Air New Zealand Limited

The report has considered Air New Zealand as the focus organization to understand the essential implications of change concerning various large organizations. The purpose of the report is to find how Airline Company Air New Zealand tackles the various drivers for change. Subsequently, the potential impact of change drivers on the company and the effective strategies the organization has taken to tackle the risks are discussed. The key points that are focused in the report are findings and analysis of change driving forces, impact of change on the organization and plans devised by the organization to tackle negative effects of change.

Air New Zealand limited is one of the largest Airline Company in the New Zealand and also serves as the flag carrier airline of the company. It provides transport services to 31 international and 20 domestic destinations (Air New Zealand, 2019).

The nature of Change

The changes that have affected Air New Zealand have been made necessary due to the increased need for technological up gradation. The need for better management of the large number of subsidiary companies of the organization along with the fleet of 113 aircrafts made it necessary that important decisions were made. The most significant decision that was taken in regards to change in the organization was the creation of the new role of the chief digital officer. The designation was given to Avi Golan, a person with significant experience in the field of digital technology due to his long association with the Silicon Valley. 

The Triggers of change

As mentioned earlier the most important trigger for such a change was the constant internal requirement to optimize the internal processes. The decision was made on the basis of the rapidly growing business function of the organization. Air New Zealand currently has a fleet size of 113 planes including the wholly owned subsidiaries. It is one of the largest service providers in the country offering services to 31 international and 20 domestic locations. The company also has 30 Airbus A320 and it has two Airbus A321neo. Moreover, it has eight Boeing 777-300ER and 13 highly sophisticated Boeing 787-9 (Air New Zealand, 2019). It became much difficult for the ICT team to sustain its important functions after Julia Raue left the organization. It was reviewed that the new role required the functional capabilities of the digital teams to be increased. Hence, the new role of the Digital head was created. The role of the team and the chief digital officer will be to manage multifunctional divisions of the organization. The digital team was also re-structured to enable the provision of better customer service. The main triggers were for better management of the increasingly digitized functions of the organization.

Changes in Air New Zealand

Brief justification of the decisions

The decision of the organizations were justifiable because in the recent years Air New Zealand have seen expansion in business. However, at the same time revenue and expenses were decreasing and required immediate attention. One significant area was the IT oriented functions of the organization. Moreover, there was a significant need to optimize the digital technology of Air New Zealand. This was the reason behind recruiting a new chief digital officer. Moreover, some of the other decisions that were made was the creation of the digital portfolio in order to combine the skills, strategies, knowledge and innovation that were focused towards complete digital transformation (Carnall, 2018). It was greatly required from the perspectives of the company. The recruitment of the chief digital officer would bring in more efficiency with regards to the digital process functions. The chief digital officer selected was Avi Golan, a person with significant expertise in digital aspects due to his association with the Silicon Valley (Air New Zealand appoints digital chief, 2019). Hence, apart from managerial expertise to lead the team the person will also have technological expertise. This subsequently helps much in the formation of the operations development plan. 

Two change drivers considering Lewin’s Force Field model

Lewin’s force field models considers the equilibrium of the status quo of a company by considering the present state or desired state of an organization in the middle of driving forces and restraining forces. The focus is towards maximizing the driving forces so that positive change can take place. The two significant change drivers in the process were customer satisfaction and technology optimization. It is important to note that Air New Zealand was fast developing with regard to the size and scope of its business. The large number of services that were offered to the customers made it necessary that the company took effective measures to sustain them. It became important that customer service is prioritized. This made it very important that the technology was optimized in order to provide better support to the increasing customer base (Hornstein, 2015). Moreover, optimal development of the technological resources was necessary for enhancing the performance prospects of the operations of the organization. The company was in need for effective leadership in the digital front. The requirement for the digital transformation of the employees was a significant driver. Hence, a person like Avi Golan was much required to lead a dedicated team that could both enhance the performance of the operations and optimize the digital resources that directly helped in the effective maintenance of customer service (Air New Zealand, 2019). The organization always focused on the fact that the organization required a dedicated leader to lead the digital processes at an executive level. Digital requirements were concerning the enhancement of the internal operational processes and the up gradation of the processes of customer service and interactions. Technology was thus required to be optimized to help in both the internal and external processes that were key to the long term survival of the organization.

