Analysing BBC Worldwide's Change Management Strategies: A Case Study

This report presents a comprehensive analysis of the change management strategies implemented at BBC Worldwide. It begins by examining the situations that prompted the company to undergo structural, strategic, cultural, and technological changes, highlighting the shift in consumer behavior and the need for a competitive edge. The report then delves into various change management models, including the Nudge Theory and Lewin's Change Management Model, evaluating their application within BBC Worldwide. Furthermore, it explores stakeholder management, emphasizing the roles of leadership and communication in navigating the change process. The analysis extends to justifying the company's approach to change, proposing alternative strategic plans, and assessing the benefits of implementing these changes, including how to ensure the sustainability of the new processes. Overall, this report provides a detailed overview of BBC Worldwide's transformation journey, offering valuable insights into managing organizational change effectively.

Managing Change BBC
Worldwide
1

Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3
Task 1...............................................................................................................................................3
Analysis of situation that prompted BBC to make structural changes........................................3
Task 2...............................................................................................................................................6
Models and theories of managing change...................................................................................6
Stakeholder management............................................................................................................7
Task 3...............................................................................................................................................8
Justification of the approach used by BBC for change process..................................................8
Development of different strategic plan......................................................................................9
Task 4.............................................................................................................................................11
Analysis of benefits of implementation of new change process in BBC..................................11
Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................13
References......................................................................................................................................14
2

Introduction
Companies undergo changes in their operational processes to suit to the present
conditions and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their structure and strategies (Donders
and Van den Bulck, 2016). This report is aimed at exploring the case study related to the changes
made in the operational processes of BBC Worldwide. It is a content company and commercial
subsidiary of BBC group headquartered in London. First of all, analysis of situation that led to
change are discussed in the report. Further, different models of managing change and the process
used by company are discussed. In addition, with an assumption of requirement of further
change, a different plan has been suggested and benefits of its implementation has been
discussed.
Task 1
Analysis of situation that prompted BBC to make structural changes
Organisational Structure
BBC Worldwide Ltd. is a content company and was established as wholly owned
commercial arm of the BBC Group. It was established with an aim to monetise brands of BBC
and selling broadcasting rights of British programmes with an objective of supplementing
income received by BBC through licence fee. It is managed by the executive team which is
known as Worldwide Executive Committee (Wex), members of which are part of Global
Leadership Team (GLT) as well of the company. GLT is group of 100 senior managers of the
company (Buchanan and Huczynski, 2019).
Change Management
In 2012, it started making changes in the organisation and underwent four changes with
an aim of balanced reorganisation.
 First change was change in organisational structure in 2012 under which, its management
was restructured from divisional to geographical. It was divided into four main regions -
UK, North America, Australia and New Zealand and rest of the world, to align itself with
change in audience tastes' in the international market.
 Second change was change in the strategy by the new CEO Tim Davie in 2013. Three
focus areas were decided – building up the reputation and branding, establish and deliver
a sustainable return and build a world class media company.
3

 Third change was change in culture of the company in 2014. Management believed that
renewed values and ethics should establish in the growth culture within every employee
of the company. For it, HR of the company organised a workshop to help employees
align with the changes expected by the WEx and GLT.
 Final change was change in system and technologies in 2015 in which office of BBC
worldwide was relocated to a new building. It had impacted more than thousands of its
employees.
Situations that triggered changes in BBC Worldwide
Every company wants to grow with time (Swann, 2017). BBC group is one of the oldest
media groups in the world. It has created BBC Worldwide with an objective that it would place it
on pedestal in the international content creation and distribution. However, it was not getting
expected results and to improve the situation, change was inevitable. Below mentioned are
causes and triggers that lead to situations that prompted management to undertake changes:
 Structural change - Executive Board of the company is responsible for managing the
affairs of the content company and used to run in conventional manner. However, with
the passage of time, market conditions took a transition from caveat emptor to caveat
venditor i.e., rather than watching whatever content sellers would offer, consumers were
increasingly being decisive of what content they would want to consume, when and how.
Also, new entrants both from local and global markets were entering the industry to
challenge the position of the company. This made company realise the need for changes
in structure and operational management to be able to retain its competitive advantage
and exploit the growth opportunities that its global working environment has been
offering. Further, technological change was expected by consumers and to fulfil
consumer expectation in complete, geographical distribution must have felt appropriate.
 Strategical change – Strategic change is something that is based on the underlying
change or reorganisation of the structure of the organisation and further impacts future
changes or necessitated them to occur (Hayes, 2018). Strategies of a company are based
on the mission, vision and value statements that drive further all the operations of the
company and forms the basis of its working culture. Executive members of the company
have identified six competencies that it wished to achieve – clear direction, world-class
expansion, strong connection, business success, innovative and creative global excellence
4

