Organizational Change Management For Blue Marina Restaurant

Internal and External Analysis of Blue Marina

Discuss about the Resistance and Background Conversations of Change.

The Blue Marina restaurant is one of the most prominent names in the eatery world of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Located in the ground floor of one of the biggest shopping malls of the city, in the prime Bukit Bintang area, the Blue Marina restaurant has been able to make a name for itself in authentic Italian cuisine within few years of its establishment. Not only quality food, but also the easy access and no fuss menu have been quite popular among the customers. However, the restaurant has been facing hard times due to decreasing efficiency and increasing turnaround time between the ordering and getting the food. This is affecting the customer service. Moreover, as the customers are getting agitated while waiting for almost one and a half hour to get a table, the competitors are getting scope for capturing their market share. Thus, the profit margin of the restaurant is declining. As the new CEO is planning to expand the business and bringing many changes in the system to increase profitability, there must be a market analysis before implementing the plans. The purpose of this report is to analyze the problems of the restaurant and identify the scopes for implementing change management to increase the profit. Internal and external context analysis, nature of change, type of employee reaction and recommendations to implement the changes are presented in this report.

Organizational change management requires and environment analysis which is beneficial to make plans accordingly. Internal and external analyses of Blue Marina are represented through SWOT and PEST analyses respectively. Both the analyses are performed in the context of implementing the new changes proposed by Marcello, the new CEO.

PEST is used for analyzing the external, that is, macro environment for Blue Marina.

The above analyses indicate that there is a good scope for Blue Marina to expand its business. As per the proposals of the CEO, the restaurant can utilize the opportunities to implement the changes in the business. Stability of the government and economic condition are beneficial for expanding the business as a chain restaurant with 2 more outlets in the city. The increasing population will supply the workforce, needed to increase the employee base in Blue Marina. Technological advancements in the nation provide the scope for designing and implementing a new information technology system. Lastly, the social condition of the nation encourages the CSR activities by the organizations and hence, Blue Marina will be able to create a position in the market by introducing CSR activities.

Types of Organizational Change

The changes in an organization are of different types. The proposed changes by the CEO include many new ideas which follow the principle of incremental changes. As stated by Burke (2017), organizational change can be two types. Transformational change refers to the change in the fundamental structure and culture of the organization, such as, a change in the hierarchical structure. On the other hand, incremental change refers to the series of small and planned steps in an organization, which take place over the time (Fitzgerald, 2017). For example, the implementation of new information system or computer system in an organization to increase the functional efficiency is an incremental change in the existing system (Lee et al., 2017).

There is another category of change to describe the changes that take place in an organization. According to Anderson (2016), there are reactive and proactive changes. Reactive change is the unplanned change, which occurs when a sudden and major event occurs in the organization and the members react in highly disorganized manner. For example, when a leader suddenly resigns, the organization undergoes a sudden change. On the other hand, proactive change refers to the change, which the leaders implement after identifying the requirement and making plans or strategies to accomplish that (Holsapple & Oh, 2018). For example, strategic planning is undertaken in an organization to make long term changes in the business operations (Kaufman, 2017).

Following these definitions, it can be said that the proposed changes in the Blue Marina fall under the category of incremental and proactive change. The CEO wants to improve the existing operations of the restaurant to increase the efficiency of the employees and hence, strategic planning have been proposed to implement new information system, recruit more workers, open new branches, offer a revamped menu, renovated décor and a new bar, launch promotional events and introduce CSR activities for community benefits. All these actions are considered as incremental and proactive change.

The organizational strategy should go through a transformation to introduce the proposed changes. The possible types of employee reaction can be explained with the help of Collin Carnall’s Coping Cycle. There are 5 stages in this coping cycle, namely, denial, defense, discarding, adaptation and internalization (Carnall, 2018). Since, change is risk, there is always resistance to risk and it exists at individual and organizational level.

The coping cycle starts with resistance and finally ends in adaptation and internalization of the changes, that is, new strategies and actions. In this process, the employees of Blue Marina should be given training to make them familiar with the new situation and how to increase their efficiency. The entire training process should be assessed by applying the Kirkpatrick’s model of four-level training evaluation. Implementation of the proposed changes in the Blue Marina restaurant would impact the employees and they need to be trained to increase their efficiency. Hence, to evaluate their effectiveness, Kirkpatrick’s Four-Level Training Evaluation Model is beneficial. Reaction, learning, behavior and results are the four levels in this model (Kirkpatrick & Kirkpatrick, 2016).

