Introduction
Some years ago, I worked in a company that specialized in online retailing in the sphere of electronics. The success of the company depended on the appropriate work of its web resources, the official website, the intranet, as well as on an efficient marketing strategy and advertising. I worked in the marketing department and participated in the promotion of the organization’s website to attract more consumers. I should state that I did not play an active role in developing a change process, but I needed to adapt to it like other employees in the organization.
Main body
Having analyzed the strategies of our competitors in the market, company leaders decided to implement the change with a focus on improving the technological base for websites, servers, customer relationship management systems, and other resources. Thus, the circumstances that directly led to the change included alterations in the market in terms of adopting new information technologies and resources for online retail businesses to increase their profitability and competitiveness.
The goal of this change was to improve consumers’ experiences when searching on our website, ordering, making secure payments, as well as employees’ experiences in processing orders and monitoring consumers’ activities on the website. As a result, it was necessary to change the overall IT base for this business without stopping sales or closing the website for a long period of time.
During the process of implementing the change, organizational leaders seemed to follow Lewin’s Change Management Model. This model includes unfreezing, changing, and refreezing stages, during which managers prepare people for the change, implement it and return to stability (Al-Haddad & Kotnour, 2015; Hayes, 2018). In the company under analysis, leaders paid much attention to preparing the technological base for implementing the change at the unfreezing stage, but they did not prepare employees for working with new systems.
The need for the change was explained, employees were motivated, but they faced a lack of training on how to operate new systems before moving to the stage of the change. As a result of failing to provide employees with appropriate training and support, the change stage was prolonged and complicated. Employees demonstrated the inability to work effectively using new systems, and customer satisfaction decreased. The company’s rating in professional websites and in the market began to decrease.
When I left the organization, it seemed that leaders did not reach the refreezing stage to stabilize all the processes. The company succeeded in sharing the vision and the need for the change and preparing the change implementation in terms of required resources and technologies (Cummings, Bridgman, & Brown, 2016). However, the failures in the work of organizational leaders were associated with their inability to provide employees with the required training in order to guarantee their effective work with new systems (Cameron & Green, 2015). It seems that leaders chose to invest in technological resources rather than human ones, but this decision led to prolonging the overall change process and affecting the customer base negatively.
Conclusion
It is possible to conclude this discussion with a focus on providing recommendations for improvement. Organizational leaders could achieve success in implementing the change when following all of Lewin’s stages strictly. It was necessary to ensure that employees were offered appropriate training and education in order to work effectively in the situation of a changing working environment. As a result of the lack of training, employees needed to learn all the important details of operating new systems during the change process, resulting in the prolongation of this stage and negative outcomes. It was required to move to the change stage only after the effective completion of the preparatory unfreezing phase.
References
Al-Haddad, S., & Kotnour, T. (2015). Integrating the organizational change literature: A model for successful change. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 28(2), 234-262.
Cameron, E., & Green, M. (2015). Making sense of change management: A complete guide to the models, tools and techniques of organizational change (4th ed.). Philadelphia, PA: Kogan Page.
Cummings, S., Bridgman, T., & Brown, K. G. (2016). Unfreezing change as three steps: Rethinking Kurt Lewin’s legacy for change management. Human Relations, 69(1), 33-60.
Hayes, J. (2018). The theory and practice of change management (5th ed.). London, UK: Palgrave.