and to achieve these changes, it was required to management to make strategy changes.
These strategical changes are bound to impact working culture of the company and that
further developed requirement to change the culture of the organisation. Strategical
change in the present times further require improvement in technology, which must have
necessitated the future change of technology and change of other operational processes
and work place.
 Cultural change - Company was observing silo working in its functioning. Silo working
is that phenomenon where groups or departments within the organisation that are working
on the same project, do not share information with each other (Piercy, 2016). Company
had adopted growth strategy and wanted to imbibe it in its culture as well. Further,
company management aims to develop the concept of one BBC, which is aligned with
the adoptive sense of the community and humanity. It was assumed that such changes not
only help company develop content which is connected with community and is thus
appreciated but also, makes an employee feel more committed to the company as it is felt
that company is committed to the society with which employees also belong. It also
increases communication between teams and departments. Therefore, change in culture
was felt necessitated by management to improve the working culture from silo working
to growth culture.
 Technological system changes – Technology in the present time and especially for
companies with digital business has been offering various benefits. With the passage of
time, technology has improved and the number of employees has increased. This arose
the change for office and use of renewed technology. Changes were required to change
the working from desk-bound to hot-desking and technologies which are though high-
risk, but also improve the chances of high-returns. Company management must have felt
need for techno-change (Mikos, 2020). Although, it is not an easy change and always
involves the risk of getting backlashes from employees especially those employees who
are not comfortable with the use of information technology but chances of returns that
implementing latest technology would bring to the company outweighs the risks and
therefore, company must have decided to undergo techno-change way.
5

Task 2
Models and theories of managing change
Change is inevitable to bring improvement in organisation and management. It is an
ongoing process that requires efforts, experience, expertise, time and dedication to develop and
implement (Thussu, 2018). Different models and theories of change management have been
developed and suggested by various experts, few of which are below managed:
Nudge Theory
It is a concept of behavioural management. Nudging means encouraging and inspire
someone to change. It not only helps in exploring existing influences but also helps in
understanding and explore the opportunities to mitigate or eliminate them, in order to increase
the level of positivity in the business processes and operations. Further, it should also be kept in
mind that there are various unhelpful nudges, of both intentional and unintentional nature and
should be kept at par.
In the case of BBC Worldwide, this theory mainly seeks to work upon the nudges on the
and by the management as well as exploring the influences on the behaviour of the staff in the
wake of change management. It can be seen that change expected by the consumers and feeling
of necessity of change was the nudge factor for the management which in turn play the role of
nudge factor for the behaviour of the employees. This theory is sophisticated in approach and
aims to take into account difference in feelings, opinions and situations of the people who were
directly impacted by these changes. All these factors were considered by management to develop
such process of change management that gets minimum resistance from employees of the
company.
Lewin's Change Management Model
This model was designed by Kurt Lewin and aims to create logical and sequential steps
to understand organisational and structured change (Grabowski and Roberts, 2019). Below
mentioned is change management of BBC Worldwide:
 Unfreeze – This is the first stage in the process of change and involves all the steps that
are required for the preparation of change. It was the stage where executive members of
the company felt the need for change due to change in consumer expectation, intense
competition and reduced competitive advantage of the company. Management of the
company then drew outline as to what changes they require in which process and what
6

challenges they might need to face in developing and implementing those changes. In
other words, it is a planning phase for company, in which it has unfreeze its stakeholders
to prepare them for the necessary changes.
 Change – This is second stage and is the point where actual change takes place. It takes
time to complete especially when human resource is involved in the change (Sveningsson
and Sörgärde, 2019). Once, the planning is completed as discussed in the previous step,
implementation of plans of change management sequentially folds out in phased manner
from 2012 to 2015. It had to face many challenges in this step and communication and
good leadership proved to be biggest keys for the company management to pass this step
such as communication with stakeholders like employees by organising global virtual
workshop, which was organised by the executive leadership in coordination GLTs.
Success of this step ensures that business is being steered forward in correct direction.
 Refreeze – This is the final step and takes place when management starts stabilising the
change, once people accept it. It is the phase when employees gradually started accepting
change management (Raskino and Waller, 2016). Company suffered with employee
turnover who couldn’t accept change and in return, it recruited new talents from the
market that were adapt to work in alignment with the latest technologies and the
expectations of the market from the company, which is a subsidiary of one of the oldest
media houses in the world. Things eventually settled down and company kept on
operating with reorganised structure and changes in the working culture.
Stakeholder management
Stakeholders are those individuals or groups that are directly and indirectly related to this
change management. Stakeholders can be of both nature – internal to the organisation and
external to the organisation. Different changes in the organisation leads to different impact on the
different stakeholders (Epstein, 2018). Although, these changes are of significant nature and had
impact over external stakeholders like suppliers, business associates, customers, etc. but it was
internal stakeholders like management and employees that were impacted the most.
 Role of leadership – These changes were of significant nature and therefore, it was
natural to face resistance from the employees as it is not easy to handle changes like
traditional desk to hot-desk in a moment or change the culture in which one has been
working in the organisation, in a day’s time. It was the time when company needed
7

