CASE STUDY
MET OFFICE
IMPORTANT NOTE
Dear students,
Please note that:
1.	This case study is to be used ONLY for your individual business reports (GC7414 Assessment Component 2) and should NOT be used for your group presentations (GC7414 Assessment Component 1) because the latter should be based on the assumption that you have not been hired as consultants yet and therefore have not had a chance to collect any data. Failure to comply with this will result in a lower mark for your presentations.
2.	The information mentioned in this document must be kept confidential and used only for the purposes of your assessment at UEL. If you have any questions or concerns in this regard, please contact me at <PRESIDIO_ANONYMIZED_EMAIL_ADDRESS>.
Thank you,
Sonya Dineva (GC7414 Module Leader)

 
The Met Office is the national meteorological service for the UK. We provide critical weather services and world-leading climate science, helping you make better decisions to stay safe and thrive. 
We deliver our services through exceptional scientific, technological, and operational expertise. Behind this is a team of excellent people, working with you to deliver extraordinary impact, making us one of the most trusted forecasters in the world. Our team of weather and climate experts play a critical role in interpreting our data, turning this into insight and advice that, in extreme circumstances, saves lives. 
We have earned a reputation for continually pushing the boundaries of scientific, technological, and operational expertise. Our supercomputer is one of the most powerful of its kind in the world, capable of 14,000 trillion arithmetic operations each second. Looking further ahead, our investment in data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence will help us meet the grand challenges of the future. 
THE PROJECT
The Met Office has been looking for ways to maximise the capacity for change of its employees, so they stay at the cutting edge of science and technical developments in a constantly fluctuating environment. In its endeavour, the Met Office joined forces with the University of East London and agreed to run a project together that was called ‘Change Readiness’ and is likely to continue for several years. The project was split into three stages, namely:
1.	Establishing a baseline for the change intervention – as part of discovering and understanding the risk/opportunity in change readiness, this stage aimed to clarify the Met Office’s understanding of ‘change capacity’ and to quantify a baseline of change capacity across the organisation and the reasons for this baseline level. The work was carried out in the UEL Business Psychology Lab.
2.	Design of the change intervention – to be done as part of the summative assessment for GC7414 and to include development of cross-organisational tactics to grow the change readiness of the Met Office employees, potentially through multiple interventions and approaches. 
3.	Further research and evaluation of the change intervention – this will be done via students’ dissertations to be submitted as summative assessment for the module GC7417 Developing as a Researcher Part 2. Details in writing to follow depending on the outcomes of the previous two stages and the needs of both parties. 

THE METHODOLOGY
As part of the first stage of the project, the Business Psychology Lab conducted the following activities to establish the baseline for the change intervention:
- Operationalised the concept of ‘change capacity’ in the context of the organisation;
- Designed a strategy for evaluating the current change capacity of the organisation, including creation of a dataset based on existing quantitative data from people surveys and qualitative data (utilising the ADKAR framework) pertaining to specific change initiatives implemented in the past as well as new qualitative data collected via focus groups with participants from all directorates of the organisation split into two groups – managers and staff;
- Collected relevant qualitative data to evaluate the current change capacity of the organisation;
- Analysed the data collected along with the existing data to identify the key areas for development to build capacity for change amongst the organisation’s employees.
At the start of the first stage of the project, The Met Office provided the following slide deck to the students (please zoom in for enhanced access – a separate PPT file has been uploaded to Moodle too):
 
 
 
 
  
 
Once the project parameters and timeline were agreed, the Met Office shared various files containing useful data (as described in the methodological strategy outlined above) as well as information about the organisational structure (with approximate staff numbers in blue) and the most important cross-cutting events impacting the organisation over the past 7 years (please note that the actual number of the change initiatives implemented in the Met Office was significantly higher, e.g., at a certain point last year, they had about 150 change projects running at the same time), namely:
 
 