Lewin’s Force Field Model: Drivers and Restraining Factors of Change

Two resistance factors considering Lewin’s Force Field model

Resistance factors are factors that can affect the implementation of the processes for change. Change is a long process and there can be significant issues that affect the progress of change. Keeping in line with the resistance model of Lewin, the two significant resistance factors were employee satisfaction and time factor (Cummings, Bridgman & Brown, 2016). Employees were dissatisfied due to the great pressure they faced while the change processes took place (Holloway, Romme & Demerouti, 2018). Additionally, as an entire department was needed to be re-structured the time factor that affected the process was also a key resistance. The resistance factors greatly threatened to limit the timely effectiveness of the changes. 

Potential causes of resistance

The potential cause for employee dissatisfaction was the amount of changes that were being made. The existing ICT technologies that the employees were familiar with were changed to new technologies of which the employees had limited expertise. The older employees naturally were dissatisfied as the newer technology implementations were difficult for them to understand. The large amount of time that was required was due to the many change processes that needed to be implemented at the same time. Hence, it was to require a long time if the processes and structures were not changed through effective planning. The risk factor was that by the time the changes are implemented the organization could already have incurred losses.

The negative impact of the change that can be highlighted concerning the case are employee churn and ineffective application of digital leadership. In the first case the employees can be dissatisfied with the long and hard change process to such an extent that they decide to leave the organization. In the second case if the change process takes too long then the organization might not be able to reap significant benefits from the change process. These negative impacts could be very harmful for the organization. The first one can drastically bring down the performance of the organization due to reduced workforce. The second negative factor can greatly render the effects of the change management negligible for the company.

In order to tackle the negative factors two essential ways are effective planning and management and good communication (Holloway, Romme & Demerouti, 2018). In the first case it is important that a dedicated team manages the creation and structuring of the processes associated with the digital enhancement of the functions of the organization. The chief digital officer needs to be made a significant stakeholder in this process. This will make sure that the operations and implementations are done in ways that can positively create an environment of trust. The teams that will be affected by the change can be properly coordinated and pre-informed. It is important that a large number of effective leaders oversee the entirety of the process. Secondly, there is a great need for teams to be made aware of the process changes and the new aspects that will came into being as a result of the changes that will be implemented. Hence, the teams, the leaderships and all other important stakeholders that will be affected due to the processes need to be effectively communicated with. 

Resistance to Change in Air New Zealand

An important factor is the management of the resistance to change. The identified issues are employee dissatisfaction and excessive time taken for the changes to be implemented. In case of the first resistance, better employee management need to be implemented. The employees need to be provided better incentives and communicated effectively stating the benefits they can receive from the change. In case of the large amount of time that can jeopardize the change implementation, it is better if detailed progress paths can be created. Thus, the progress paths can help to achieve significant goals in convenient amount of time.

Conclusion

It can be said that from the essential evaluation of the change management processes it is clear that the most important things to manage will be employees and time factor. Firstly, the employees need to be satisfied to a certain extent in order to accept the change process that takes place. This will enable the better implementation of the changes. Secondly, time management is also an important factor that can govern the effectiveness of the change process. Some of the improvement were increasing the number of group sessions to improve binding of the employees. Other important steps were to re-structure the process for enabling better time management. It becomes much important that the stakeholders are essentially managed towards improving the effectiveness of change. Air New Zealand have significantly managed the change processes and have been able to successfully implement many of the proposed changes. 

References

Air New Zealand (2019). Retrieved from https://www.airnewzealand.com/

Air New Zealand appoints digital chief. (2019). Retrieved from https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11554172

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