Evaluation of Organizational Readiness to Implement Change within the Workplace

Organizational change is an initiative to transition from current state to a desired future state, where the initiatives can be either planned or unplanned based on the motivational factors. This study evaluates the impact of organizational characteristics and change management strategies adopted by facility management (FM) professionals to implement planned and unplanned changes due to internal as well as external factors. The implementation of new or innovative workplace strategies (flexible workspace) were considered as planned changes, whereas changes implemented at workplace as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic were considered as unplanned changes (e.g., remote working, safety protocols, etc.). The research team adopted a survey-based methodology to collect information on planned and unplanned change management experiences from FM professionals across the world. Through the help of an FM association, a total of 800+ responses were recorded from 60 different countries. Using machine learning algorithm, the research team was able to identify the impact of key organizational characteristics and change management strategies responsible for the successful planned or unplanned change initiatives. Most of the models were tested on 30% of the randomly selected data and recorded predictive accuracies as high as 85%.