Organisational Change
In this globalised era, the organisations are attempting to make effective use of resources, gain operational efficiency, reduce cost, establish best practices, promote leadership, employee performance and become more responsive to changing needs of customer which aim to achieve desired business objectives. Business have realised the value of change management to sustain in competitive business environment.
Change management is a transformational process for existing system to a desired state of new process, behaviour or ideas to become responsible to deal with internal and external business landscape (Beerel, 2009). Thus, organisational change management is becoming the necessity for every business in order to make improvement in their business process and organisational culture activities.
The proper implementation of organisational change makes the organisation culture flexible and develops the healthy working environment (Cameron and Green, 2015). This practice encourages the individuals to achieve the organisational objectives and it also helps individual to attain personal growth and development.
However, managing change is a difficult and a lengthy undertaking due to internal resistance. The change process requires following a systematic order to help the transition from one state to desired state for efficiency and effectiveness of employee and employer. It is also the responsibility of an organisation to realize to the outcome of the change process on the workforce and overall organisation.
The primary aim of the report is to find the rationale for the process of change management in Walmart and to gain an understanding how the process of change management is carried out and what was the outcome of change management for the retail organisation. The report also identifies the challenges faced by the retailer in implementation of change process and ways to overcome these challenges.
The structure of the report begins with a short introduction to the case organisation, Walmart, followed by the change management process. This study is going to discuss about the reason of implementing the change management and the process of bringing the organisational change. Furthermore, study also discuss about the challenges that faced by the company while implementing the change management process.
Wal-Mart is the USA based leading retailer that deals in various product categories comprising of global and own brands founded in 1962 by Sam Walton. The company is operating around 6,800 stores worldwide. The mission statement of the giant retailer is to provide access to high quality of life to maximum individuals through its products by saving money.
The vision of the company is to become superlative retailer for customer and employee choice to reach top position in retailing industry. The Walmart is putting continuous effort to fulfil its vision and has achieved the company vision to a certain extent in recent years. In 2016, Walmart has achieved a sale of $374.5 billion (Walmart, 2016).
One of the success factors of the company is the exercise of change management as a core management strategy to make the organisation continue its adoption to efficient processes, technologies and enhance work performance of employees to ensure that the retail organisation is able to cope with external changer and sustain its leading position in the competitive retail industry.
Despite the success of the retail organisation and popularity in the industry, the huge size of Walmart poses several problems like workplace discrimination, ethical issue and data misuse. The union members form association for dignity in respect and to certain job protections.
However, in Walmart the employee demands respect and wage protection as the pricing pressure on different suppliers have an impact on wages of workers. Moreover, the leadership management at Walmart demands equal opportunities for male and female workforce.
The management practices and business model for the organisation had also been criticised due to poor customer service leading to high customer dissatisfaction from the stores (Forbes, 2016).
This indicates failure of management to bond with its customers. The organisation structure is more of bureaucratic nature so it is required for the retail organisation to manage the management to deal with issues like leadership, culture and workforce motivation.
The identification of change management is related to the adoption of novel technology and cultural training workforce along with a employing a well-structured in store system of customer service management. These factors directed the initiation of a process of cultural change across the organisation.
Organisational change management processes
The various processes in the organisational change management are Burke-Litwin change model, meta model, enneagram and balanced scorecard model.
The cause and effect relationship is defined and established by Burke-Litwin change model considering the organisational dimension required to bring desired change in performance by linking the performance with internal and external factors (Ceptureanu, 2015).
This model analyse the 12 organisational factors affecting performance to influence these factors to bring change (Martins and Coetzee, 2009). This model is used to describe organisational change in Walmart though identifying the cause-effect relationship within the 12 organisational dimensions.
In case of Walmart, the changes identified by the model are to reduce the workplace discrimination, improving employee relationship and reduce the cost implication for the implementation of change process.
The external factors were more dominant in stimulating the organisational change. This triggers the development of leadership to address the issue of workplace discrimination and to improve the employee relations within the retail organisation.
