other clerical purposes shortened the time spent on such duties, and because of this, made the management avoid employing more officers in this field. Although the existing employees of the firm were not laid off, the firm did not employ new employees at new branches. The existing employees were spread to serve in new branches to work with the new machines. This greatly improved their morale.
The success of Redesign from a Financial Standpoint
From a financial perspective, redesigning the activities of the firm has had a positive effect on the firm. The reduced number of employees has resulted in reduced wages that the firm has to pay and consequently reduced the cost of production. Although the initial costs were huge, the long-run financial effect has been positive.
References
Barthe, G. (2010). Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation. New York: Springer.
Huber, P. & William, G. (1993). Organizational Change and Redesign: Ideas and Insights for Improving Performance. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kotler, P. (2003). Marketing Insights from A-Z: 80 Concepts for every manager. New York: John Wiley and Sons.