WMBA 6615 Week 11 Organizational Culture Change Plan Example

A Culture Plan for Cedar Fork Engineering: Four Mechanisms in Sequence, From a Development Time Code to a Crew Chief at the Monday Meeting, What Stops to Make Room for Them and How Each Would Show at Six Months

Student Name

Walden University

WMBA 6615: Building Organizational Culture: Leaders as Architects

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

A Culture Plan for Cedar Fork Engineering: Four Mechanisms in Sequence, From a Development Time Code to a Crew Chief at the Monday Meeting, What Stops to Make Room for Them and How Each Would Show at Six Months

The Target State

In two years, the following should be true at Cedar Fork Engineering, the composite firm whose culture this course has examined. Every new engineer has a named mentor before their first day, and mentors log their time to a code that does not count against them. Promotion committees write their judgment of each candidate's technical leadership before they look at utilization. A survey crew chief addresses the Monday meeting monthly, and design engineers spend a day in the field in their first week. Engineers propose new methods through a funded pilot process, and at least two pilots run each year.

These behaviors address the pattern this term's analysis found. Cedar Fork's culture rewards billable time and controls cost well, but it does not fund development, it keeps its field crews outside its center and it leaves almost no room for trying new approaches. The firm's competing values profile was strong in market and hierarchy, weak in clan and nearly absent in adhocracy (Cameron & Quinn, 2011). The plan does not aim to weaken the market and hierarchy strengths, which keep the firm profitable and its work safe. It aims to add the missing quadrants through mechanisms, not slogans.

Why Mechanisms Rather Than Messages

Cedar Fork already publishes values that promise development and technical excellence. The values comparison showed that only the values tied to near-term revenue survive. Schein and Schein (2017) name a handful of primary embedding mechanisms, among them what leaders watch and measure, their reactions to crises and their choices about who is hired, rewarded and promoted. Chatman and O'Reilly (2016) argue that culture is best treated as shared norms reinforced by the organization. A new values statement would change nothing. Each mechanism below changes what is measured, rewarded or scheduled.

Mechanism 1: The Development Time Code

The change. Create a development code on the timesheet covering mentoring, design reviews held inside the firm, agency workshops and approved pilots, capped at 10 percent of an engineer's hours with group leader approval, and exclude it from both group utilization and individual promotion utilization.

Owner. The chief financial officer, because utilization calculations sit in finance.

Start. January 1, the start of the fiscal year, so that dashboards and targets reset cleanly.

Cost. The work is largely being done already, unbilled or at the expense of individual utilization. The new cost is the additional mentoring and reviews the code will encourage, estimated at about $161,000 a year in forgone billing for mentoring and perhaps $100,000 more for reviews and pilots.

Visible at six months. Development hours appear on the dashboard as a separate line; every new engineer hired since January has logged mentoring hours with a named mentor; group utilization targets are unchanged and met.

Mechanism 2: The Structured First Week

The change. Replace the current first week, a laptop, an eight-hour code and a project by Wednesday, with the five-day design: a mentor on day one, a field day alongside a survey crew, a quality review, open training on how the firm earns money and a first assignment by Friday.

Owner. Each group leader, with human resources maintaining the schedule template.

Start. The first new hire after the time code is in place, so that the week's nonbillable hours do not penalize the group.

Cost. About $2,900 per new engineer, roughly $90,000 a year at current hiring.

Visible at six months. All new engineers have completed the full week; 90-day survey answers show that newcomers know whom to ask about their work.

Mechanism 3: Leadership Judgment Before the Number

The change. Revise the promotion procedure so the committee writes a paragraph on each candidate's technical leadership, citing evidence such as mentoring, reviews and client recognition, before it reviews utilization. Promotion utilization is calculated on billable plus development hours.

Owner. The executive committee, which runs promotions.

Start. The 2027 promotion round, announced in advance so candidates know how they will be judged.

Cost. A few hours of committee time per round.

Visible at six months. The revised criteria are published, and engineers who mentor report, in a short survey, that mentoring no longer harms their prospects. The real test comes at the first promotion round, when at least one candidate with strong development work and moderate billable utilization should be judged on the whole record.

Mechanism 4: The Field in the Center

The change. Give a survey crew chief a standing monthly slot at the Monday meeting to report on field conditions, safety and redos, and add the crews' two measures, injuries and redos, to the firm's dashboard beside utilization. Speed up the field change request process so that a request can be approved by phone and recorded the same day.

Owner. The Raleigh office director, who chairs the Monday meeting, with the operations manager for the field change process.

Start. The second quarter, after the first two mechanisms are running, so that the change is not lost among others.

Cost. Ten minutes of a monthly meeting and a modest change to the project management system, estimated at $15,000.

Visible at six months. Crew chiefs have spoken at six meetings; redos and injuries appear on the dashboard; field change requests are filed on the day of the change rather than after it.

What Stops

Capacity for new practices has to come from somewhere. The plan ends four things. The eight-hour nonbillable onboarding cap ends, replaced by the first-week code. The handbook's mentoring promise is rewritten to describe what the firm actually does, because a written promise that is not kept teaches newcomers that written promises do not matter. The Monday meeting's opening item, backlog, moves to second place behind safety and field conditions, shortening the backlog discussion by about five minutes. And the biennial engagement survey stops until the firm commits to publishing an action plan within sixty days of each survey, since a survey with no response teaches employees that their views are collected and ignored.

The Sequence

The order matters. The time code comes first because every other mechanism depends on it: without it, the first week and mentoring lower group utilization, and group leaders will quietly undo them. The first week follows, once newcomers' time can be recorded without penalty. The promotion change comes next, timed to the next promotion round. The field mechanism comes last because it changes a long-standing ritual, and the firm should first see that the earlier changes do not hurt its numbers. O'Reilly et al. (2014) found that culture is shaped by those at the top and is linked to firm performance, which is why the sequence starts with changes leaders control directly and aligns the firm's design step by step rather than all at once.

Risks

The largest risk is that utilization falls and leaders reverse the plan. The development code is capped at 10 percent for that reason, and the plan should be judged on the firm's billable utilization, which should stay near its 82 percent target. A second risk is that group leaders comply on paper while continuing to signal that billable time is all that counts. The six-month survey questions are designed to detect that. A third risk is that the crews see the invitation to the Monday meeting as a gesture. Giving them a standing slot and putting their measures on the dashboard is meant to make the change structural rather than symbolic.

How the Plan Will Be Judged

At two years, the plan should show three results the firm already measures or can easily measure: early-career engineer attrition down from 18 percent to about 12 percent; median time to professional engineer licensure shortened; and at least two pilots of new methods completed, one of them adopted. If attrition does not fall after two years, the plan's theory, that development and connection keep young engineers, is wrong for Cedar Fork, and the firm should look elsewhere for the cause.

References

Cameron, K. S., & Quinn, R. E. (2011). Diagnosing and changing organizational culture: Based on the competing values framework (3rd ed.). Jossey-Bass.

Chatman, J. A., & O'Reilly, C. A. (2016). Paradigm lost: Reinvigorating the study of organizational culture. Research in Organizational Behavior, 36, 199-224. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.riob.2016.11.004

O'Reilly, C. A., Caldwell, D. F., Chatman, J. A., & Doerr, B. (2014). The promise and problems of organizational culture: CEO personality, culture, and firm performance. Group & Organization Management, 39(6), 595-625. https://doi.org/10.1177/1059601114550713

Schein, E. H., & Schein, P. A. (2017). Organizational culture and leadership (5th ed.). Wiley.