Change Management Plan of Walmart - Case Study Example

Change Management Plan - Walmart Business analysts associate Wal-Marts success in the pervasive and strong culture. Despite the tremendous growth rate and huge size, the company retains one of the most cultural elements contributing towards the success from early years. The management policy holds that satisfied and happy employees perform well and take up responsibility for happier customers. The senior management works towards improving the skills of managers and respective leaders. The mandate of management includes minimizing risks and keeping current systems operational. Change requires the firm to create new operating systems that demand for strong leadership. The renewal process will go past having sufficing real leaders while promoting and hiring them for senior level jobs. This approach needs to change as it has diluted the much-needed sense of urgency. The change efforts should start with individuals and groups focusing on Wal-Mart’s market position, financial performance, technological trends, and competitive situation. The focus towards potential revenue drop is based on importance of patent expiry and trend of declining margins within the core business. It is imperative to establish the emerging markets for which people seem to ignore (Sofroniou, 2010). Wal-Mart finds ways of communicating this information dramatically and broadly with respect to the crises, potential risks and opportunities that are timely. The initial step is important as it involves getting transformative programs that require aggressive cooperation of all personnel. Absences of motivation mean that employees face difficulties in making efforts in advancing in their curricular. The comparisons with alternative steps of change process are a gradual process. Most companies are perceived as failure in the initial phases (Cameron & Green, 2012). The reason for Wal-Mart’s failure includes the fact that executives continually underestimate the levels of hardship in driving people from comfort zones. The overestimation of success levels of the increased urgency is due to lack of patience. The preliminaries in Wal-Mart’s policy paper should allow executives overcome the paralysis of downside possibilities. The first step involves acting with urgency. Wal-Mart should evaluate the human resource practices among competitors. This will include identification and discussion of crises, potential risks, and major opportunities. Making the strategic shifts in new HR roles will generate unique issues within Wal-Mart’s HR group. The efforts will create some level of commonality in the steps and activities while increasing the possibility of success. The steps and activities include strong HR leadership. While Wal-Mart makes major change efforts, strong leadership will develop clear vision and motivation for others while sharing the mission and objectives. The firm will help employees work towards achieving organizational expectations. For purposes of changing the involvement of HR in Wal-Mart, HR top leadership should work within HR groups and with other organizational leaders in reshaping expectations of the components of HR delivery. The levels of success for such change are dependent on HRs capability in meeting real organizational needs and credibility developed within. The second approach involves the development of guiding coalitions through the assembly of groups equipped with sufficient power for leading change efforts. Human resource department will encourage groups towards working in teams (Cameron & Green, 2012). Flexibility and creativity are some of the HR group’s successful concepts in future and have a likelihood of responding to changing needs of Wal-Mart’s client organizations. Responsiveness within the retail world requires Wal-Mart to be flexible like other organizations while changing their needs, as well as priorities. Traditional processes and activities are insufficient in meeting the needs of future-HR leadership in Wal-Mart and may rely on the creativity of the groups for purposes of achieving effective results. Increasing the scope of globalization for market performance will generate the essence of flexibility and creativity while Wal-Mart succeeds with new locations, new workforces, and new customers (Sofroniou, 2010). The third methodology involves developing change strategy and vision. Wal-Mart can create a standing human resource vision aimed at helping direct changes of efforts. In the end, Wal-Mart can establish strategies aimed at achieving the vision. Delivering value is a particular challenge for Wal-Mart HR. HR will continue being perceived by most modern organizations as a function that does not generate revenue. It is critical that Wal-Mart makes apparent the implications provided by working with management teams in hiring right people, paying them appropriately, managing them well, and building working environments that encourage self-determination. The concept of value delivery within Wal-Mart can be extended through the argument that HR should deliver on economic value for customers and employees. The fourth step includes communication of vision buy-in. Wal-Mart will use all avenues possible in communicating new strategies and vision to stakeholders. Top management can take the opportunity to teach new behaviors through setting examples of guiding coalition steps. Job rotation is a way of bringing a business perspective to HR against the rotation of line managers to HR functions. The people will serve reality checks within HR departments and bring increased value understanding of the HR function within their line functions during the rotation. The approach works best while durations of assignment are sufficient in allowing rotated individual to embrace sufficient time in achieving proficiency in areas of HR (Harrington, 2006). The focus also drags on close working relationships with the experienced HR people who are instrumental in organizational learning. Sending Wal-Mart HR people to other departments will serve similar purposes. The stage is followed by intense empowerment of broad-based action. Wal-Mart