Proper management of an organization requires effective communication platforms across all sectors and departments. The flow of information is an essential tool in ensuring that a manager succeeds at their duty and in the process ensures that the company gets to grow. The primary role of a manager is to create an environment that encourages change and innovation for the employees. The growing customer base requires an urgent implementation of an automated customer service that will allow customers to input their orders. This will be a great way of addressing the issue of employees being overwhelmed by the increased pace of the workplace. The first step in implementing the change at the company will be ensuring that the employees and the entire organization are aware of the urgency that is required in implementing the change.
For the employees, the overwhelming work of serving the customers creates the impetus for urgency. For the management team, on the other hand, the loss of customers and the reduction in profit margins as a result of the poor customer experiences will create the motivation for making the shift to an automated customer service system. The second aspect is creating a committee or team that will play the role of overseeing the change process (Kotter, 1996). The team will be tasked with developing changes, eliminating obstacles and ensuring that the change process is as smooth as possible. For the change to be successful and as fast as possible, there is the need to ensure that a vision for the change is created.
The vision in this case is to ensure a better shopping experience for the customers by guaranteeing that their waiting time in drastically reduced. It is also important to have a strategy at hand that will allow for a systematic approach to the automation process. Once the vision and strategy have been developed at the management level, the entire workforce has to be notified of the changes that are to be made. The communication allows for awareness and readiness for the entire organization. While the automation may be limited to serving customers, the benefits are to be felt within the entire organization (Kotter, 1996). This means that the entire organization should focus on ensuring that the process is successful. To motivate workers and teams into sticking to the change process, there will be a need to generate short terms wins such as automating single stores or departments at a time. Once the departmental automation has been effected, there will be a need to integrate all the automated departments for the overall change to be noted (Kotter, 1996).
Over time, the systematic changes will morph into organization-wide progress and automation will soon be implemented within the entire organization. Once automation has been completed, it is important to reinforce it as a culture of the organization by creating a direct link between automation and organizational growth and success (Kotter, 1996). The major challenge that Dalman and Lei face is in passing across their message for the managers to understand the urgency that is required in implementing the change. While the email may be an easy way of reaching out to the managers, expressing the message is going to be a hard task. The other major challenge that arises in regards to checking comprehension of the message that needs to be passed across (Blundel, 2004). Filtration is another great pitfall that Dalman and Lei have to deal with. Explaining the need for automation may not be well understood by the managers in which case they might choose to ignore the message or not accord it the attention it requires.
References
Blundel, R. (2004). Effective organisational communication: Perspectives, principles and practices. Harlow [u.a.: Financial Times/Prentice Hall.
Kotter, J. P. (1996). Leading change. Harvard Business Press.
