Need for Cultural Change at an Organization

Culture Shift

There is something to be said for the idea that an excessive focus on culture and what makes people different is at some point counterproductive and less than conducive to progress. However, the ignorance of culture and differences between people is fairly to very unwise and it should also be kept in mind that having a strong, defined and proper company culture is necessary for a firm to operate and exist in the proper way. With that in mind, there are times and situations where a culture shift within an organization is required to restore or regain cultural and business continuity for all involved. While upholding the proper amounts of cultural sensitivity can be taxing and expensive, there are situations where it is needed and the proper models to create and shape the same should be used.

Analysis

As noted in the introduction, there is often the need for a cultural shift when it comes to ongoing operations and the patterns that are used when it comes to the same. In this case, the organization is a global healthcare group and there has been an expensive yet necessary culture shift so as to modernize and flesh out the cultural and business facets that are in use. Just by virtue of the fact that the healthcare organization in question is global in scope, that in and of itself necessitates a cultural paradigm that has the proper size and scope. To fully create and enforce the new cultural paradigm that must exist, the organization in question needs to use or complete a couple of tasks. Those tasks, in the order in which they will be discussed in this brief report, include the choosing of the proper model and framework to complete the change, instill the proper argument about why performing a cultural assessment is needed and necessary, the rationale for choosing the assessment instruments mentioned earlier, the providing of a time table for the assessment process and the deliverables to the Board when it comes to specific requests and details about the cultural shift (Euromed, 2017). .

As noted already, the basic need for cultural change is clear given the global nature of the healthcare organization in question. Since there is a global feel and composition in question, the cultural norms and values of the organization need to match. Simply allowing the culture to match a singular culture, even if it is a dominant or large one, is not something that is workable as it will alienate and frustrate those that are not part of that culture. With that in mind, there has been a Harvard Business Review treatise on this subject that properly informs and elucidates about how to effect and employ cultural change that relates to a global healthcare system. Their test case was Aetna from when they were struggling \"mightily\" about fifteen to twenty years ago. Indeed, Aetna went through four CEO\'s in five years so there was a lot of instability and one of the main reasons for this was a less-than-cohesive and well-rounded company culture (Katzenbach, Steffen & Kronley, 2017).

What Aetna found out is that focusing only on non-cultural items (both corporate and global culture) in favor of things like keeping claim costs down and the like is a losing proposition. There are obviously costs involved in attacking and changing cultural ruts but not addressing the elephant in the room, so to speak, will just tend to alienate and otherwise create problems with employees and clients alike. With that in mind, cultural intervention should be a \"first resort\" rather than a last one or otherwise down the list. The revised culture in all of its forms, needs to be figured out and installed before anything is done. Overall, the order of operations and steps is to make sure strategy and culture match, focus first on a few critical shifts in behavior, honor and uphold the strengths of the existing culture, integrate formal and informal interventions and measure/monitor the evolution of the culture of the organization. The last of those steps, the evolution, should be made up of looking at business performance, critical cultural behaviors, milestones, underlying beliefs/feelings/mindsets and so forth (Katzenbach, Steffen & Kronley, 2017).

When it comes to the justification and rationale for using the model mentioned above, that would be because there is a use of what works already while only adjusting what must change to get to where everyone needs to be in the future. Indeed, creating things entirely from scratch may be something that might be needed. However, while changes are surely needed across the board, there is no sense in discarding methods and procedures that work just fine. If it is not broken, it should not be fixed, after all. The rationale for performing a cultural assessment is along those same lines. Indeed, there has to be a review of the perspectives, cultures, languages, ethnicities and so forth that are within the makeup of the organization so that a singular and cohesive culture that does not alienate or discriminate is created instead. As noted before, being focused too much on culture and what makes people different is not a good idea but cultural variations cannot be ignored as it can offend those that feel that they are being disregarded as people and marginalized from a cultural standpoint. For example, if there is a presence of many Muslim people within an organization, allocating a small space and some time for those people to conduct their prayers would be a wise thing to do. In many cases, it\'s an unwise idea not to provide such a space if it becomes obvious that such a need exists (Nolo, 2017).