6: Managing Organizational Change

Background

Organizational change is a purposeful change that intends to improve organization’s efficiency and efficacy. Change is sometimes undesirable, especially when it comes to changes in systems that would affect organizational structures, routines, and/or costs. However, because the society is constantly changing, the organization should be flexible to adapt to transformational, incremental, planned, and/or unplanned changes. Whether these are planned or unplanned changes, the organization, nevertheless, should evaluate the risks and the possible impacts of the changes occurred or would occur.

Since my internship at NCRIC, there have been two significant changes that occurred within the organization, one of which I initiated in making the changes. One of the programmatic changes I initiated was translating one of NCRIC letters to clients (unaccompanied children) in Chinese. Since most of the clients had been coming from Latin America, the organization only had template letters in English and Spanish. However, in the recent years, there has been a gradual increase of Chinese smuggling or religious persecution cases referred to NCRIC. Because I saw the need to have a letter in Chinese, I asked my supervisor’s permission to translate the letter that introduces who we are as an organization and what services we can offer to help.

Another significant change that happened at NCRIC is an infrastructural change--the head organization, USCRI, moved its office from Washington, D.C. to Virginia. Before, USCRI was using one of the floors at Johns Hopkins University building. The main purpose of this moving is to have its own building and to have a more spacious place to work.

Analysis

Whenever changes occur, we should anticipate positive effects and/or negative intended and/or unintended consequences. However, because NCRIC does not have a systematic and rigorous evaluation in place due to lack of funding, the organization may not be aware how a certain change has been affecting its overall activities in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. Furthermore, the lack of evaluation is limiting the organization to learn about the proportion of positive and negative effects of the changes occurred.

For instance, without doing a formal evaluation, it is difficult to assess whether the organization’s move to Virginia created more positive impacts than negative consequences. However, based on mere observation, few people left the organization because of the distance change. The new USCRI’s office location could repel volunteers to work at NCRIC; on the other hand, this may not be a problem since the organization pays for the transportation expenses of the interns and volunteers in addition to stipends. Another risk of this infrastructural change could be an increase in tardiness. Once more, in order to prove the hypothesis, there needs to be a formal evaluation. If this risk is proven to be correct, then the organization should create an incentive program to minimize tardiness of staff members.

Recommendations

• • NCRIC should invest and allocate money to do program evaluation in order to assess the efficiency and effectivity of the current and new programs.

  • NCRIC and USCRI should provide an incentive program to minimize tardiness.