Changing the Organizational Culture of World Relief Chicago: Research Proposal

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Table of Contents

Letter of Transmittal
Executive Summary
Background of Problem
Proposal
Staffing Plan
Budget Estimates
References

Letter of Transmittal

The Founder,

World Relief Chicago,

3507 W. Lawrence Avenue,

Chicago, Illinois 60625.

Dear Sir/Madam,

Within the attached proposal, you will find a succinct plan to initiate cultural change in your organization. It aims to promote inclusivity and diversity, which are critical areas of organizational development. My analysis includes a review of the main resource requirements needed to initiate and train employees with special recognition of value needs and market expectations of World Relief Chicago and its intended mission of empowering local churches to help local vulnerable communities in Chicago. I have worked as a volunteer in your organization and developed this proposal based on my familiarity with the firm’s objectives, system processes, and employee attitudes.

Based on my experiences and evaluation of the firm’s activities, I recommend that a new value system be introduced at a department level using a bottom-up framework to entrench a culture of diversity and inclusivity in the organization. In the attached proposal, have provided an outline of the projected staffing requirements and budgeting needs that will be needed to implement the plan.

Thank you for trusting me to complete this proposal on your behalf and I welcome your feedback upon perusal of this document.

Sincerely,

Former Volunteer.

Executive Summary

This document contains a proposal to change the organizational culture of World Relief Chicago, which is a non-profit organization based in Illinois. The firm’s main objective is to empower churches to support local communities, especially in terms of their health and education needs. World Relief Chicago, like many other organizations in the US, has had a non-inclusive management leadership structure that is male-dominated and characterized by the non-representation of diverse ethnicities and races in the communities it represents. Therefore, the proposed change management plan is aimed at nurturing a new value system that promotes inclusivity and diversity in the organization. The main sections of this proposal will outline key areas of the plan, the expected staffing framework, and the annual budget forecast for the firm.

Organizational culture refers to a set of beliefs, norms, and attitudes that are commonly shared among employees in a given workplace setting. This paper is a research proposal to change the organizational culture of World Relief Chicago, which is a non-profit firm aimed at empowering local churches in the state to help vulnerable communities (World Relief Organization, 2021). The company’s culture is progressive but fails to reflect inclusivity and diversity across various levels of management. The goal of this proposal is to make the firm more representative of gender, racial, and cultural diversity as a hallmark of its role to empower local communities in underprivileged neighborhoods of Chicago. The scope of the change cuts across all levels of the firm’s management, including its departments.

Background of Problem

Diversity in an organizational setting refers to the recognition of people’s unique characteristics and attributes that make them stand out from the rest. Comparatively, inclusion refers to social practices or norms practiced in an organization that may make some of its workers feel welcomed or unwanted (Janssens & Zanoni, 2021). Most organizations, including World Relief Chicago, have been operating on a narrow framework of cultural management practices that have since seen the firm’s management become dominated by men and people from one racial background. While this situation does not mean that no people from minority communities participate in the organization, their proportion is not commensurate with industry best practices, or even the percentage of representation of minority groups in Chicago. In this regard, there is a gap in representation at the top echelon of management, which could be mitigated by a recalibration of the firm’s culture.

Proposal

Plan

World Relief Chicago should adopt policies that mainstream practices promoting diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Although the firm has made progress in training its employees to be inclusive, this strategy is inadequate in covering the full scope of organizational change processes needed to mainstream practices that promote heightened levels of diversity and inclusivity. Consequently, there is a need to recalibrate the firm’s value system, but doing so requires that the firm recognizes key points in its history that require a fundamental behavior change. Given the changing socio-economic landscape of businesses and organizations in the US and around the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I believe that now is the time to make such changes.

In this regard, World Relief Chicago should recognize the need to build new habits and behaviors that, when put into action, support the overall desired change. In other words, the company’s value system should support the proliferation of honest conversations among employees and allow them to canvass ideas among themselves as a framework for realizing real progress in cultural change. Since organizational culture is only successful when embraced by all stakeholders in the organization, adopting a bottom-up model of change management is the most appropriate strategic fit for World Relief Chicago. The firm could use various channels for implementing this transformation and identifying change cohorts within each department of the organization and supporting their growth is one of them.

