Organisational Change Management At Nokia: Strategies Adopted To Regain Market Position

Executive Summary

Describe about organisational change management at Nokia?

For this project, The Company we have selected is the Nokia. Nokia is a world famous company into telecommunication, originated from Finland and was established in 1865. Nokia being a renowned mobile devices manufacturing company and holding a prominent market position was affected due to major technologies adopted by its competitors in the mobile communication industry. The aim of this project is to discuss how the Nokia undergone major strategic changes to regain its market position.

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Nokia has undergone a major organisational restructuring, in which it has revived its organisational goal, vision, mission and objectives into clear and specific new strategies as per the current market requirements or competition (Amanda, 2013). In the past recent years Nokia has lost its market throne to its competitors Samsung and Apple, because Nokia failed in adopting latest mobile technologies, because of which the company struggled to regain its profit and revive its market top position again. This project thus focuses on how Nokia has brought major organisational strategic change by adopting Windows Phone Platform (Muhammad, 2010).

Change is an unavoidable process or a phenomenon. An organisational change can be achieved only bringing behavioural changes in the individuals of the organisation. A change in the organisation cannot be achieved by bringing changes in the group, teams or company. An organisational change can only be achieved when individual changes (Kotze, 2006, p.17)

At Nokia Company the major organisational change happened with the initiation of “Booster Programme” in the year 2008. The Booster Programme was introduced looking at the ever changing customer aspirations and development of latest technologies among the competitors. In the Booster Programme, the company restructured its nine business units into four business units. With the purpose to include rapid production and innovation, the company also restructured all its manufacturing and development processes into just three horizontal business units (Amanda, 2013).

The Booster Programme came up as a daunting organisational Change programme for Nokia. This programme was brought in effective in just one week by providing 100 new jobs. With the onset of new jobs, the old Nokia employees jobs were saved and they were not required to switch other jobs. The only change these employees faced was that the teams to which they belonged were reconfigured. This reconfiguration of teams was done with a mindset of skilfully and rapidly reconfiguring its human resources so as to meet the ever changing customer needs and demands (v, 2010).

With the implementation of team reconfiguration, the Nokia’s senior teams were totally committed to deeply involve the employees into organisational strategies and implementing the organisation’s structure based on projects. Now looking at the adoption of latest technologies by the various competitors, Nokia shifted its strategic change towards the development of technological platforms through which millions of people worldwide can join together easily and rapidly. Thus the company’s long term success was seen in its capacity of bringing innovations.

Organisational Change at Nokia

At the worst time of recession in 2009, the company’s innovative ideas of involvement and constantly strategising were put on test. During this time the decision taken by Nokia was to actively involve all its employees worldwide into the business transformations. At this time the company’s whole focus was on its Market business, which was a newly formed enterprise whose focus was on retaining the customers and creating new and prompt customer solutions. In the past years, Nokia’s major emphasis was on developing a flexible and adaptive organisation by using the talents of its employees present in the market business. This was the time when the Company Nokia entered its Booster Programme (Martin, 2010)

The origin of the Nokia’s Booster Programme was marked in the year 2008. This programme began with a team comprising of Maximilian Kammerer and Ian Gee and two other designers, whose aim was to boost the awareness and skills of each Nokia employee by motivating the regional teams to work efficiently and effectively across various functions. Another aim was to enhance the capacity of utilising and acquiring the external resources so as to meet the organisational performance goals. The last aim was to transform the whole business units from line based structure to an organisation where all the competencies can be pooled through a pragmatic or a project structure. Nokia was very ambitious for this program and thus it ensured to cover all the 5000 employees and encourage the concept of cross-functional and cross-hierarchical working. Above all the budget and time for this programme to be rolled was very less i.e. just three months and Nokia successfully implemented this program within the decided timeline and budget.

The Nokia’s design team was very clear with the point that if they follow top to down traditional approach in bringing the change then it will be a very slow process and will not allow the timely involvement of employees being a part of the solution by using emerging technologies. With the rapid onset of social latest network technologies a new environment has been created in which Nokia has to make a long term commitment for its employees by involving them to play at a faster rate and come out with innovative and critical thinking (Zell, 2003).

The team for Booster Programme decided working on two streams of activities. One was two day face to face workshops with the team leaders and the second was creating online social network community which ensures the broader involvement of all communities. The two day workshops were designated to major location in the World like Beijing, New York, London, Dubai and Paris where about 100 change leaders were allotted to each workshop. These workshops were designed to teach the employees about the major change the Company will be undergoing and to tell them why change is important and how they will be benefitted so that minimum resistance come at the time of implementation (Cameron, 2012)

After the completion of the workshops, around 700 employees returned back to their teams and engaged themselves in the ongoing process of change. At this point the online social committee created came into the picture. The design team with the specialist partners or designers came up with an intranet site which was accessible to al the employees of the markets business and workshop participants. This intranet site helped the senior managers and change leaders to easily conversate and exchange ideas with the experts and community members. Thus the combination of traditional workshop and latest online community proved to be a success where 5000 employees joined the booster programme and made the communication and interaction among the employees, community members and senior managers a easy task.