dynamic, transactional and transformational leadership at the same time to manage issues
faced by their personnel, the role which was played actively by the new executive team.
 Communicating change – It was important that all the change be conveyed to all the
stakeholders in a proper manner so that their association with the company is not
impacted. Company took serious measures regarding this as it organised a workshop
inviting all the employees globally with GLTs and WEx so that there is no
communication lag between the internal stakeholders of the company. For the external
stakeholders, company underwent discussions and negotiations with them to work out the
new partnerships (Goodman and Dingli, 2017).
 Motivating and supporting others through change – There was a fair chance that these
changes would change power dynamics in the company and give rise to new power
politics. Most impacted from these developments were the employees who resultingly,
suffered from low morale. To tackle these issues, WEx empowered GLTs who, in turn
empowered and instructed their subordinate team leaders to take into account all the
issues that their team members are facing. Also, they were asked to motivate people and
inspire them to support each other through change.
Task 3
Justification of the approach used by BBC for change process
Management of the company tried their level best to implement a change process which
is not only logical but is also sequential as well. It was years' long process and was developed
and implemented in phases to reduce friction in the process in nascent stage only.
 Structural change – In order to align itself with demand of market and expectations of
customers, company changed itself from having product based divisional structure to
geographical regions based divisional structure (Donders, 2019). It was necessary and in
the alignment with the objectives that company has laid for itself as post the re-
organisation, it was in better position to serve its consumers in the language, they want
the content and the type of content they expect which was kind of ignored in the previous
setting of organisational structure.
 Strategical change – Change in the strategy of the company was inevitable in the wake
of change in the organisational structure and proved to be complementing the re-
8

organisation. It has also been able to prove itself superior base for the culture change that
management brought out next. It was futuristic and something that was so flexible that it
could accommodate further changes in the future. This was like firm foundational step
that company took on-board and aimed at the sky to achieve without limit riding on the
change in content process that it undertook simultaneously.
 Cultural change – It was another major change that took place and had impact over all
of the organisation's working culture globally. Company adopted growth culture and tried
to help all the employees to imbibe it by organising workshops of employees with WEx
and GLT (Mwakisaghu, 2019). It was big chance for all level of employees to be part of
the change. They communicated more which reduced silo working. WEx tried to ensure
that communication channels are proper and no employee feel isolated. Executive
members tried to display exemplary leadership. This workshop also helped WEx in
identification of the areas of improvement.
 Technological system changes – Company is in digital content presentation business
and therefore, it is very important for it, to move with time and be updated with
technology. Outdated technology coupled with outdated customer attraction package is
capable of having completely thrown it out of the competition in the future. To avoid
such issues, it took leap of faith for the future which was necessary and definitely worth
taking the plunge for.
Development of different strategic plan
Change management can lead to results of both positive and negative nature. It was a
challenge for the management team to develop and deliver change of such significant nature and
communicate the change to the stakeholders involved. Change in line of management lead to
huge changes in the company and it was as if, whole organisation had to undergo adoption and
adaptation of new business model (French and Gordon, 2019). This did not go down well with
the employees as it sounded disruptive to them. This reduced their morale and resulted in the
reduction in productivity of the employees. Furthermore, it was observed that silo working could
still be observed in the company and the GLT did not exhibit the leadership skills that was
required from them to achieve the required objectives of the change management. In order to
eliminate all these shortcomings, further changes are required in the management and operational
9

