Identification of the main issues

Discuss about the Changing Organizational Culture Change Work.

Changes in an industry are the only continuous process that one can expect while setting the goals and objectives of the organization thriving in that industry sector. Express Link courier has been a renowned company in the courier service which is facing serious threats in the recent years mainly because of the ever-changing demands of the consumer base. In order to keep up with the demands of the consumers, the company has been struggling with the different strategies they are trying to implement. However all of them are going in vain. Moreover, the rising competition among the increasing number of courier services due to introduction of various new features is thereby resulting in high loss of the organization. Therefore, the assignment would mainly focus on the the main issue that is resulting in the failure of the strategies and subsequently huge loss to the organization.

On thorough research, it was found that the previous years have been very critical for the Express link courier Service. This is mainly because many of the competitive organizations have come up with a number of different features like same day delivery which have attracted attention of a large number of consumers of the service. Not only this, the other organizations have also provided a number of interesting features where even one can fix the date and timing according to the demand and wishes of the customers. Therefore, Express link courier had lagged behind mainly due to the absence of introduction of similar schemes. The company strategists have thereby analyzed the entire issues and had come up with many schemes that would have attracted the customers like same day delivery, discounts of booking within specific hours, early bird offers and others. However, introduction of these offers also have not helped with the financial profit of the organization. On researches done by experts it was found that the workers were not being able to adjust themselves with the new changes that had been implemented. The workers were found to be having illusions about their new roles. The roles of the workers were not clearly stated by their seniors who led to the establishment of the confusion. Even the seniors fail to create a proper planning of able leadership among the team members for which a total state of pandemonium existed among the various team members. This led to failures in collaborative approaches and complete commotion in the implementation of correct strategized plan in the work field. A model that can be used by the experts to overcome the issues associated with the new changes in the organizations is the ADKAR model that will help to clarify the issues faced by the organization (Hayes, 2014).

ADKAR model

The model was mainly created by the Prosci founder Jeff Hiatt where he gave a tool to identify the changes along with the concept of properly handling the issues. This is mainly helpful as it provides a simple easy to use framework that every worker in the environment can understand and think about the changes (Waddell et al., 2013). ADKAR is useful in outlining changes to each and every individual rather than as a whole team. This is mainly because when each person in a team adapts to the change, it will be automatically reflected in the team work (Hornstein, 2015).

AWARENESS: The individuals must first be aware of the reasons for which the changes have occurred in the organizational processes (Macaya, Crawford & Soto, 2016). Awareness will mainly act as the goal or the outcome of the early communications that are intricately associated with organizational changes. In this above mentioned scenario, the individuals would try to research about the main causes that had resulted in changes and besides the company authority should also be responsible for establishment of the proper communication of the awareness.

Desire: The individuals should desire from his own instinct to engage and participate in the change and bring out the most successful outcomes from it. Desire here can be defined as the goal or outcome of the sponsorship and the resistance management (Pollack, 2016). In the mentioned case, the individuals should have the desire to come forward and accept the challenges that they have to undertake in order to accommodate with the present changes so that the newly set objectives could be achieved.

Knowledge: This tool will help the individual to understand the requirements and develop knowledge to overcome the issues that are occurring because of the newly implemented changes. Knowledge here is mainly defined as the outcome that comes from the goal or the outcome of the training (Welch, Sinha & Ward, 2016). In this scenario the external change experts would guide the leaders of the organization about the approach that they should uptake to instill the knowledge among the workers. This would help them to cope with the new environment of changes and also help them to apply their own skills to meet the demands of the organization.

Ability: Ability is the feature of this framework that helps in realization or proper implementation of the changes in order to achieve the required performance level. This can be defined as the goal and outcome of the additional coaching, practice and time (Worley & Mohrman, 2015). In the present scenario, the authority must ensure that the training and coaching of the workers are done to such an extent that their knowledge does not get limited to knowing only, but they should also develop the courage and the ability to implement the knowledge in the field so that the objectives set up due to the arrival of the new schemes and associated changes in the environment.

Recommendation

Reinforcement: This tool of the framework helps the individual to be assured so that the alterations that he had brought into his working way help to adjust him in the new environment. This should be done in such a way so that the effect sticks to the aim and ultimately help the organization to adapt itself successfully to the organization (Kazmi & Naarananoja, 2014). This is done through proper measurement, corrective action and recognition of the successful changes.

The goals that are set up by the ADKAR are sequential and also cumulative which will in turn help in the achievement of the successful implementation of effective and sustainable changes that would take place.

