HRMG 4202 Week 2 Four-Column Change Account Example

What Each Job at Larkfield Hotels Lost, Gained, Moved or Kept When the Front Desk Came Out: A Four-Column Account of the Mobile Check-In Change, From Two Rollout Documents

Student Name

Walden University

HRMG 4202: Human Resource Development and Change

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

What Each Job at Larkfield Hotels Lost, Gained, Moved or Kept When the Front Desk Came Out: A Four-Column Account of the Mobile Check-In Change, From Two Rollout Documents

Scope and Sources

This account describes one change at Larkfield Hotels, a composite group of seven select-service hotels in central Ohio with about 210 employees. Between March and May of 2026 the group replaced the front desk at all seven properties with check-in through its mobile app, which issues a digital room key to the guest's phone, and two self-service kiosks in each lobby that print key cards for guests without the app. The rollout ran in two phases: three hotels in March and the remaining four in May. The four to six desk agents at each hotel were retitled guest hosts and issued tablets that connect to the property management system.

The account draws on two documents. The first is the rollout memo the operations director sent to general managers in February, which lists the duties to be retired and the new host duties. The second is the revised guest host job description, posted in April. Where the two disagree, the account says so. It does not rely on memory of how the desk used to run, because accounts written from memory tend to make a change look larger or smaller than it was (Bridges & Bridges, 2016). Where neither document says what happened to a duty, the account marks it as unknown rather than guessing.

The Four Columns

Table 1 sorts the guest-contact duties of the former desk agents into four columns: removed, added, moved to another role and unchanged. Each entry is written as an act an observer could see, because a change account is only useful to a trainer if it says what people now do differently.

Table 1

Desk Agent Duties Before and After the Mobile Check-In Change

Sources: February rollout memo and April guest host job description. Composite organization.

The Unchanged Column

The unchanged column is short but important. Hosts still answer the phone, take reservations, settle complaints in person, arrange late checkouts and restock breakfast. Listing these duties keeps the change from looking bigger than it is, and it tells a trainer which skills need no new instruction. The rollout memo omitted the unchanged column entirely, which may explain why several agents told their general manager in March that "the job is gone." On the documents' own terms it is not gone; about a third of the guest-contact work continues as before.

The Shift That Rearranges an Hour

The largest change is not any one duty but who starts the conversation. At the desk, guests approached the agent; the agent's job was to respond. As hosts, the former agents must start most contacts themselves, walking toward a guest who has stopped at a kiosk or who is looking at a phone with a puzzled expression. During the evening peak, roughly 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. on weekdays, that means a host spends most of an hour on foot, choosing whom to approach. Weick and Quinn (1999) describe this kind of change as a shift in the pattern of everyday work rather than in any formal rule, and it is easy to miss in a list of duties. The revised job description captures it in one line, "proactively engages guests throughout the lobby," which tells a host what to aim for but not how.

Where the Two Documents Disagree

The rollout memo says identity checks for flagged guests move to the night auditor; the job description lists them under host duties. Interviews later in the term will need to settle which is true in practice. The memo also says parking permits are retired, while the job description says hosts "assist with parking requests," which may mean helping guests use the kiosk menu.

What the Account Cannot Answer Yet

Two questions remain open. First, neither document says how kiosk errors will be counted, so there is no record yet of how often guests stall or how long they wait. Second, no document assigns disputes over room charges that a guest raises at checkout through the app, which previously went to the agent at the desk. Hiatt (2006) notes that people cannot build knowledge of a change until they know what it requires of them; on these two points, the hosts do not yet know.

References

Bridges, W., & Bridges, S. (2016). Managing transitions: Making the most of change (4th ed.). Da Capo Lifelong Books.

Hiatt, J. M. (2006). ADKAR: A model for change in business, government and our community. Prosci Learning Center Publications.

Weick, K. E., & Quinn, R. E. (1999). Organizational change and development. Annual Review of Psychology, 50, 361-386. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.50.1.361