Employee Reaction: Coping Cycle

As the strategic changes will be implemented in the Blue Marina, the new and existing employees will be given training and their training and learning will be evaluated from their reactions, learning outcome, behavior and results. Reaction of the employees should be measured in terms their acceptance of the change, and learning objectives should be planned to measure the learning of the employees (Paton & McCalman, 2000). In level 3, behavior of the employees will be assessed in terms of their application of the knowledge. If there is no change in the behavior after the training that would indicate that the training was ineffective. Lastly, final results are important to measure the effectiveness of the training program (Kirkpatrick, 2001).

Thus, the response of the employees towards the proposed changes should be evaluated first and training programs should be introduced to make them aware of the changes and increase the efficiency of the business. The evaluation of the effectiveness of the training should be done by following the Kirkpatrick’s Four-Level Training Evaluation Model.

The Blue Marina restaurant should adopt the ADKAR model of change management while implementing the new changes in its business operations. ADKAR change management model is goal focused. As stated by Karambelkar & Bhattacharya (2017), in this model, every step of change management is sequential and cumulative goals should be achieved to accomplish the final goal of bringing change in the organization. To achieve the change in the business strategy, the Blue Marina restaurant should bring changes in the organizational process as well as in the productivity, attitude and efficiency of the employees.

ADKAR model is an acronym for Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement. This model is suitable for change management in the Blue Marina in the following ways. Marcello, the new CEO of Blue Marina identified the need for change and he proposed the strategic changes in business operations, which indicates awareness of the management about the need for change. The stakeholders agreed to support the plan, which shows the desire for change in the business.

Regarding the planning and execution of the proposed changes the restaurant can adopt the following steps.

• The employees should be intimidated first about the new plans and their reactions should be measured. The management should convey the benefits of the changes to the employees. Awareness is the first stage in the ADKAR model and the CEO of Blue Marina should pass on the awareness about the need for change in the system to the employees to make them aware about the need for business growth.
• New teams should be formed to handle different needs of the change management plan. The other owners and stakeholders must be consulted and involved in decision making process. According to the second stage in the model, that is, desire, they should be willing to bring changes to increase the profitability of the business.
• Based on the training needs analysis required for the new process, the management should organize training for the employees to increase their knowledge and efficiency. According to the ADKAR model, it is the third stage, where the knowledge is created for anticipating the potential outcome of the plan in terms of behavior and skills of the employees. This helps in predicting the potential output of the changes.
• A budget plan should be prepared to accommodate all the changes, such as, renovation cost, menu cost, recruitment cost, cost of sponsoring community projects, implementation of new information system, and promotion cost. The assets and resources must be evaluated while making the plans so that optimized utilization can be achieved. Ability is the fourth stage in the model, which enables the restaurant to make the plan as per their resources and implement those in a daily basis to bring an incremental change in the organizational structure and operations.
• Lastly, reinforcement is the last step in the model, which focuses on sustaining the change in the long run. For this, Blue Marina should introduce rewards and recognition programs to encourage and motivate the employees to increase their efficiency, especially in the customer service. A new menu, new décor of the restaurants and introducing the bar are planned for reinforcing the change and along with that, the employees should contribute through their services to make the changes sustain in the long run to increase the profit margin of Blue Marina.

Conclusion

Change management plan is a necessary step for the organizations to improve their services and increase profitability in the long run. Blue Marina has been facing challenges from internal as well as external environment and those can be addressed with a new strategy. As the new CEO of Blue Marina has proposed many new plans for bringing change into the business operations, there should be proper planning to implement the changes. As per the SWOT and PEST analyses, the restaurant has weaknesses in employee efficiency and the competitors are taking that advantage. However, by applying the ADKAR model of change management, the restaurant can make and implement strategies to improve the business operations and employee efficiency, which is expected to increase the profit margin in the long run for the Blue Marina.

Evaluation of Effectiveness: Kirkpatrick’s Four-Level Training Evaluation Model

References

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