process of the business. Revised planning is required to shape strategies that would be further
implemented by developing and executing a changed plan.
 Types of intervention – In the changed plan, company is required to make further
interventions in its corporate culture on the same line of objectives as decided earlier but
this time, the company should develop the final draft of the changes in the corporate
culture and operational working in the pre-discussion with the employee groups. This
would result in less resistance from the employees (Deuze and Witschge, 2016).
 Culture profiling and selecting interventions – For making appropriate changes in
strategy, it should undertake cultural profiling tool to identify cultural styles and
preferences that are in alignment with the change in strategies that management is seeing.
It is a way of analysing or a variation on management profiling. It will help company
align its business processes without disregarding any culture of the employees found in it.
That would save both company and employees from culture shock.
 Action research and appreciative inquiry – This is the process of research and inquiry that
aims at improving effective leadership and organisational change (Lepeley, 2020).
Company should use appreciative inquiry model for developing changes in both its front-
end service i.e., service related to range or quality of products that company offers to its
customers or its back-end services i.e., services that it provides to its employee to
strengthen employee relationship with the company and improve talent retention.
 High performance change and development – This is related to technology that the
company aims to develop and use to provide high-definition content to its consumers.
Technology will be able to prove itself game changer for the company however, with
further developments in the technologies, it lays extra pressure on the finances of the
company to keep itself. Therefore, company should first of all prepare a cost benefit
analysis statement for the development and then analyse how frequent upgradation it
should seek in its technological system change (Simpson, 2017).
 Business process re-engineering and lean processes – Company has reorganised its
structure to geographical lines and therefore, accordingly should further change its
content selection and development process according to local taste. It can further make
sub-groups in four major regions to make the business process re-engineered according to
10

the lot company targets in the local market. It should apply lean processing as this would
help it in minimising wastage in the process.
Task 4
Analysis of benefits of implementation of new change process in BBC
In the previous section, it was discussed that company should rather than make a new
change management plan altogether, should make a plan that carries forward the original and
existing change management plan with an objective that it would remove the shortcomings of the
original plan (Graber and Dunaway, 2017). It would be easier both from the implementation
point of view as the existing plan was already in the process of unfreeze, change and refreeze and
also, from the financial point of view as to develop and implement a new plan involves huge
costing and company has already incurred once on development and implementation of existing
plan of change management.
It can be seen that further changes had been suggested that – in the structural re-
organisation, business should develop further sub-group in the primary geographic distribution
so that accurate content can be developed as per taste of the local consumer, which was the main
point of whole re-organisation drive (Price and Toye, 2017). Also, it would enable minimisation
of wastage, following the process of lean operations and business process re-engineering. In the
strategies, it was suggested that company undertakes cultural profiling tool so that resulting
culture that develops based on that strategy is inclusive of varied cultures that are found in the
employees of the company, giving it a look of truly global company, which is again one of its
main objectives to undertake reorganisation process. In addition, in the culture change, it is
suggested that all the major changes that company undertakes must be pre-discussed with the
employees’ groups so that lesser conflicts and situations of friction between management and the
employees, arises in the future (Stimmer, 2019). This would be also be beneficial from the point
of view that employees are internal stakeholder of the company and knows the issues and
solutions related to its operational betterment more than any professional expert hired from
outside. Therefore, the suggestion that they would make be adding values to the discussion that
are undertaken by the company regarding the management and operation changes. Further, in the
technological and system change aspect, it is suggested that experienced employees of the
company are habitual of traditional desk job and therefore, it is difficult for them to switch to
11

hot-desk out of the blue and to keep them committed to the company, trainings must be provided
beforehand switching to the technology. Also, they must be given on-the-job training as part of
development so that it can retain talent that is valuable to the company but is not able to adjust
with the technological advances. Additionally, technology is something that keeps on updating,
especially in the industry that company operates in and to make mental technological
upgradation in such a large company is not an economical task to do but if not done, there is
likely chances that company would miss out with competitors (George, 2019). Therefore, it is
very important that first of all it calculates cost-benefit analysis of the technological
implementation and upgradation, before making actual move, for it is meant for constructive
purposes for the company and not act as disruptions. Below mentioned is the implementation of
these suggestions using Tuckman’s stages of group development:
 Stage 1: Forming – This is the first stage in which stage is set for development by
observing the dependency of factors on each other. In other words, this stage is to directly
help the leaders of the company to define the change required further, identify factors
required to accomplish it and establish a relationship with their subordinates to mutually
exchange information related to those factors and situations (Esser, 2017). To be effective
in this stage, leader should be clear about goals and directions that they need to pass on to
subordinates in clear and concise communication manner.
 Stage 2: Storming – In this stage, teams start working together. To effectively accomplish
this stage, it is necessary that all the team members interact and involve with each other
to complete this stage. Leadership role is again very important be it any change,
structural, cultural or other, so that no two team again come at loggerheads or are not
coordinating with each other, to prevent situation of silo working again. Also, it would be
helpful in case of conflict resolutions (Sanson and Steirer, 2019).
 Stage 3: Norming – This is further stage, where employees start working as a team
actually. Silo working would be eliminated and new and more effective method of
working would be developed. In this stage, individual goals of employees are superseded
by their team objectives. They would respect each other more as they have reached a
situation of mutual agreement. Specific team roles have been provided and all the teams
now share information in favour of completing company targets effectively.
12