eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

The objective of my study was to examine my case company´s change management process at the pre-change stage. I concentrated especially in the participative nature of the change management and in the end one of my main objectives was to point out how employee participation affected their change readiness. Another important theme in my work was change communication and for example which communication channels the employees considered the most effective in communication related to the change process.

The actual change in question was my case company´s Helsinki office´s move to new premises which required quite considerable changes in the everyday work of the employees. In practice, this meant moving from a more traditional office where every employee had for example their own designated desks to an open and activity based office design where everyone chooses their work station according to the needs for each task. In my study, this change process is referred as Workplace of the Future initiative which was used by the case company as well.

The empirical part of my thesis was a single case study using mixed methods approach. The central source of my empirical data was an online questionnaire for the employees working in my case company´s Helsinki office. The survey included both quantitative, Likert-scale formatted questions and qualitative, optional open-ended questions. In addition, as I was employed by the case company at the start of my thesis research, I had the opportunity to observe for example different Workplace of the Future initiative related focus group meetings and workshops in which the employees had a chance to participate

The findings of my work revealed that according to majority of my survey respondents, having a chance to participate in the chance process increased their knowledge and commitment for the coming change. Most importantly, participation and the overall change management process before the actual change had a positive effect on the change readiness of the employees. This was found out by asking the employees to compare their change readiness before and after participating in the Workplace of the Future change management process.