Communicating and Managing Change During Extreme Events: 21st Century Challenges and Opportunities

Background: A major challenge as well as fundamental assumption in change management is treating change as an enterprise-wide phenomenon that impacts a spectrum of people, policies, processes, behaviors, and outcomes. Historically, change management has been used in large-scale organizational transformation efforts and draws from nine major best practices in the change management process: 1) change strategy, 2) change leadership, 3) stakeholder analysis, 4) communication, 5) human capital, 6) learning and training, 7) process and infrastructure, 8) project management, and 9) performance management.

Program background: Using the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) as a use case, the presenter's team applied the above nine best practices to assessing VA’s change communications and management response to COVID-19. VA’s experience demonstrated how the organization’s response was optimized through the application of change communications and management in: defining and optimizing change in extreme events such as COVID-19; leveraging extreme events for broader change initiatives; engaging stakeholders at multiple levels; harnessing social and digital media; correlating organizational and individual behaviors and actions; measuring success and ultimate outcomes; and building organizational capacity and resiliency.

Evaluation Methods and Results: To assess how the nine best practices were (or were not) applied before, during, and after VA’s response to COVID-19, VA senior leaders and other responding officials were engaged and interviewed on the value, utility and effectiveness of the change communications and management methods. Insights, best practices, and lessons learned from the interviews were used to further update and improve the change communications and management best practices to ensure the methods were adaptable and agile for responding to future change scenarios and events.

Conclusions: The VA use case demonstrated that the consequences of extreme events such as COVID-19 can present significant challenges to an organization's people, operations and resources. An inadequate or poorly planned and managed response can result in audiences, both internal and external, either overreacting, taking inappropriate actions, and losing trust, or successfully navigating and managing change through all phases of an event. VA was able to successfully apply these best practices to ensure it was operationally ready, its workforce was equipped and disruption of care and services to Veterans was minimized.

Implications for research and/or practice: VA’s experience and lessons learned provide a useful framework to other organizations, be it government, industry or non-profits, on how change communications and management best practices can be a central feature in planning for, responding to, recovering from, and building organizational resiliency for the full range of extreme events and scenarios. In addition, how the best practices can be leveraged for other internal and external communication purposes including increasing situational awareness; building and maintaining trust; encouraging cooperation and constructive dialogue; creating informed decision making; and encouraging appropriate risk reduction and protective behaviors.