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Change Model for Short-Term Change
The planned change is to set-up a website to sell-off long-standing inventory items. This change is small and specific and would involve only a small number of people. For this kind of scenario, the Action Research would be suitable (Weiss, 2016). It has been proven effective for planned change for small to medium-scale change interventions. It can allow implementers to immediately go into planning and implementation through data collection and analysis.
The project leader will also act as a change consultant to effect the implementation of the website. His first task is to identify impacts of the technology change on people and existing processes of related functions such as sales, marketing, IT, finance and office administration. He will collect data by research and interviews to include employees and suppliers. Part of the process is to solicit support for the change through information sharing. He will then produce a change plan to be approved by management.
Change Model for Long-Term Change
The vision is to transform the company’s operation from brick-and-mortar to e-commerce which would result in changes in organization, structure and culture. Effectively, the change would be a transformation on the nature of the company. Tracking the long-term transformation process should also involve on how the external environment would interact with the “new” company. External stakeholders like the customer, suppliers and government should be engaged to identify changes that can trigger towards the company.
For the above purpose, the best change model would be a combination of the Macro-Level External Forces of Change (MLEFC) and Lewin’s Force-Field Analysis (LFFA) (Weiss, 2016). MLEFC would respond to the transformed company by creating forces which the company has to deal with. Resistance to these forces would then require further change management within the company’s internal environment. This process would persist until both company’s external and internal environments have achieved a stable co-existence.
Rationale of the Decision
With the rate of shrinking sales, the company only has a year to turnaround the situation. The bottom-line issue is that the market interest is waning on the company’s products. There needs to be a revitalized marketing effort to revive and create new appeals. The immediate reaction would be to launch marketing campaigns using traditional media and to expand the sales force but both of these would be both expensive and would take more than a year to implement and for full effects to take hold.
As an alternative marketing and sales approach, e-commerce offers the most cost-effective and widest means to reach the market. It does not promise to cover all of the market or to be as effective as store sales people in bringing in sales but would be the best option if time-to-market is a critical factor. Also, the business is simple product sales and plain information would be enough for much of the market instead of face-to-face persuasion.
Effect of Changes
Effect on Employees
There will be effects on work and morale on employees. Marketing would need to understand deeply e-commerce and how it can complement its current marketing practices. This would also be an opportunity to extend into social media to complement its new presence on the web. This new learning should be invigorating and would uplift morale. Sales would also need to understand the complementation and leverage on the new richer channel of information for customers. The sales process would be shortened with the availability of complete information for the presentation and objection phases.
The work of IT would be two-fold: technical implementation and direct support to marketing. This will be a new area of expertise for IT and would have the same motivating effects as that of marketing. It would also need to work closely with marketing to apply web search techniques to market the products on the internet.
The long-term effect would be the downsizing of sales and marketing and eventual elimination of sales. Sooner or later, they would see the trend and demoralisation would lowly set in. Affected employees would be making plans to leave the company.
Effect on Managers
Managers also need to understand the basics of e-commerce if their employees will be involved whom they would eventually be supervising. This would be an additional area of work for IT managers in terms of new competencies and facilities. Marketing and customer service have to create new positions or responsibilities that will be related on the website. With much of the information about the company and products already on the website, all managers are expected to be knowledgeable about the company. The company would slowly take on a new identity as an e-commerce company. Managers should be able to explain these to their staff. HR managers will explain these to job applicants.
With the slow downsizing, managers have to manage the morale of staff. The psychological impact will be real (MacDonald, n.d.) and they should be sensitive to this concern of employees. They should work with HR to provide the best response.
Effect on Executives
The change will be a gradual transformation of the business model of the company from a traditional bricks-and-mortar operation to one using e-commerce. The organizational re-structure will see the phasing out of field sales and the creation of telesales and online sales. In exchange of less manpower, more resources would be added for warehousing, distribution, logistics and IT. Internally, the most important effect would be the need to maintain overall stability amidst growing reactions to the slow downsizing.
There will be new external concerns like the market reaction to the new business model, new regulatory requirements for e-commerce and data security. They would find the business easier to manage with less people and the elimination of distribution layers or middlemen (Kumar, 2016).
Conclusion
The change is at the enterprise level and would have the negative effect of downsizing down the road. In the short term, the benefits are mostly positive leading to new knowledge. Change management would be straightforward using the Action Research. Employees would undergo career changes in or outside the company. Management must look at the external environment who will present more forces that will again induce the company to change.
References
Weiss, J.W. (2016). Organizational Change (2nd ed.). San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint Education, Inc.
Kumar, R. (2016, February 8). Reasons How E-commerce has changed the Business Style of Small Business Owners. Retrieved January 27, 2016 from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/7-reasons-how-e-commerce-has-changed-business-style-small-rohit-kumar
MacDonald, L. (n.d.). The Positive and Negative Effects of Downsizing on Departing Employees. Retrieved January 27, 2016 from http://smallbusiness.chron.com/positive-negative-effects-downsizing-departing-employees-34813.html