Another model to guide implement change is through meta-model with learning and change coordination. In each stage of this model, learning occurs in active progression to make the change effective (Young, 2009). Thus, the lessons that are identified in the process of change management become the learned lessons in the organisational culture inspired by behavioural norms.
It is a deductive change model that enhances learning moving from pre-change state to new normal change state is shown below. This model was used as a counselling based model to indentify the pre-change in the Walmart to identify the early signs to indicate the need for change and raise the concern to highlight the requirement of change management.
Enneagram of personality is model that is used for identify the personality type. This tool is used at the organisation. This model is based on the nine major element including reformer, helper, achiever, individualist, investigator, loyalist, enthusiast, challenger, and peacemaker.
This model is highly used in the business environment. The manager uses this tool to make aware the top management about process of workplace. This tool is also helpful for Wal-Mart in the change management. The change management process of the company faces the issue in the various context factors.
This model depicts that how the personalities change in the organisation. It defines the feature of the new personality in the organisation. The enneagram of personality types also assist in managing change at individual level. Sutton et al. (2013) mentions enneagram is an effective tool to transform relationship and foster personal development in business.
The model specifies the distinctive pattern of individual actions, thoughts, perceptions and feelings through nine personality types as illustrated in below figure. The enneagram model highlights the different personality types for accessing behavioural change and motivation to drive change in an individual (Yilmaz et al., 2014).
Another popular method implemented by organisation today is balanced scorecard to implement the change process by translating strategies into operational outcomes to derive behavioural changes and improved performances (Chavan, 2009).
The balance scorecard methodology tracks the effectiveness of strategy implementation by an organisation to follow strategic performance. This method identify strategic areas of organisation, set objectives, choose leading or lagging performance measure to identify level of performance and improvement required and action plan is designed to accomplish the desired objectives (Grigoroudis et al., 2012).
The change management process of Walmart is a process which is adopted and implemented by an organization in its culture to overcome the challenges and changes in an effective manner.
The process of balanced scorecard method in Walmart includes understanding the retail organisation vision to develop consent towards the organisation strategy and expressing the concerns to the operational level. The next step is to create proper communication channel and bond with different business units.
According to Cornelissen and Cornelissen (2017), a proper communication strategy links the business goals with the individual goals. This method also employs planning of business to assist the Walmart to incorporate business objectives and individual development goals with financial objectives.
The learning activity and feedback mechanism help the retail organisation to make necessary changes in the business strategy.
Challenges faced in the change management process
The retail organisation faced many political challenges such as workplace discrimination leading to conflicts, planning of change process, leadership challenges, communication, lack of consensus, resistance from employee in the process of change management.
The planning of change management was a complex task due to high cost involved in implementing the change process for a big organisation like Walmart (Anderson and Anderson, 2010).
The lack of consensus in the senior mangers was another complexity during the change process. It is important for the managing change that the senior managers should develop consensus to communicate the implementation decisions by communicating the benefits that can be sought with the new system.
The employee faced feeling of uncertainty due to inadequate communication and developed a sense of fear about the job security and concern for the new knowledge and skill development in adoption of new technology by the retail organisation (Langley et al., 2013).
Outcome of change management process
The outcome of the overall process of change management was positive experience for the Walmart. This change process was useful in developing consensus in the senior managers for better implementation of the decision at the organisational levels.
The change process also indicated the need of developing a proper communication policy across the retail organisation. The change process was successful in implementing new technology for the customer service in the in-store management and to bring about a positive influence over the cultural aspects of the organisation.
The changes were reflected through high motivational level of employees and committed towards the work and to achieve organisation objectives (Pollack and Algeo, 2014). The change model of Burke-Litwin is effectual for the managing the change process in real organisation, Walmart.
The change process deals with the organisational factors that influence the performance and leadership development. The changes in the external environment factors are necessary to bring a positive change in Walmart and its employees according to this model.
It can be summarized that the Walmart process of change management is well-structured and comprehensive in nature. The change management process is seen to be a crucial factor in Walmart business operations for the continued success in retailing environment.
The process of change management in the organisation leads to important change like adoption of new technology and improving the culture of the organisation.
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