Implementing Lewin’s Change Theory To Improve Attendance Monitoring System At Neverthere College

Introduction to Issues faced by Neverthere College, UK

The report is prepared to discuss about the issues faced by Neverthere College in United Kingdom. The attendance monitoring system will be implemented by the end of September 2020 to ensure that the problems can be overcome and students will be provided with good quality education and learning experience. The Lewin’s change management theory is used here to determine the changes that will be implemented and how it can overcome the issues and maintain stable business functioning. The Lewin’s change theory involves the various stages including the unfreezing, changing and refreezing that can help to achieve the desired level of behavior and manage proper functioning of Neverthere College, UK too (Almeida, Domingues and Sampaio 2014). The change theory will not only transform the entire way of business functioning but will also promote innovation, creativity and adapting to changes for sustaining in the competitive marketplace. With the business procedures becoming adaptable to changes, it would be easy to enhance the speed up time for managing the production and delivery, furthermore provide services to the customers to ensure customer satisfaction as a whole.

The changes within organizations are considered as common aspects needed to improve the business functioning regardless of the size, industry and age. With the changing business environment and world, it has created necessity for the business organizations to change quickly and survive within the competitive business environment properly. The Lewin’s change theory is one of the major frameworks applied to bring changes in the nature of business as well as its functioning (Clark, Silvester and Knowles 2013).

At first, it is important for Neverthere College to prepare itself adaptable to the changes and accept it by breaking down the issues and existing status quo to find out a new way of operating within the industry. The main thing for developing the message or information could be existing ways of doings that must not continue. One of the most convenient way is to determine the issues faced by the company such as the lack of improper infrastructure, processes and back dated procedures. The enrolment and entry grades are reduced and students remained absent. During this stage, it was found that the college has 8000 students studying on A level, 4000 students taking subjects like English, Mathematics, etc. while vocational students are 3000 and 1000 students take professional courses including CIPD at level 7 (Waddell et al. 2016). The numbers of staffs are 1000 including teachers, lecturers, individuals who manage seminars and tutorials and others who manage the administrative procedures. The major issue emerges here because the administration staffs input manual hand written paper based registers from the teachers into the Excel spreadsheets on a monthly basis. The reports are provided to the senior management team and are quite slow and ineffective. Thus, monitoring the attendance of the students of Neverthere was quite difficult because of the manual hand written registers. Communicating the senior management team is useful to make the staffs know about the changes needed to be done and its effectiveness in monitoring the records and attendance of students (Eason 2014).

Importance of Change Management and Lewin’s Change Theory

Once the people of Neverthere College are unfrozen, it would be easy to change and start moving towards the right direction for adopting the changes. The College should move in the new state of being through transition, learn new behaviors, processes, and promote creativity. The changes would be possible through proper communication, support and time management needed by the staffs to adjust to the changes. To carefully plan and execute the change, Neverthere College must remind the staffs the reasons for change, which should be done at the unfrozen stage only. The student bar code reader usage is an effective solution to the issue that can store around 15000 barcodes and scan the identity cards of the students. As the barcode reader is connected with the computer system operated by the lecturer, as soon as the bar code of the identity card is scanned, the data will be uploaded to the servers and the students’ attendance can be recorded (Manchester et al. 2014). An IT manager would be assigned with the role of converting the data into information for recording the student’s information. It would also provide better authentication, security and effective transition of the students’ information.

Computer systems could also be used for scanning the hand recorded registers that should not only record the student related information, but would also determine the time periods of teaching by staffs, availability of tutor initials and room numbers. The attendance sheets are send to the Administration staffs, which are later scanned to deliver the data into the computer system. It is important to bring changes properly and make sure that the attendance sheets are managed daily to ensure appropriate information stored in the database of the computer system (Cummings, Bridgman and Brown 2016).

The refreezing stage enables the consistency of the changes that have been made at Neverthere College in UK. All the changes including the implementation of the bar code scanner, maintenance of students’ identity cards with barcodes and computer systems scanning the attendance sheets of students must be accepted and refrozen as the new status quo and new way of business functioning. It would also ensure that the staffs do not revert back to the existing functions and embrace the existing ways of thinking, rather become habituated with the changes. Once the new systems of recording the students’ information would bring positive results, it should be cemented into the organizational culture for enhancing the way of thinking. There must also be rewards and acknowledgement of the people whose efforts had helped in reinforcing the new state (Hossan 2015). The new way of managing changes would bring stability, consistency, improved services delivered by Neverthere College, furthermore make the students habituated with the actions, and employees should feel more confident too. With the changes, the College would foster creativity, innovation and even replace the back to date infrastructure and processes with new ones for ensuring higher attendance, better grades and enhanced rates of progression too within the educational field in United Kingdom (Havens and Anderson 2014).

The costs incurred during the change management theory are fixed costs, variable costs and cost of assets during a certain time. The costs that did not change during the transformation of organization were considered as fixed assets while the variable costs changed with time, which also impacted the output of the organization. The depreciation costs and change in market value were considered as costs of assets managed during the change management theory implementation. There are other asosicated costs incurred for making sure that the right individuals are involved during the management of changes at the college such as IT manager and maintenance person. By providing the right wages to them, they will remain motivated and will contribute fully to the management of changes at Neverthere College.

Conclusion

From the report, it was understood that Neverthere College was suffering from issues like back to date infrastructure, absence of a positive and innovative culture, because of which, the students were absent and the grades fell too. To improve the functioning, the organization should bring changes and that would be possible by implementing the bar code scanner for scanning the students’ IDs and even use computer systems to scanning the attendance sheets. This could be a huge change, transform the ways of managing a good workforce, and deliver the best of services to the students for remaining successful within the field of education and learning at UK.

References

Almeida, J., Domingues, P. and Sampaio, P., 2014. Different perspectives on management systems integration. Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, 25(3-4), pp.338-351.

Clark, D.M., Silvester, K. and Knowles, S., 2013. Lean management systems: creating a culture of continuous quality improvement. Journal of clinical pathology, pp.jclinpath-2013.

Cummings, S., Bridgman, T. and Brown, K.G., 2016. Unfreezing change as three steps: Rethinking Kurt Lewin’s legacy for change management. human relations, 69(1), pp.33-60.

Eason, K.D., 2014. Information technology and organisational change. CRC Press.

Havens, W.H. and Anderson, D., Honeywell International Inc, 2014. Bar code scanner with integrated surface authentication. U.S. Patent Application 13/865,607.

Hossan, C., 2015. Applicability of Lewin’s change management theory in Australian local government. International Journal of business and Management, 10(6), p.53.

Manchester, J., Gray-Miceli, D.L., Metcalf, J.A., Paolini, C.A., Napier, A.H., Coogle, C.L. and Owens, M.G., 2014. Facilitating Lewin’s change model with collaborative evaluation in promoting evidence based practices of health professionals. Evaluation and program planning, 47, pp.82-90.

Waddell, D., Creed, A., Cummings, T. and Worley, C., 2016. Organisational change: Development and transformation. Cengage AU.

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