THE FINDINGS
Quantitative analysis – findings from t-tests and ANOVAs performed on existing People Survey data
Age, pay grade, and tenure on the job seem to be the factors, on which the Met Office employees differ significantly from each other (gender does not appear to play an important role in the organisation). 
The age group with the best overall attitude was 20-24 years, followed closely by the next group of 25-29-year-olds. These groups scored the highest with regards to the individual components of attitude to own work, work-life balance, learning and career development as well as to the management team and the change management interventions introduced at the Met Office. The only exception was the factor of attitude to teamwork, on which the group of 60-64-year-olds scored the highest. However, this age group performed worst in terms of their attitude to learning and career progression and to change management. Mid-aged employees scored the lowest on overall attitude, attitude to own work, work-life balance, teamwork, and management team. 
The best-scoring pay grade group was always AO-EO (Administrative Officer-Executive Officer) and the worst – SEO-HEO (Senior Executive Officer- Higher Executive Officer).
As for tenure, those employees who had been working with the Met Office for less than 6 or 12 months consistently demonstrated the highest ratings, e.g., on overall attitude, attitude to work, WLB, teamwork, management team, learning and development, and change management. The analysis revealed that, in many cases, there was a linear tendency towards decreasing attitudes with increasing tenure on the job with the exception of attitude to work which was very high for those with 20+ years of experience in the organisation (the group of 5-10 years scored the least on this factor) as well as teamwork where the 5-10 years tenure group was the worst-performing one again.  

Quantitative analysis – findings from regression models derived from existing People Survey data
The following relationships were reported:
1.	Attitude to management team seems to be predicted by employees’ happiness with change management, learning and career development opportunities, and teamwork.
2.	Attitude to teamwork seems to depend on individual work attitude and perceptions of management team.
3.	Attitude to learning and career development seems to be impacted by satisfaction with work-life balance, change management, and management team. 
4.	Work attitude seems to be predicted by work-life balance and teamwork.
5.	Work-life balance seems to be impacted by attitude to change management, learning and development opportunities, and to work.
6.	Attitude to change management seems to depend on satisfaction with own work, the management team, and the existing learning and career development opportunities.

Quantitative analysis of existing ADKAR responses regarding previous change interventions
1.	Sum of means for each group – as can be seen from the below table, the Finance and Markets directorates scored the highest on the aggregate ADKAR variable, whereas People and Programmes scored the lowest.

Directorate	ADKAR Sum of Means
Technology	7.3
Services	7.4
Science	7.3
Programmes	6.2
Finance	8.7
People	6.3
Markets	7.9
2.	Means for each part of ADKAR – the results were consistent across all parts of the ADKAR model, so no components stood out as particularly successful or problematic, but all of them revealed scope for further improvement.
 
Element of the model	Score
Awareness	3.4
Desire	3.4
Knowledge	3.3
Ability	3.5
Reinforcement	3.4
 
3.	ADKAR questions that had a significantly higher or lower mean score compared to the average – as can be seen from the below, the issues with communication and the ability to give feedback seem to be particularly relevant.

Questions that performed better than average:
-  A: Credibility of person explaining the change
-  A: Understanding of one’s line management responsibilities
-  D: Belief in the case for change
-  D: They made a decision to participate in change
-  D: Belief that manager is supportive of change
-  R: Belief that manager is committed to sustainment of change
 
Questions that performed worse than average:
•	A: Could explain why this change is happening
•	A: Communications about why the change is happening effective
•	A: Understanding the nature of the impact on one’s work group
•	A: Belief in consistency in management of people decisions across the Met Office
•	D: Ability to voice objections, and these being taken into account
•	D: Being motivated by the People Framework
•	D: Feeling part of the Met Office management team
•	K: Understand the impact of change on one’s behaviours, tools, processes, workflows.
•	A: Ability to practice new skills and behaviours
•	R: Opportunity to provide feedback using new ways of working
•	R: Understanding of impact of not using new ways of working
Qualitative analysis of consequently collected Focus Groups data
Please zoom in significantly to view the main themes and subthemes of the qualitative analysis. For accessibility purposes, a separate file containing the same thematic map in a PDF format could be found on Moodle.

 
YOUR TASK
As part of the second stage of the Change Readiness project, you are expected to:

•	Employ the above information and findings from the baseline activity and other enquiries to individually generate a report containing recommended solutions and plan (details of the structure of the report can be found in the module handbook). 

•	Your report should outline the key areas and initiatives that could help build the capacity for change amongst the employees of the Met Office.  

•	You should target and integrate interventions designed around changing a few critical behaviours and to provide research-backed but also innovative range of ideas and options. 

•	Please note that that emphasis of the interventions you will suggest should be placed on improving the general ability of the employees of the Met Office to absorb and take on change (recognising this will also require managerial/corporate interventions).

In the meantime, the Met Office will be simultaneously entering a design phase involving formulating options/tactic to mitigate their change readiness corporate risk.  Therefore, their senior steering group will welcome your briefs on this matter as they will help the organisation to reach a view on the most valuable actions they can take going forward and to make relevant decisions.