Resistance

When the company announced for manufacturing windows based phone- Lumia, thousands of employees protested as they were shocked that they might lose their jobs. They also argues that Nokia Lumia phone is not capable of adapting different hardware. With this decision, there were waves of resignation by the top leaders like Chairman, vice president, CTO (Culcmsralte, 2012).

Apart from employees Nokia saw the resistance from the market and customers too because they disliked the Microsoft and its offerings. Also the network operators were against the Windows phone because they got worried with the skype (Yarow, 2012) feature available at Windows phone which will risk their international calling business. The shareholders also showed resistance because their share price drastically dropped by 10% (Amanda, 2013)

Nokia can manage the resistance by adopting various strategies. It could have educated the staff about the change and explained them why it is important and how they will be benefitted.  The staff could have got the support from their managers who timely educate them about the change and help them to overcome their fear and anxiety. The resignations could have controlled by offering incentives and benefits after implementing the change. In case if employees are still not ready for change then forcefully they have to make accept the change by threatening them to loss of their jobs (ADKAR, 2013).

Conclusion

The Nokia is really working hard in connecting its people. The best example we discussed above is its Booster Programme. The company is bringing organisational changes to cope with the competition but the employees are affected with such changes. The effectiveness of change management is measured by how the stakeholder’s goals and interests are satisfied (Paton, 2000).

Nokia’s decision to switch to Windows phone has been a controversial discussion. This decision has been logical but was not totally nonsense. This decision was made in a rush because of which all the stakeholders were shocked and lead to disastrous consequences (Wall Street Journal, 2010).

Thus from the above project we can conclude saying that Organisation first should identify the reason for change. In an Organisation there are different people working together whose mindset and risk taking capacity is different. They have creative mindsets and when the ideas get insufficient then comes the entry of brainstorming sessions. Thus we can say that Organisational changes are good for the organisation if they are properly planned, managed and executed. Although Nokia started its Booster Program to eliminate the gap of communication at the time of change and initiated the workshop programs but still its decision towards Windows Platform mobile application did not proved to be a success.

References

ADKAR Change Management Model Overview. (2013). Change Management Learning Center. Retrieved from : https://www.change-management.com/tutorial-adkar-overview.htm

Amanda H.C. Lam. (2013). Change Management at Nokia. Retrieved from https://dadablog.net/publications/ChangeManagementAtNokia.pdf

CAMERON, E. and GREEN, M. (2012). Making Sense of Change Management : A Complete Guide to the Models Tools and Techniques of Organizational Change 3rd ed. 3rd ed. Kogan Page Ltd.

Culcmsralte. (2012). Change and resistance to change. Leading in a changing world. Retrieved from https://culcmsralte.wordpress.com/2012/04/01/change-and-resistance-to-change/

Kotze, R. S., 2006. Performance: The Secrets of Successful Behaviour. s.l.:Financial Times Prentice Hall.

Muhammad Habibullah Khan. (2010). Project of Change Management on Nokia. Retrieved from https://www.scribd.com/doc/27597324/Project-of-Change-Management-on-Nokia#scribd

Martin. (2010). Inside Nokia’s Booster Programme. Maemo.org. Retrieved from https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=42435

Paton, R and McCalman, J. (2000). Change Management: A Guide to Effective Implementation. 2nd Edition, London: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Leading Change, Transition & Transformation. (2013). Retrieved from :https://www.adelaide.edu.au/hr/strategic/leading_change_toolit.pdf 

The Wall Street Journal. ( 2011). Full Text: Nokia CEO Stephen Elop’s ‘Burning Platform’ Memo. The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Retrieved from: https://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/02/09/full-text-nokia-ceo-stephen-elopsburning-platform-memo/.

YAROW, J. (2012). Nokia’s CEO Talks About How Skype Affects Carrier Relations. Business Insider, Inc. Retrieved from: https://www.businessinsider.com/nokias-ceo-says-carriers-hate-skype-and-its-affecting-windows-phone-sales-2012-5.

ZELL, D., (2003). Organizational change as a process of death, dying, and rebirth. The Journal of Applied Behavioural Science, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 73-96 ABI/INFORM Global. ISSN 00218863.