Organizational Change during crises. The transition to E-learning at the university of Udine during the COVID 19 emergency

Chapter 1. Organizational change 
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It is not essential if the firm is the best in its sector or not. All firms must make 
organizational changes to remain on the market. It is most common to see the best firms 
spend time and money on changing, respect to small and medium enterprises. It is quite 
common because, in general, change something is not easy or fast and require specific 
competencies that not all the firms can obtain. Furthermore, changes are generally 
expensive, and the benefits derived from, for example, a cost-saving transformation. Of 
course, it depends on the type of change because it can be little and incremental, and this 
does not require much effort, or it can be radical, and this can create several problems of 
management and costs.  
These changes generally create a sort of endpoint that permits to decree the beginning 
of a new period where the people in the firm will have to start to operate and get used to 
this further improvement.  
Summering these concepts, the firms choose to change for there different reasons: 
1. Performance. Firms want to improve their efficiency to meet or anticipate external 
environment factors. 
2. Development. Organizations have to improve or investigate a cost-saving strategy 
through lean manufacturing 
3. Transformation. Firms want to grow or expand through new corporate. To do this, 
they have to acquire firms or mergers with others. 
Another important consideration for the managers when they focus on change is to 
consider organizational change as systemic. If they want to obtain the goals saw in the 
previous paragraph, they have to evaluate change as a system. 
There are three main reasons to consider change objectives as systemic: 
1. Managers must evaluate the whole organization. A change in one part modifies 
the total system, and they cannot assess only the specific area where change has 
made. The risk is that the transformation will not work. 
2. Change leaders must consider the target for change as a group with its identity 
and not the single people. This mentality permits them to understand and pay 
attention to the organization’s culture that sometimes is difficult to identify.