can remove all human recourse policy obstacles affecting change. The change systems and organizational structures will establish the identity to the vision (Reiss, 2012). The encouragement of nontraditional and risk-taking ideas will inform decisions regarding activities and actions. To this end, the firm creates corporate culture that encourages employees towards contributing their best. The focus also ensures uniformity and discipline in the organization. The atmosphere fosters growth in a rapid pace as well as operational diversification in the long term (Holloway, 2014). The culture of Wal-Mart is essentially service-oriented and customer-centric. It includes the focus of creating operations that provide the best value within affordable prices. Unity of purpose, as well as spirit of oneness, is maintained and created within the organization. The company has an open policy for managing information flow and compliance reporting. The sixth step involves generation of short-term wins. The focus requires planning for the visible HR performance improvements. Wal-Mart can create the improvements through recognition and reward systems of employee involvement in such improvements. Business unit assignment will allow Wal-Mart assign HR employees to ascertained business units for purposes of enabling them develop focused relationships with smaller business parts (Harrington, 2006). The relationship will be enforced even as HR persons have direct reporting relationships with leaders of business units. In such situations, the goal of central HR grouping in Wal-Mart will be to provide services and information to distribution of HR representatives. The elements also deliver services on a personal basis to business units. The advantage of such structures is that they foster creativity and flexibility. Local Wal-Mart HR people can tailor and modify services and processes to meet the requirements of the firm’s assigned business units. Further, top management should encourage all stakeholders to support the idea. The application uses increased credibility among change systems, policies and structures that lack a fit to the vision. Hiring, promoting, and developing employees within Wal-Mart will implement more aspects of the vision. Wal-Mart can reinvigorate the overall process for new projects, change agents, and themes (Anderson & Anderson, 2010). The last step involves making the change remain in the organizational culture. Wal-Mart should articulate the human resource connections between organizational success and new behaviors. Top management can develop the approaches of ensuring leadership succession and development (Heldman, 2011). Acute future orientation is a way in which HR will provide value in understanding the aspects of changing organizational, workforce, and environmental factors have a likelihood of influencing the business. The element of focus also anticipates associated HR needs coupled with preparedness of delivering appropriate solutions to address the needs. The maintenance of a strategic focus on workplace trends allows HR to prepare an evaluation report on impacts that Wal-Mart faces when particular changes take place among organizations processes and people (Holloway, 2014). The elements also prepare the workings of business leadership while deciding on the best ways of responding to the curve. For instance, a single movement has the probability of having significant impacts on ways in which people are managed, valued and hired through intellectual capital. The new roles of the HR department are those that are learned through intellectual capital as well as the implications as evaluated through impacts on the current practices. The approach develops ideas as well as recommendations involved in the changing of HR practice as well as other forms of business processes. Centers of excellence within Wal-Mart will advance the organizational growth through mergers and acquisitions. Top management will find itself within multiple HR agendas. The duplicative and complementary nature of activities can be avoided (Anderson & Anderson, 2010). The duplicative roles exist when they are subject to critical downsizing and consolidation that leaves behind departments that are not in a position of serving all business areas and accustoming to the credibility of Wal-Mart HR. Effective responses to the issue include utilizing multiple HR groups. The approaches that can work well include developing centers of excellence for which HR groups within different Wal-Mart parts develop the expertise in certain areas and serve needs of the company. The areas of specialty allow for HR groups to operate within the model while seeing each other as complements and not competitors. The company benefits from high expertise levels are based on the scope of operational areas. In conclusion, the consulting model allows for HR departments of Wal-Mart to work towards adopting consulting models in service provision. Wal-Mart can learn consulting skills, view the internal customers as equal clients, and take client satisfaction as success measure. The larger high-technology firms have internal clients with needs that are not met through internal HR groups and consider external service providers as direct-even within the basic HR needs. References Anderson, D., & Anderson, L. A. (2010). Beyond Change Management: How to Achieve Breakthrough Results Through Conscious Change Leadership. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Cameron, E., Green, M., (2012). Making Sense of Change Management: A Complete Guide to the Models Tools and Techniques of Organizational Change. New York: Kogan Page Publishers. Harrington, H. J. (2006). Change Management Excellence: The Art of Excelling in Change Management. New York: Paton Professional. Heldman, K. (2011). Project Management JumpStart. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Holloway, G. (2014). Change Management: New Words for Old Ideas. New York: Xlibris Corporation. Reiss, M. (2012). Change Management: A Balanced and Blended Approach. New York: BoD – Books on Demand. Sofroniou, A., (2010). Change Management. New York: Lulu.com. Read More