Change Intervention - Solar Hud Company - Case Study Example

WORK INTEGRATED CHANGE PROJECT Name Course Number Date 1. Introduction In an organization change is vital to allow staff to exercise their creativity, explore new opportunities, and learn new skills in ways that benefit the company through improved commitment and new ideas. Preparing staff to manage these changes entails an analysis of the training and tools required to assist them acquire new skills (Austin 2011). Training can be offered via the traditional classroom set ups or progressively through online learning platforms. Notably, companies have to do effective job of assessing capabilities of employees and then make decisions to breach the gaps between the skills required and the current skills to respond the growth dynamics. National and global economy can affect companies in both negative and positive ways and either way can be stressful. If the economy is strong and there is increased demand for services and products implies that organizations have to consider expanding and this can entail addition of new facilities or employees. Such changes offer employees opportunities; however they also bring new challenges. A dwindling economy such as the one experienced in 2009 can be worse as organizations find themselves requiring making hard decisions that can affect employees’ benefits and salaries and can even threaten their jobs. Thus, the ability to handle the two ends of the spectrum is important for companies that intend to maintain vivid brand and sturdy relationship with their employees and customers as well (Burnes 2009). The aim is this work is to apply theory to a practical organizational situation that involves change. 2. Project Description This project examines a change situation in an organization. In particular it studies a situation that had to change in an organization and the action that the manager took (change intervention) to establish the desired situation. The other part of the project applies a theory that applicable to the change situation, and in essence uses that theory to recommend enhanced change practices that will improve change interventions effectiveness in case the organization involves in change process in the future. The paper will also demonstrate how relevant knowledge (theory) suits the change situation and interprets the situation from theory perspective. 3. Change Analysis The person I interviewed had just been employed at a Company called Solar Hud. The company manufactures hot water solars and was a booming industry somewhere between 200 and 2010. During this period there was global economic crisis most companies including his own was affected. This forced the company to bring in a new manager that would assist the organization thrive during those difficult economic times. Certainly the new manager had to make hard decisions to accomplish the goals of the organizations and such changes obviously would entail cutting costs, and sending some employees home. Solar Hud had an issue with unskilled and inexperienced employees and hence the company needed to change incompetent staff and get more skilled, experienced and competent employees. Unfortunately the interviewee was a new employee and less experienced and had to leave the organization. The situation came as a result of new manager. Each manager has his/her own ways of managing an organization. Like in this situation the manager was very strict and need highly competent employees to turn around things in the company since the company as incurring losses at the backdrop of 2009 global economic crisis, because the employees at the time were less skilled hence could be come up with innovative ways to improve the business operations, thus the new manager had to make a decision to effect some change to improve the performance of the company. 3.1 Change Drivers and Change Intervention Change Drivers Internal factors that drive organization to change include streamlining work processes, cutting cost, poor moral and low productivity (Maurer 2011). Whereas the external factors that drive change in organizations are new technology, new market, change in consumer preferences and competition1. For our case, the company needed to be efficient and effective in the way it runs its operations. The status quo could not achieve this, hence the management had to make a decision to get a new manager would was capable of turning things around. It became apparent that some employees were incompetent in terms of lack of experiences and skills, hence this was derailing the performance of the company and it could not meet its expectation coupled with difficult economic times. Strategically focused companies are capable of changing ahead of the curve with regards to developing and planning a workforce that has the right competencies. Such organizations have profound strategic acumen into their employees and utilize that acumen to proactively have the correct employees in place to respond effectively to sudden needs in the market place. At any given time, a number of organizations can find themselves confronted with a scenario with very little time to evaluate viable candidates as a result of unplanned or planed change in industry and leadership conditions. Intervention The new manager could only achieve the goals of the company through having highly qualified, competent and skilled employees work in the organization. 3.2 Change Perspectives One perspective of change management that is relevant to this situation is rational perspective. Change agents, for instance the new manager deploying rational strategy to effect change through the use of rational arguments, and special knowledge2. This perspective presupposes that rational employees will be guided by self-interest and reason in determining whether to support change or not. The political perspective played an important role in mobilizing and convincing employees that the change that was being brought will leave them better than they were before3. The last change management perspective that was relevant to our situation was the cultural perspective. Cultural change is guided by the beliefs and values shared by members of the organizations. The employees were able to inculcate the values of the company such as efficiency and competency in their tasks. 