WMBA 6882 Week 7 Timed Change Announcement Sequence Example

Who Hears at 7:00, Who Hears at 8:00 and Who Reads It Wednesday: A Timed Disclosure Sequence for Announcing Computer-Generated Ordering to Sixteen Prairie Line Stores on Tuesday, September 5, 2028

Student Name

Walden University

WMBA 6882: Initiating and Managing Change

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Who Hears at 7:00, Who Hears at 8:00 and Who Reads It Wednesday: A Timed Disclosure Sequence for Announcing Computer-Generated Ordering to Sixteen Prairie Line Stores on Tuesday, September 5, 2028

The Announcement and the Date It Becomes Irreversible

On Friday, September 8, 2028, Prairie Line Farm & Home will sign the purchase order for 190 handheld devices that run the new ordering screen. After that, computer-generated ordering for hardgoods is no longer a pilot but the chain's method, and the sixteen stores outside the pilot will convert in two waves before December 31. The announcement of the waves must therefore reach everyone affected before the order is signed, so nobody learns from a delivery of new devices what their manager could have told them.

The chain, invented for this course, sells feed, fencing, tools and pet supplies from nineteen locations. The three pilot stores have run computer-generated ordering since July 10. In May, the first announcement of the pilot reached store managers and pilot leads on different days, and a store manager whose leads heard from a neighboring store's staff objected, reasonably, that she had been told last. This sequence is designed so that no store hears about its own change from another store.

The Schedule

Table 1

Disclosure Sequence, Tuesday, September 5, to Thursday, September 7, 2028

Prairie Line Farm & Home is composite; head counts are approximate.

Defending the Gaps

The hour between district managers and store managers gives district managers time to read the pilot results and agree on answers to the questions they expect. Store managers will call their district manager before anyone else, and a district manager hearing a question for the first time from a store manager cannot answer it.

The seventy-five minutes between the store managers' call and the pilot stores' call is deliberate. The pilot stores are the evidence in the announcement, and their managers and leads should hear how their results were presented to everyone else, rather than hearing it secondhand from a colleague at another store.

The leads' huddles happen in all sixteen stores in the same two-hour window. This is the single most important design choice in the schedule. In May, leads in one store learned about the pilot a day before leads in a neighboring store. Smeltzer (1991), in interviews across 43 organizations, found that what most separated ineffective announcements from effective ones was employees learning of the change from someone other than management, along with inaccurate rumors. A same-morning huddle in every store removes the window in which one store's leads can tell another's.

The gap between the leads' huddles and the all-staff notice is nineteen hours. Leads are the people cashiers and part-time staff will ask, so leads need an evening to absorb the news before they are asked about it at Wednesday's opening huddle. Cashiers are affected least: their work does not change, and they need to know only that leads may be busier in October.

Vendors with vendor-managed lines hear Tuesday afternoon, by phone from the merchandising manager, because their sales representatives visit stores weekly. A representative who hears from a lead that "the computer is taking over ordering" might reasonably conclude that the vendor's line is affected. A call before any visit prevents that.

The Messenger in Each Row

Every row names a person by role, not "communications." Store managers deliver the news to their own leads because leads trust their own manager on questions about their work, and because the manager is the person who will hold them to the new process. DiFonzo and Bordia (1998) contrasted two companies going through change and argued that the one which communicated early and often, through credible sources, kept uncertainty and harmful rumors in check. The vice president speaks to managers, not to leads, so that the leads' version comes from someone they work with every day.

What Store Managers Carry Into the Huddle

Each store manager receives a one-page sheet at the 8:00 a.m. call with four items: the store's wave and its first ordering date, the pilot results in three figures (in-stock rate on top items up from 93.1 to 96.4 percent, ordering time per lead down from five hours a week to under two, and 71 percent of system orders released without edits), the hours commitment through July 2029, and the name of the pilot lead at a nearby store each lead can call. Lewis (1999) found that during planned change, organizations relied mostly on one-way information sharing; the last item on the sheet gives leads a peer to ask, which turns part of the announcement into a conversation.

What Could Go Wrong

If a district manager cannot reach a store manager before 10:00 a.m., that store's huddle moves to the afternoon, and the director of store operations calls that store's leads directly at 10:00 a.m. so they do not hear from another store. If news reaches social media before Wednesday's all-staff notice, the notice will go out the same afternoon instead.

References

DiFonzo, N., & Bordia, P. (1998). A tale of two corporations: Managing uncertainty during organizational change. Human Resource Management, 37(3-4), 295-303. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-050X(199823/24)37:3/4<295::AID-HRM10>3.0.CO;2-3

Lewis, L. K. (1999). Disseminating information and soliciting input during planned organizational change. Management Communication Quarterly, 13(1), 43-75. https://doi.org/10.1177/0893318999131002

Smeltzer, L. R. (1991). An analysis of strategies for announcing organization-wide change. Group & Organization Studies, 16(1), 5-24. https://doi.org/10.1177/105960119101600102