This recommendation is borrowed from the work of Florentine (2019), which highlights the progress made by firms that have reported significant progress in change management after identifying small cohorts of change that exist within their formal structures and outside the executive or management levels of operation. These cohorts of change will act as command centers for nurturing the new culture system by equipping employees with skills and nuggets of knowledge to accommodate diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

This strategy has been proved to be more effective than commonly used one-off training sessions that most companies introduce for their employees. Therefore, the plan provides a holistic approach to circumventing multiple channels of change management that are needed to instill a new culture system within an organization. It adopts a bottom-up approach that recognizes the importance of making employees at the base of the organizational pyramid to understand the value of diversity and inclusivity in the company. Consequently, at a departmental level, employees would be allowed to see the benefits of embracing inclusivity and diversity, including the bigger pool of talent, heightened levels of employee engagement, and trust, which are associated with such a culture (Janssens & Zanoni, 2021). Thus, a new value system should be introduced at a departmental level.

Schedule

There is no restrictive framework for implementing the aforementioned proposal for initiating organizational change at World Relief Chicago. The change will be an ongoing process nurtured across all departments without a restrictive timeline.

In this framework, the transformation will be promoted as the “new norm” or rule that employees need to follow. The unrestrictive timeline is partly rooted in the philosophy and science of human behavior whereby people are deemed creatures of habit and would generally be skeptical about any type of change in the workplace. This statement means that the introduction of a new culture system is unlikely to be accomplished within a given timeframe. Therefore, the delimited period proposed for the implementation of the new plan is designed to allow employees to get used to change and for the initiator of the change to choose the right measures to employ. Therefore, the management process will be designed to include feedback loops where, periodically, progress made will be evaluated to make improvements.

Details

The Chief Executive Officer, helped by various departmental heads, will spearhead the new organizational culture system. Major units of the firm that will be involved in the plan include the Church and Volunteer Engagement Department, Immigrant Family Services Unit, Operations, and Finance Division, and Volunteer Mobilization Department. Having worked within the Volunteer Mobilization department, I understand that most employees would be receptive to the new plan because few do not recognize the importance of diversity and inclusion within the department.

Staffing Plan

The staffing plan outline here will illustrate how different activities, roles, and responsibilities at World Relief Chicago will be distributed across various departments and divisions within the organization. The estimated number of employees needed to implement each phase of the change management plan is also outlined in the last column of Table 1 based on the weight of responsibilities allocated for each area of the operational planning process.

Table 1. Staffing Plan (Source: Developed by Author).

Activity	Role	Responsibility	Number of Employees Required
Pre-contemplation and contemplation planning	Departmental Manager for Volunteer Engagement Unit	Systems Development Policy Formulation	13
Determination and Systems Mobilization	Departmental Manager for Immigrant Family Services Unit	Interface Integration Maintaining Synergy of workplace operations Relationship Management	14
Action	Departmental Manager for Operations and Finance Unit	Resource Allocation Policy Implementation Systems Audit	102
Maintenance	Departmental Manager for Volunteer Mobilization Unit	Feedback collection and management Developing Evaluation Reports	55

According to the staffing plan outlined above, implementing the change management process will involve employees from various departments of the organization. The responsibilities attached to each one of them are commensurate with the kind of jobs or duties they are currently engaged in. Similarly, the number of employees allocated to each phase of the change management plan is aligned with the expected duties and goals of each one of them. For example, the action phase plan has more than 100 employees because every member of staff should actively engage in the change management process. Overall, the staffing plan will involve 184 employees, which is only shy of the 200 people working for the organization. Therefore, these statistics mean that the proposal outlined above will involve more than two-thirds of the firm’s employees.

Budget Estimates

The forecasted budget is expected to cover each area of operational planning outlined in the staff plan above. According to table 2 below, there are two main areas of expenditure: indirect and direct costs. Direct costs refer to key expense areas that are directly linked to the system organization change, while indirect costs are those directly attributed to the process of contracting external parties that will be involved in the change management plan. Stated differently, this area of expenditure refers to the involvement of an outside party who will provide technical support in the change management process.

Table 2. Budget Forecast (Source: Developed by Author).

Company Name: World Relief Chicago

Operating Budget (Cost Estimates are Computed Annually in US Dollars):

Direct Costs:
- Salaries (Including Fringe) 750,000;
- Travel 100,000;
- Supplies 1,800,000;
- Equipment 2,000,000;
- Staff Development 250,000;
- Occupancy 100,000;
- Other 50,000.
Indirect Costs:
- Independent Contractor (Based on the recommendation of Industry Experts) 70,000.

Total Operating Cost 4,320,000.

References

Florentine, S. (2019). Diversity and inclusion. Web.

Janssens, M., & Zanoni, P. (2021). Making diversity research matter for social change: New conversations beyond the firm. Organization Theory, 6(2), 1-10.

World Relief Organization. (2021). About us. Web.