Part B
As it is mentioned in Part A of the assignment, the communication of organizational change in Twitter is going to be communicated through the delivery of oral presentations, supported by visual data, such as diagrams and slides with the most important statements. Firstly, the change manager in charge with conducting the organizational change will deliver oral presentation to the head of departments, emphasizing the need for change and engaging employees into change-related communication. Thereafter, using the script of oral presentation by the change manager, head of company’s departments will supplement it with factual data, concerning particular departments of the company and deliver the presentation to employees. According to Walker (2014), the process of preparation to delivering the presentation will include five main stages, namely planning and organizing, developing the content, designing key visual aids, practicing the delivery and delivering the presentation (p.189). In the process of preparation it is useful to develop the script of the presentation first. The script of the oral presentation by the change manager looks as follows:
“Dear ladies and gentlemen,
Thank you for coming today and your readiness to participate in developing the change for Twitter. You may claim: “Twitter functions well. Millions of users visit the website every day, and it serves as a tool for many popular people, including political leaders, singers and famous actors. Furthermore, advertisements in Twitter help advertisers catch the attention of many users, targeting them according to their age, gender and areas of interests. However, we need to remember that Twitter functions in highly competitive environment, and both its survival and remaining at the certain level of profitability. Thus, Twitter needs to develop new products and interfaces on permanent basis, so that users keep engaged with Twitter and it continues to play a significant role in their daily lives. Reaching this aim requires thorough efforts and well-matched cooperation between all the departments of the company. However, as far as it is being reported by almost all the departments, recent changes of the company’s organizational structure resulted in the excessive growth of the company’s organizational chart and departments’ failure to get to cooperate. Let me remind you that initially the company aimed at breaking into a significant number of departments with various leaders, so that different functions can be performed independently and daily activities do not require excessive communication. Despite viability and popularity of this model of the company’s functioning, in the case of Twitter the roles have soon got confused. Thus, nowadays the company experiences the lack of centralization and hierarchy as too many people tend to report the information to the company’s CEO without discussing the ideas among themselves and elaborating on common solutions to the issues. This situation has exerts negative impact on the effectiveness of the company’s performance and can be viewed as a potential threat for the company’s further success.
What can be done to cope with the issue under study? Firstly, the need for change needs to be discussed internally in each of the departments, so that we can get more aware about the concerns, experienced by each department, and general vision of the new organizational chart for the company. Secondly, the visions and ideas will be synthesized, and the common plan for making the organizational structure of Twitter adherent to current and developmental needs of the company. Finally, the plan will be once more discussed with Twitter managers and staff, and the implementation will begin. At the planning stage of the change, let me suggest that each head of the department conducts the presentation of the need for change in Twitter and gathers employees’ concerns related to the current state of the organization of the company and cooperation between different departments and the ideas for the future. Let us also establish the tow-month preparation-for-change term, so that both managers and staff have the opportunity to brainstorm concerns and ideas, as well as present them to me. I believe that uniting our efforts and expertise will help us identify all the issues Twitter currently encounters and develop viable solutions to them. Thank you for your attention. If you have any questions and commentaries, I will be happy to address them right now”.
C) Analysis of communications is a core part of the work of change managers and specialists, who deal with communications. Seeing the way the reality is constructed in a particular communication and its effect on the stakeholders is likely to help managers develop effective communication strategies, taking into account the peculiarities of different stakeholders (Stocchetti&Kukkonen, 2011, pp.21-22) As it was mentioned above, the main tool to communicate the change in Twitter to its employees was conducting oral presentations that used visual aids.
Two-level organization of oral presentation allowed to spread the need for change-related information among all the employees in the company. The fact that each of the departments’ head contributed to the creation of a presentation for his/her department helped to make the approach informal and substantiated by facts and examples, stemming from departments’ daily activities. As staff members were kindly asked to contribute to the process of potential change design, they are likely to become engaged into this process and actively participate in it.
Ensuring of proper engagement of staff members from different departments can help realize two important purposes of communicating the change to the staff. Firstly, it will help to raise concerns and ideas that will be used during the formation of the change plan. Secondly, engagement of employees and their direct participation in the preparation for change will help management avoid resistance to change that is one of most common issues, encountered by change managers in the process of change plan implementation.
However, the type of communication, chosen for making the staff aware about the change, still has some drawbacks. Firstly, the oral presentation does not provide the opportunity for effective follow-ups and launching the space for discussion of concerns and ideas among employees. Secondly, there is no unified mechanism of getting the feedback from the staff. Taking into account the above-mentioned drawbacks of oral presentation as a communication tool in change management, I would like to recommend Twitter change managers to establish web-based platform for exchanging ideas about the change and sharing relevant documents. Furthermore, it can be offered that the employees get the opportunity to track the change process through an electronic resource, comment on intermediary results of its implementation and share related concerns. Particularly these mechanisms can help ensure non-formal involvement of employees in the process of change management and fully avoid resistance to change as a process that cannot be influenced by staff.
References
Stocchetti, M., Kukkonen, K. (2011). Critical media analysis: an introduction for media professionals. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang
Walker, R. (2014). Strategic management communication for leaders. Mason: Cengage Learning
