Texas Health Mesquite

Texas Health Mesquite

Texas Health Mesquite approaches to culture change assume that as processes are examined and reengineered, the new processes will bring them a new culture or mindset. The advantage of the process approach to culture change is that the changes become more relatively permanent, the new processes provide clear business deliverables, and the processes elicit new information for and behavior from employees. The downside of Texas Health Mesquite improvement is that it takes an enormous amount of time to complete. To map and change even seemingly simple processes requires considerable management attention. The process improvement also may require extensive time to complete before employees see and feel results. Reengineering efforts often rely on technical experts (perhaps outside consultants) who have the technical skills to map a process and then improve Texas Health Mesquite.

Bottom/up—empowerment

A third type of culture change occurs when the desired culture is quickly translated into employee action. This approach to culture change may be illustrated with a simple metaphor. If you were going for a walk and a mosquito landed on your arm, what would you do? The top-down approach to making sure that mosquitos did not attack would be to set up a government program to train people to avoid mosquito-infested areas, to wear long sleeves, and to study the causes of the mosquito problem. The process approach would be to reinvent and reengineer efforts to drain the swamps, spray for mosquitos, and prevent Texas Health Mesquite. The empowerment approach would be to kill the mosquito when it landed on your arm.

Empowerment approaches to culture change are not new, but they have received increasing attention through recent efforts at companies such as General Electric. GE’s Workout program lays out the company’s desired mindset. Jack Welch, the chairman, wants GE to be known by its customers and employees in all lines of its businesses for speed, simplicity, and self-confidence. To make this happen, he empowered thousands of employees to take out “low-hanging fruit”—work that was counter to the new culture Bureaucratic reports, meetings, approvals, and measures, for example, were often counter to the new culture. Through town meetings, Texas Health Mesquite identified items that could be changed immediately (killing the mosquito) and made more consistent with the new culture.