Sample essay on managing organizational change

Part 1

The concept of using staff meetings is a good strategy for creating the questionnaire in the organization. Completing a questionnaire using staff meetings gives the members a sense of involvement in the planning. The questionnaire can initiate ideas for discussion or ask the staff members to prioritize the topics to be addressed. This method can help to jump-start discussion and interaction at the opening of the staff meeting. The questionnaire act as pre-work that pays real dividends in making staff meetings educational and dynamic for all parties involved. Using staff meetings to create the questionnaire provides the right environment for making better decisions faster and successfully (Francisco, 2007). This helps to focus on decision making rather than information sharing because the staff members can make productive use of its time together.
The staff meetings tend to generate a lot of positive energy and excitement but this motivation can disappear quickly when none of the members can agree on what to put in the questionnaire. Therefore, full participation is needed for the staff members in drawing the questionnaire. The staff meetings ensure the enough time to review the decisions that should be included in the questionnaire. This is so because it involves assigning responsibility to different staff members who will report the progress of drawing the questionnaire. Staff meeting is a critical method for making decisions and being responsible for designing questionnaire because members can agree on what they mean, which helps to understand, come to a compromise and create a driving forces. To help make proper decisions every member should participate in drawing the questionnaire.
Managers have a unique opportunity to change the meeting experience in the organization by creating and facilitating meetings that matter and in the process to ensure right decision is captured. As change agents in the organization’s managers are in a position to alter the meeting experience by facilitating a shift in organizational focus to help staff members get mindful about how they engage in the meeting progress. Facilitating the meeting can result in significant improvement on the time invested and the results obtained.
Facilitating effective meetings requires preparation to conduct the meeting in a mindful way and follow up in order to move forward the organizational agendas. By facilitating the meeting, managers invite the right people for the right reasons which promote the organizational decisions. Similarly, they take care of the logistical details to ensure the organization runs smoothly, efficiently and according to plan. It ensures there is adequate resources and time to carry out the organizational functions. The managers select people who are stakeholders and can make a clear contribution to achieve the organizational objectives.
As facilitator, manager should endeavor always to create endpoints and facilitate the meetings. He or she should give a clear purpose and objectives, involve the right people and use proven methods such as questionnaire to get the most out of the time invested. However, if an organization fails to provide adequate resources, the facilitation can not be a good approach to bring change in the organization. Similarly, if the organization fails to monitor the process this will affect the movement of organizational agendas forward. The organization should set the example to change the culture otherwise the facilitators can not help to change the organizational culture and eliminate time wasting in the meetings.

Part 2

The contemporary planning models for change call for managers to select indicators of quality and set standards that describe the point at which organizational changes become extremely vital. Therefore, both normative model and the staff meeting force field approach are planning method used to draw questionnaire items. To set these approaches, managers need to understand the importance of these approaches.
The normative approach is widely used procedure for obtaining information from stakeholders. The approach involves querying people about the level of an indicator such as number of encounters at which their experience becomes unpleasant, unsatisfying or undesirable and then agreeing upon a standard (Arun, 2009). The normative approach helps the managers to take drastic action such as use limits when standards are exceeded.
The approach makes assumptions that employees are rational people, but accept the existence of socio-cultural norms within the organization. It challenges the values and attitudes and educate employees into embracing new methods of working. However, the approach raises the question about the items obtained from the questionnaire because it is vital to know how much confidence can be placed in people’s response to normative questions. One issue is that people write in numbers on questionnaire simply because they are asked and not because they have genuinely deliberated on the issue. This makes managers unjustifiably confident in the numbers obtained. The method does not give specific actions that describe the exact behaviors to be included in the questionnaire.
On the other hand, the staff meeting force field approach is the technique to implement change by determining which staff forces drive change and which forces resist change. The use of staff meeting force field approach will enable the managers to put driving and restraining items in the questionnaire. This makes people to answer questions genuinely on the issues, therefore the data collected is based on rational decision. Therefore, managers trying to implement this approach must analyze the balance of driving and restraining forces. The staff meeting should make a decision by selectively removing or weakening the restraining forces. Selecting the driving force will become powerful enough to enable the change to make in the questionnaire.
The staff meeting force field approach gives specific actions, which reflect rational behavior of staff members. The method helps the managers to communicate the reasoning behind the staff meeting decision. The method helps the organization to increase the changes of success by embracing the driving forces and weakening the resisting forces (Plunkett, 2013).  However, the division of staff meetings in the decision making is the main challenge of the staff meeting force field approach. The unproductive staff meeting can be frustrating in staff meeting force field approach because it is influenced by the enthusiasm and attitude of the staff members.
I would recommend the organization to use the staff meeting force field approach because it helps to increase the changes of success by embracing the driving forces and weakening the resisting forces. It is an effective method of facilitating communication in the organization and effective staff meetings. Therefore, I would like to change the rough draft created in the management meeting because it was created based on values associated with success. The questionnaire should include the driving and restraining forces. The management should embrace both values for success and the weakening factors.

References

Arun, J. (2009). “ A Theoretical Review of Business and Consumer Ethics Research: Normative and Descriptive Approaches.” Marketing Review, 3(4), 134-137.
Francisco, S. (2007). “ How to Create and Facilitate Meetings That Matter.” Information Management Journal, 13(6), 12-16.
Plunkett, W. R. (2013). Management: Meeting and exceeding customer expectations. Mason, OH.