The Express Link Courier organization has a very dedicating workforce. Besides wanting their best for the organizations, they also believe in working together as team. They strongly believe that collaborative approach helps in attaining goals at a much faster rate than working singly. This feature of unity among the team members can be utilized as a weapon to overcome the issue of abrupt organizational change. By understanding the background and the activities that one should undertake after reading the ADKAR model, they should engage themselves in effective meetings and conferences where they would help each other in understanding the effects of the changes and how this can be be overcome by effective collaborative work (Welch, Sinha & Ward, 2016). This would help them in understanding the weakness and strengths of each other’s and can perform their respective tasks effectively after discussing with their leaders.

Another very good feature that the organization already possesses is their modern innovative technology that is very important to carry on with the organization. However to make the business successful with the new changes, more recent technology has to be implemented and the employees have to adjust their working skills according to the new requirement. The employees have to be fast and rapid in handling their assignment so that the organization changes can be adjusted fast and the loss can be covered.

While measuring the progress, the expert has to look individually in each and every domain in order to get an overall idea about how the ADKAR process have helped the organization, its team and its every individual to progress in the serious crisis period of acute loss and organizational changes.

On an individual employee level the different tools that will help the experts to measure changes are adoption matrices, usage and utilization reports, compliance and adherence reports, proficiency measure, employee engagement and feedback, issue compliance and error logs, awareness and understanding the changes, employee readiness assessment results and employee satisfaction survey results (Grant, 2014).

Measurement of progress

Key milestones will mainly depend on the efficiency how each of the projects is being conducted. The measurement tools will include performance improvements, progress and adherence to planning, business and change readiness, project KPI measurements, benefit realization, speedy execution (Alvesson & Sveningsson, 2015).

Time management at every aspects of the set up time frame can be measured by tracking of the change management activities conducted according to plan training tests, effective measures, participation and attendance number within the set up time frame, communication deliveries and effectiveness within a set time frame can also give us idea about the progress made by the organization (Massingham, 2014).

I was appointed as the external change agent in order to tackle the issue that had remain associated with the various issues that are reported by the authorities of the organization named Express Link Courier. The company has faced losses due to the new trends of features that have been provided by the other competitive companies of the courier industry. The concerned company has thereby tried to implement a number of changes in their planning and have introduced a number of new schemes for the customers. They have also altered the reforms which were necessary in order to match up with the standards of its competitive companies. It also aimed to prepare a strong loyal customer base and also tried to implement the new working styles of every individual through then introduction of new software though technological modifications.

Different types of issues were observed by me when in was hired and given the responsibility to analyze the barriers that are causing hindrances in the implementation of the changes occurring in that area. I along with my team tried to analyze the different working grounds of the teams and the workers and realized a number of issues. These issues were believed to create obstructions while the workers wanted to adjust themselves with the changes. The hindrances were that the roles of the different workers and team members of different designations were not clear about their roles in the newly implemented systems. Besides confusion with the new roles, the workers were not skilled enough to handle the new softwares that were instilled in the company to keep up with the new schemes. Therefore the workers were losing self confidence and were losing their interest in their work. Moreover the seniors were disillusioned about how to tackle the entire situations as they were confused themselves about how to adapt to the new environment of the office place.

After being appointed as the external change agent, our team researched and found out the faults. We applied the ADKAR model which acted as a framework for building of a clearer understanding of the effects of the organizational changes. It also helped in the developing interventions that will help to adjust to the organizational changes in a way that would help in achieving the vision of the organizations. It was observed that the five components of the ADKAR model have not only helped to understand the various effects that had resulted in the organizational changes. It was seen that after the workers understood the causes for the implementation of the changes, they expressed their interest to participate together for adjusting themselves for the environment. They underwent training under their seniors who planned their respective assignment and successfully adjusted themselves to the new environment.  On measuring their progress over six months, I found that they working consistently and the company were seeing good profit levels as well. Therefore as an external change agent, I would recommend the usage of ADKAR models to help individuals assess themselves an suit up wth organizational change.

References:

Alvesson, M., & Sveningsson, S. (2015). Changing organizational culture: Cultural change work in progress. Routledge

Grant, A.M., (2014). The efficacy of executive coaching in times of organisational change. Journal of Change Management, 14(2), pp.258-280.

Hayes, J. (2014). The theory and practice of change management. Palgrave Macmillan.

Hornstein, H. A. (2015). The integration of project management and organizational change management is now a necessity. International Journal of Project Management, 33(2), 291-298.

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Pollack, J. (2016, December). The need for integration between organizational project management and change management. In Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (IEEM), 2016 IEEE International Conference on (pp. 1245-1249). IEEE.

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