Management of Change: Organisation Development and Design — Microcredential — Open University — 3/4

Continuing my Management of Change: Organisation Development and Design Microcredential from the Open University series. This is the third of the four essays that I produced for the course, enjoy.

Task 3

Write an opinion piece of 500 words, informed by your critical analysis of the course content, explaining what you consider to be the most important current transformations as we continue to integrate digitisation into our working and organisation life, using an industry you know well as an example.

• Take some time to reflect on your opinion and argument.

• Choose an industry with which you are familiar. Ideally it should be the industry of the organisation which you wrote about for your second assessment task in Week 8.

• Consider how that industry should develop in an increasingly digital environment.

• Use the PESTLE activity to frame your writing.

Please refer to Step 12.6 for a list of activities which you might find helpful to underpin your work.

I recently attended a talk from Richard Houston, Deloitte’s CEO, in which he explained that an important value driver for Deloitte is how they attract, retain and integrate new talent (Houston, 2021). Kelly (2021) argues this is an important issue for all companies and not just Deloitte. This mission is complicated by Covid-19 changing the environment that we would be joining and the introductory support that we can receive. As a result, I believe one of the most important changes of digitisation is how well new employees are set up for success by their induction particularly in consulting, where connections and personal development are integral.

The environment that we joined has changed significantly. One advantage, in this regard, consulting has had relative to other industries is that travel plays a substantial role in the job. This aligns with my own and millennials preference for work travel (Deloitte, 2021). This can be used as a social factor to attract new talent to the industry. However, Covid-19 has taken this advantage away temporarily and political factors such as Brexit have made this more challenging in the long term. Personally, my desire to travel is to expose myself to new people, cultures and ideas. I cannot talk for other consultancy firms but I feel that my employer is meeting these challenges head-on. I can meet new people via the internal social network (Riemer et al, 2021). I am exposed to a new culture by attending showcases on different traditions such as Yom Kippur and Black History Month. I am exposed to new ideas as I attended a session with Deloitte Portugal’s Telecoms Centre of Excellence to learn more about technology (Pires, 2020).

The introductory support that we receive has changed. For instance, from virtual training sessions through to meeting colleagues, my introduction was completely online. While this had some advantages, such as reducing the anxiousness and overwhelmingness of being around a large number of new people (Berent and Lemley, 2010 and Tangcharoensathien et al, 2021) and as a cost-saving for the company. It also had its drawbacks such as weaker bonds with colleagues as we only met them online (Ren et al, 2012) and limitations on the types and effectiveness of online learning that we could do (Guillén et al, 2020). The latter is particularly interesting as the Passage one skills (Collins et al, 2021, Step 7.10) taught to be successful in an online work will differ from past inductions where the focus was on skills needed for the office (Hatayama et al, 2001). This presents an opportunity cost, balancing learning temporary online working skills with time spent on in-office skills that we may need after the pandemic to climb to the later stages of Charan’s (2001) model. This is further complicated by the facilitators still learning how both to work and teach from home, their reflection of phase one of their career being solely in the office and graduates unlearning behaviours from prior employment or internships (Pedro, 1984).

References

Berent, J. and Lemley, A. (2010). Work makes me nervous: overcome anxiety and build the confidence to succeed. John Wiley & Sons.

Charan, R., Drotter, S.J. and Noel, J.L. (2001) The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership Powered Company. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.

Collins et al. (2021) ‘Six human workplace practices (Step 7.10)’, BZFM802: Management of Change: Organisation Development and Design. Available at: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/management-of-change-organisation-development-design/2/steps/1204585 (Accessed: 29 November 2021).

Deloitte. (2021), A call for accountability and action THE DELOIT TE GLOBAL 2021 MILLENNIAL AND GEN Z SURVEY, 2021. Available at: https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/insights/articles/GLOB144377_Millennial-survey/2021-deloitte-global-millennial-survey-report.pdf (Accessed 21 December 2021).

Guillén, G., Sawin, T. and Avineri, N. (2020). ‘Zooming out of the crisis: Language and human collaboration’. Foreign Language Annals, 53(2), pp.320–328.

Hatayama, M., Viollaz, M. and Winkler, H. (2020). ‘Jobs’ amenability to working from home: Evidence from skills surveys for 53 countries’. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper, (9241).

Houston, R. (2021). Meeting with Richard Houston — Quarterly town hall — People, priorities and performance, October 2021.

Kelly, J. (2021) ‘A War For Talent Is Starting — Spoiler Alert: Workers Will Win’, Forbes, 17 April. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2021/04/17/a-war-for-talent-is-starting-spoiler-alert-workers-will-win/?sh=444465cb49f2 (Accessed 21 December 2021).

Pedro, J.D. (1984). ‘Induction into the workplace: The impact of internships’. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 25(1), pp.80–95.

Pires, F.G.A. (2020). Decision support tool for Integration Platforms.

Ren, Y., Harper, F.M., Drenner, S., Terveen, L., Kiesler, S., Riedl, J. and Kraut, R.E. (2012). ‘Building member attachment in online communities: Applying theories of group identity and interpersonal bonds’. Mis Quarterly, pp.841–864.

Riemer, K., Scifleet, P. and Reddig, R. (2012). ‘Powercrowd: Enterprise social networking in professional service work: A case study of Yammer at Deloitte Australia’.

Tangcharoensathien, V., Bassett, M.T., Meng, Q. and Mills, A. (2021). ‘Are overwhelmed health systems an inevitable consequence of covid-19? Experiences from China, Thailand, and New York State’. bmj, 372.