The Management of ASDA - Essay Example

Customers tend to prefer those retail stores which serve them quickly.

Although ASDA is one of the largest UK retail organizations, research has revealed that customers have to wait longer at ASDA as compared to Waitrose and Sainsbury (Mirror, 2006). ASDA is the third number in the UK retail industry based on customer waiting time. This situation is a serious issue for any retail organization.

The management of ASDA should take considerable measures to reduce customer waiting time and to make sure that the company has the lowest possible customer waiting time in the UK retail industry. For this purpose, the management has to change some of the working standards and procedures and along with this has to incorporate new technologies. This change is important to provide the customers with a valuable shopping experience and make sure that there is high customer satisfaction. This, in turn, will facilitate the organization in the process of attracting more customers and retaining the current ones, thus increasing the customer base.

To incorporate this change it is first important to measure the current performance, set new standards for the performance, and compare the current performance with the new standards. For this reason, the management of ASDA has to first measure the current queuing time and set the new queuing time.

The management of ASDA should follow the eight steps of change management proposed by Kotter (2007), which are as follows:

1. To establish a sense of urgency
2. To form a powerful guiding coalition
3. To create a vision
4. To communicate the vision
5. To empower others to act on the vision
6. To plan for and create short-term wins
7. To consolidate improvements and produce still more change
8. To institutionalize new approaches

The management of ASDA has to first communicate to the employees the importance of this decision and the implications for the whole organization. Secondly, the organization will have to identify and formulate a group of people who can lead the change process. Their organization will have to come up with a proper vision which should be communicated to the employees and the employees should have the required empowerment to take the necessary steps. The organization will have to create short-term milestones and wins and work on required improvements. Apart from this, the organization should enforce a system of proper control and monitoring for continuous improvement.

Several internal and external factors will either support the change or resist the change. The needs organization to incorporate the appropriate change management strategies to minimize the negative forces and enhance the positive forces (Markovic, 2008). One major element in the process of change management is regarding the management of resistance. Most of the changes or transformation fails because of the increasing resistance (Atkinson, 2005). The organization needs to manage the resistance effectively and efficiently. In this particular case, the high resistance will be from the employees of the retail organization. To reduce the resistance on the part of the employees, the management of the organization should involve them in the process and implement the method of participatory communication (Russ, 2008).