Abstract:

Introduction:
Change readiness is related to the capability to acquire knowledge. Since Corona it got clearer than ever that working teams in organisations are more diverse in how work is integrated with personal life. Change happens unplanned and anytime and with immense impact on work reality. A continuously changing number of employees switches between home office and office location and working hours are flexible. Formerly synchronous face to face training sessions had been replaced with virtual instructor led courses, often as blended learning solutions or with eLearnings. The challenge remains how knowledge acquisition can be effectively enabled in such a diverse work environment and change readiness supported. The new normal work reality with hybrid and diverse work forces creates a new challenge for organisations on how to enable learning. Learning needs to be flexible in terms of place and time and always accessible to create the required change readiness. The paper investigates change readiness in relation to knowledge management and the new need for spontaneous and self-paced knowledge and skill acquisition.

Aim and objective and feasibility of the research:
The chosen topic for this work focuses on the resent changes in asynchronous work and learning reality and its influence on employee’s capability to follow the fast-paced organisational changes required in a fluctuating economic environment or other phases of uncertainty.

The objective of this paper is to identify a new way of employee education that can influence change readiness. The following hypotheses are expected to influence the change readiness level of an organisation:
- Hypothesis 1: Knowledge: Knowledge can`t be taught primarily in classrooms any longer. It needs to be always available to ensure everyone can access it when required. This includes not just specific known and expected knowledge but also unforeseeable and spontaneously required knowledge.
- Hypothesis 2: Willingness: Mindset readiness is key and feeling safe in everchanging environments relates to self-confidence based on knowing your own strength and preferred behaviour routines. This requires reflection of existing routines through available learning opportunities. Such a winning mindset is influenced by how much you know and what you expect about the future and thus influenced by knowledge you can obtain.
- Hypothesis 3: Skill: Execution capability with well reflected knowledge of the borders and the capability to express these borders e.g. to team members without fear and without the need to formally meet ensures teams can handle new and unforeseen situations. New technologies hold new answers to how skills can be developed and thus how capable people feel and are in handling new situations.

Pharma Industry as focus industry for the intended research allows examination of a fast-changing economic environment in a global market that had been exposed to fully changing their go-to market models. Therefore, it is an ideal specific environment for research related to change readiness and the possibilities to impact it by technical and new approaches to learning. Pharma companies are excellent example of a homogeneous “knowledge worker” (Senge, 1990) environments. The findings will be discussed and the meaning for a broader application explained and therefore benefits to other organisations and leads to new questions for further research.

Keywords:

Hybrid work, hybrid learning, new normal, work 4.0.