Strategic Change Management In Childfund Kenya

Abstract

Organizational change management is normally eminent in all types of organizations irrespective of their form during their lifetime. The research objective was to determine the context, nature and practices of strategic change management that ChildFund Kenya has adopted over the last eight years and the challenges it has faced during the process. ChildFund Kenya is part of ChildFund Inc., an international child development Organization with it’s headquarter in Richmond, Virginia and having operations in more than 35 countries. ChildFund started working in Kenya in 1960 and the National Office is in Westland Nairobi was established in 1973.This was a cases study since the unit of analysis was one organization. Both primary and secondary data collection methods were used. The researcher had a face to face interview with the country director, finance director and program director. Content analysis was employed to analyse the data.ChildFund Kenya has a strategic plan for years 2012-2016.All staff participate in the formulation of the strategic plan. Any strategic change done is communicated to all staff and they all participate and are involved in the process thus they own the process. Restraining factors that the organization has experienced during change are limited financial resources, resistance to change, community change fatique and lack of human resource capacity, that is, some staff could not comprehend the purpose of the change. The study also established that to minimize challenges of change management that arose due to organization design, organization culture, resource limitation and staff resistance, the management defined the agency values and developed training modules that instilled a sense of collective commitment to agency values, staff were continuously educated and plan awareness workshops organized. The structure was also changed to accommodate the changes and communication of the changes made to staff at all levels. Benchmarking number of processes with peer organizations who had undertaken similar change processes is also done. Helping employees cope with change is one of the most critical success factors in change management. Although ChildFund Kenya conducts trainings and organizes workshops to make employees own the changes, one thing that did not come out clearly from the study is how the organization motivates staff to keep the newly acquired behaviour going including rewarding performance, encouragement and recognition.