Introduction
Facilitating change is one of the important duties in human resource management. In order to adapt to the ever-changing conditions of the market, organizations must constantly evolve, adopting new techniques and improving the quality of production, organization, and services provided to the customers (Kaufman, 2017). At the same time, not all change processes are handled properly due to various issues that happen during the conception and implementation phases of change. This paper will provide a reflection on personal experiences in a copywriting center.
Copycat Copywriting Center
Copycat Copywriting Center (name changed for privacy reasons) is a company that provides website content, SEO texts, and other writing services to any companies located in the US or abroad. It has over 40 copywriters actively working within the company’s office and over 100 part-time freelancers. For a long period of time, the company operated without any vision or an overarching mission to govern the company’s actions.
The top management of the company decided it was time to change things, creating a mission statement, which was focused on bringing happiness and satisfaction to customers. This was supposed to be achieved by increasing employee autonomy and providing more tools for them to interact with the customers while simultaneously optimizing the company’s structure. Thus, it was a big change both in terms of mission parameters, operational, and organizational efficiency.
What Worked?
One of the very few successes of the implemented change was the creation of coherent vision and mission statements. It emphasized the focus on quality as a means of making customers happy, as opposed to quantity. It marked a gradual shift in how employees perceived their work and made them focus more on making sure that the parameters of the texts were to the letter and in accordance with the demands of the customer.
What Did Not Work?
The office personnel accepted the proposed changes poorly. One of the reasons was that there were no preparations made to properly prepare the employees for the changes, which were dropped on them without warning. The company was doing well, and the majority of the employees saw no need for changing their routines. Words of dissent were suppressed, and some of the more ardent protesters were fired, which created a poor working climate.
In addition, many employees found the mission of the company to be dishonest. Copycat Copywriting Center was notorious for underpaying their workers, thus leaving very little room for altruism and concern for quality or customer relations, as the majority felt they were not paid to do that. Lastly, the optimizations that took place effectively removed the front-end department and placed the responsibility of contacting and dealing with the customers on copywriters. It added to the amount of stress on individual employees without being adequately compensated. As a result, there was a massive surge in turnover rates.
Conclusions and Recommendations
There are six stages of organizational change: initiation, investigation, intention, introduction, implementation, and integration (Kaufman, 2017). The majority of mistakes were made during the investigation and introduction stages. The company did not identify the right issues, as the proposed changes were clearly out of touch with the reality of work on the ground level. The introduction stage was simply skipped over, which caused additional problems during the implementation stages. Here are several recommendations to avoid such a disastrous scenario in the future:
- Involve junior managers in change planning. They can provide valuable information and inform the scope of the change process.
- Implement a proper introduction process. The employees must be made to understand and accept the planned changes before the implementation phase begins (Palmer, Dunford, & Buchanan, 2017).
- Implement corporate ethics when planning a change process (Alwesson & Sveningsson, 2015). The employees at the Copycat Copywriting Center were treated unfairly, as they were given additional work without proper compensation.
Had these steps been implemented during the change management process, the the company would have suffered such a dreadful fallout.
References
Alwesson, M., & Sveningsson, S. (2015). Changing organizational culture: Cultural change work in progress (2nd ed.). London, UK: Routledge.
Kaufman, H. (2017). The limits of organizational change (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.
Palmer, I., Dunford, R., & Buchanan, D. A. (2017). Managing organizational change: A multiple perspectives approach (3rd ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.