3.3 Change Assumptions When Solar Hud brought in the new manager, most of the employees were not sure of what is likely to happen and there was a lot of uncertainty. As a result a lot of employees resigned since they were confused and upset concerning what was taking place. However, the company retained a couple of more experienced employees with propositions of career development and then new management was open and encouraging regarding the company’s future prospects. One method the company could have handled this change is by applying the concept of Freeze/Unfreeze. According to this concept there is a 3-force stage that is required for any company to be driven to bring the change. The first is unfreezing, which empathizes on preparing employees for the looming change. This is an integral aspect of change stage before the implementation through assessment and influencing the need to change and resistance. Second stage is changing of employees, technology, structure, and tasks. Preferably an organization would be frozen entirely, ready for change and the objectives clearly made. At this phase, it is desirable that employees are not viewed to have sense of low or high security so as to avoid resistance. The last stage is refreezing, which is the reinforcement and evaluation of the changes, which occurred. 3.4 Planned or Unplanned Change Not every change in companies is because of the direction of the change agent4. Unplanned changes happened randomly and spontaneously. At times they can be disruptive, just like wildcat strike, which ends in the closure of a factory, or may be beneficial for instance interpersonal conflicts that results in the established of a new process directed at smoothing the flow of work between business units. If drives of unplanned change start to appear, it best thing to do is to act swiftly to reduce possible negative effects and optimize any probable benefit. Unplanned changes in a number of occasions can be transformed to useful advantage (Hurst 2008). However, for our situation this was a planned change which came about as a result of a deliberate effort by the new manger (change agent). It was a specific response to new manager’s perception of the performance gap- which was actual the difference between the actual and the desired state of affairs5. It was planned through the management first identifying the problem which was low productivity due to inexperienced and unskilled staff and cutting cost, hence they looked for a new manager who would do this by sending incompetent people home, and training some and hiring new and skilled employees. Several planned changes can be viewed as attempts projected to deal with performance discrepancies in ways that benefits a company and its employees. 3.5 Effectiveness of the Change Intervention Change intervention was effective because it eliminated the incompetent and inexperienced workforce and brought it skilled and competent employees under new leadership of strict manager hence improving the performance of the Solar Hud to where it was initially. The intervention came at a better time otherwise the company could have shut down due to incompetent management (Adebanjo 2010). 4. Conclusion Organizational change takes place when an organization effects a transition from its existing state to their desire state. Organizational change management is a process of implementing and planning change in companies in a way so as to reduce cost to the company and employee resistance, whereas optimizing the effectiveness of the change determination. The company attained it objective of culture change, productivity and growth, nevertheless a lot of employees were lost during this process and it appeared that a lot of preparation and planning were never in place. It is not apparent as to be lack of communication, planning or the utilization of external consultant could have resulted to the radical change. One possible assumption could be as a result of budgetary constraints since the organization has been incurring losses since it was established, and this year it reported a loss of over a hundred million. Besides successful strategies for change management that were applied by the agent of change, particularly strategies moves of getting competent employees adopted by new manager, as well as other approaches were found that could benefit the company to effectively handle change in the future. 5. Recommendations Cultural change can take several years, nonetheless effective cultural change approaches can be adopted to reduce the timeframe. One such approach is explained by Oakland and Tanner, where they argue that it is critical to align the culture to back-up the intended change in employees’ behavior. For instance, Solar Hud required a customer skilled, competent and professional culture that required employee to develop their behavior and professional skills. This could be achieved by all units undertaking complete training program developed to improve awareness in communication, having a lot of emphasis of empathy and questioning (Bateman, Thomas and Carl 2009). Finally as managers if we intend to have our companies grow into greater heights then we need to have experienced and skilled employees, and have them continue learning and improving their skills. Bibliography Adebanjo, Dotun. "Corporate Restructuring: Managing the Change Problem from Within." Leadership and Organization Development Journal. 2010. Austin, Mary Ruth. "Managing Change." Manage. August 2011. Bateman, Thomas S., and Carl P. Zeithaml. Management: Function and Strategy. Homewood, IL: Irwin, 2009. Hurst, David K. "When It Comes to Real Change, Too Much Objectivity May Be Fatal to the Process." Strategy and Leader-ship. March-April 2008. Maurer, Rick. "Transforming Resistance." HR Focus. October 2011. McCallum, John S. "The Face Behind Change." Ivey Business Quarterly. Winter 2009. Recardo, Ronald J. "Overcoming Resistance to Change." National Productivity Review. Spring 2009. Schwartz, Andrew E. "Eight Guidelines for Managing Change." Supervisory Management. July 2008. Trahant, Bill, W. Warner Burke, and Richard Koonce. "Twelve Principles of Organizational Transformation." Management Review. September 2011. Wallington, Patricia M. "Making Change." CIO. April 1, 2012. Oakland, J. S., & Tanner, S. Successful change management. Total Quality Management, 18 (1-2), 1-19. 2011. Burnes, B. Managing Change, Fifth edition, Pearson Education Limited.2009. Read More