Question
Your employer has been going through many challenges this past eighteen months due to the recent financial crises. There has been major challenges throughout the company including, high turnover, software applications being used are outdated, stress is increasing for those employees who have been staying around, and morale is at the lowest point ever for the company . The remaining executives are planning to do a re-organization of the jobs and responsibilities throughout the company. However, each time the executives want to implement the change; another batch of employees resigns. You have been asked by your supervisor to prepare an analysis of what the executive leaders must do. Present your findings as a 4 page report in a Word document formatted in APA style. At a minimum, your paper must:
Apply the best organizational development process skills the executives should use
Apply the change strategies within the short-term and long-term
Evaluate and present the impacts of the resources
Answer
Designing Intervention
Abstract
Just like individuals, the organization faces a crisis from time to time. Although sometimes it is hard and rare for an organization to admit that it needs some help, deep down in the minds and hearts of the top management they clearly know that they need help to solve their crisis. In business organizations, crisis management is practically unavoidable especially in the world today full of innovations and inventions that are leading to a high employee turnover and making old technology obsolete at a very fast pace. On other occasions, accidents in the workplace or acts of God such as flood can bring the crisis to an organization. However, what matters most is the management of the ongoing crisis in an organization. Designing an intervention project or program is the most viable option that an organization can take in order to manage a crisis. This paper seeks to elaborate the best way an organization can apply organizational development process skills to manage a crisis.
Question 1
Apply the best organizational development process skills the executives should use
To be in a position to solve the crisis, especially in our case, the executives need to come together as one and find the root cause of the employee turnover, the use of outdated application software and reason for the low morale among the employees. The organization development process is usually based on the research model that starts with the investigation to identify the problem or the need and desire for changes in an organization. Most of the cases a problem in an organization may seem to be straightforward and discreet. However, the case may change as more and more investigations are conducted to identify the root cause of the problem that is facing an organization (Chao-ming, 2007). As a result, the executives of the company need to develop and design tools, experiences, and environment that will help the organization to integrate the changes into their systems smoothly. Below are some of the skills that need to be implemented by the executives:
Co-designing
For an organization in business to achieve its goals and objectives, it requires more than on players who makes it possible for the organization to produce and manufacture goods and services and later distributes them to the target market. Thus, every stakeholder ranging from employees to management to suppliers to distributors hold a very important position in an organization. As a result, it is crucial for the executive to involve all stakeholders when planning and designing an intervention to save the company’s operation. Each group of stakeholder should be well represented during the designing process to ensuring they give their verdict in the new processes and to ensure that there is no group of stakeholders that remain with cold feet.
Shared vision
For a business organization to achieve its objective and goals, it must have a mission and vision. The vision of an organization helps to track the activities and actions of the organization and the employees of the company to work towards a single goal or objective. Thus, it is of great importance to try to align the goals and interest of the employees of the organization to those of the organization. Most are the times where employees are caught between self-interest and the interest of the organization. In such situation, the stakeholders should always be encouraged to put the interest of the organization first. Thus, the executive must ensure they have a shared vision with all stakeholders (Fleck, 2014).
Transformative empathy
One of the main causes of employee turnover and low morale in organizations is the stakeholder’s resistance to change. An organization may get into trouble if some of its stakeholders have trouble imagining things and operations being different than that they are used to. On another occasion, the executives of a company may decide to overhaul completely all organizations processes and culture which may anger some of the stakeholders. To successfully design an intervention program, the management needs first to talk to all stakeholders to get their views on the proposed new processes and make changes whenever necessary. Talking to them about the new processes or any changes in the workplace before they are implemented makes them physically, mentally and emotionally prepared for the coming wave of changes.
Question 2
Apply the change strategies within the short-term and long-term
Real and variable intervention activities and the program may take the time to implement and yield positive results. However, despite the time taken and the resources used in the process, the workers and the stakeholders in general adapt and accept the change along the way (Fleck, 2014). Primarily, there are four models that are used by organizations to implement changes in their operations. These strategies include:
- Empirical-rational – in this short-term strategy, the management assumes that human beings are rational, and they follow their self-interest until they are satisfied. As a result, to successfully implement change in an organization the management needs to talk to their staff about the coming wave of changes.
- Normative reeducative short-term strategy – human being is known to organize himself in social groups. As a result, he follows the norms, structure, and culture of the social group. To implement change, the executives need to redefine and reinterpret the existing values and norms of the organization.
- Power-coercive – this change strategy is seen as a long-term strategy, and the management assumes that the workforce is primarily complaint and will follow what they are asked to do. Thus, the management needs to stamp their authorities through issuing of directives.
- Environmental-adaptive strategy – it is a long-term strategy used by the organization to implement change as a human being is known to oppose loss and disruption but grandly accept new environment. As a result, the change should be based on building new organization culture and creating friendly working environment for all levels of employees.
Question 3
Evaluate and present the impacts of the resources
Resources of the organization determine the success or the failure of that organization. As a result, resources will highly impact the changes made to an organization in the following ways.
- The cost of change – if the estimated cost of change cannot be fully financed by the organization, it becomes very difficult for the organization to implement those changes and at times, they are not effectively implemented(Wolstencroft, 2013).
- A number of employees- an organization facing a high rate of employee turnover, may find it difficult to implement changes considering that employees do not stay long enough in the organization to fully implement the changes. Some of the methods used to keep employees in an organization include appropriate rewards, better working conditions and appropriate degree of freedom.
- Availability of machinery – with the current continuous and rampant changes in technology, it becomes difficult for an organization to implement innovations and invention in the information and technology sector if it cannot successfully purchase and adapt to the current technology in the market.
References
Chao-ming, W. Z. (2007). Managing strategies of constructing item designing changes [J]. Shanxi Architecture, 26,, 143.
Fleck, S. J. (2014). Designing Resistance Training Programs, 4E. Human Kinetics.
Wolstencroft, K. H. (2013). The Taverna workflow suite: designing and executing workflows of Web Services on the desktop, web or in the cloud. . Nucleic acids research, , gkt328.
