Question

Do you believe that employers should seek the employee's perspective before making a drastic change within the organization? Please explain why you feel this way and share a source from an article that discusses companies making a drastic change.

Answer 1

In my views, the greatest challenge in operationalizing strategy across various business functions or the overall company depends on the way the overall workforce perceives the strategy or change. Usually it has been seen that employees in major organizations hesitate to embrace any kind of change – a change in strategy, policy or framework. This is so because the employees get scared of their job security and stability as well as they are apprehensive about the ways in which they will tackle the change.

To bring about the any kind of change in the organization, the manager needs to involve all employee in the change process. The manager needs to align the thought process of the employees with the objectives of the transition process. The workforce of the company serve as the primary barriers to the change process. Hence their involvement in the change strategy is quite imperative. Their inclusion and involvement in every stage of the change process will help in making the change successful for the company. The top executives and management of the company will be required to develop the change objectives and strategy, the ground -level employees will be required to execute the change. The middle managers act as the link between the other 2 groups and assist in the execution and monitoring of the change process.

Some of the strategies, which can be used by the manager to overcome the employee resistance and facilitate the strategy change process are

• The objectives and goals of the transformational change must be very clear
• All the stakeholders must have clarity about the objectives, features and benefits of the change process
• A dedicated change management team must be selected for executing the change process, which must have members of all employee groups. These members will act as change agents
• The available resource must be evaluated effectively so as to determine their usage in the change process
• The leader and the change agents must address all inhibitions of the stakeholders
• Comprehensive risk assessment of the change process must be conducted, so as to Identify the potential barriers to the change
• The change management plan must be formulated in a way to address each identified barrier

Some of the change management tools, which can be used by the manager and the employees, to keep track of the transition change status in processes and systems for accommodating the new strategy, are:

• Force Field Analysis
• Flowcharting
• Kotter’s 8 Step Change Model
• Gantt Charts
• Lewin’s Change Model