University Phone System Upgrade

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Change can do you good!

There has been a lot of change since I posted into my blog a while back.  I am about to finish the first course in my MSIDT program which was about Organizations, Innovations, and Change.

I researched a change the I am currently experiencing in my organization and will be posting a short presentation of it in blog tomorrow.  I have added an excerpt from my assignment below which give a history about the organization environment that I work in and the type of change we are currently experiencing. 

                                                              

Organization Profile: Structure, Culture, and Leadership

Call centers are an integral part of an organizations infrastructure and this is no different for most large schools and universities. At the university where I work, the culture is very structured with the leadership of the university, the president and vice presidents, making all the decisions from the head office.  There are several smaller offices around the country that have center heads, however, all decisions are made at the head office. All of management at all of the sites are content with letting all decisions come from the main office.  The site directors and all managers of the advising departments do not question the decisions made.  They pass them along to the employees, so it is an environment of  ” this is the way it is going to be done and there is no discussion”.   All the way from the dress code to whether or not there can be a casual jeans Friday are made at the home office. 

 Several of the sites located in a few different states are for the Enrollment and Academic Advisors and they are organized in just such a way as a company call center.   Large rooms with many advisors in cubicles.  All advisers used to be able to prioritize their day with new prospective students and continuing student phone calls and appointments.  Each morning every advisor would get a list in their database with new inquiries from people looking into degree programs and requesting information.  These would come into the individual advisor’s names, so in the morning each would have a list of people to call.  There were also calls to be made to other people that were in various stages of the application process for the degree programs.  There was the ability to organize calls how based on preference such as calling by what state they lived in, when they preferred to be called, and other such sorting options.

      About a year ago, leadership at the university made the announcement that a new phone system was going to be installed.  There was no reason given at that time that I could remember and after speaking with other colleagues, no one could recall the reason other than it was time to update our phones.  It was announced that there would be a pilot team of advisors that would work with the new phone system before it was distributed to everyone.  Since it was something new, everyone was interested but there was no further communication for many months.  Just as quickly as it was announced originally, new phones arrived for the school that advises for all of the Bachelor degree programs.  C.Gallahand is an advisor on that team and he said it was announced to his team in a meeting that they would be the pilot team for the phone system and that training would begin the following week (personal communication, January 23, 2013). 

The phones were linked to the computer and had all sorts of new features like preset voice messaging, touch screen dialing of the phone number.  It also does all of the call the prioritization and there are no personal lists any more but instead everything comes into a shared queue for all of us to log into and press a button to get a “new inquiry”.   This is the next person that the system deems requires a call back at this time.

The training consisted of a 3 hour training class to cover the phone system and how it worked.  There was a question and answer session, however, it was made known that the phone system was being installed and there is no turning back.  There was not a feeling of openness in the classroom to bring up any real concerns, so no one did in the training class I personally took part in.  I did hear from other employees it was the same in their training classes we well (personal communication, January 24, 2013).   During the training, leadership never clearly communicated why this type of phone system was needed.  Everyone was already meeting goals and the new phone system was expensive.  In order to map out a successful change,  Beach, in Leadership and the Art of Change, mentions that clear communication of the vision is important and that there are 6 rules to follow to ensure this takes place (2006, p. 78).   Beach states that concrete goals of the vision and the reason for the change should be communicated.  The only reason given was that all other large schools were moving to this type of call environment using this very phone system, so we needed to do it as well. 

            After the pilot team started using the new system, C. Gallahand said that the number of calls he made a day almost tripled with the newer, faster dialing and messaging systems that the phone has (personal communication, January 23, 2013).  As the rest of the schools in our university are getting the phones installed within the next few weeks, we are also being told that we should see an increase in the amount of work we do each day.  This has some employees now starting to speculate if that will equate to a decrease in the number of advisors that will be needed in the future.  Since there were no long term goals communicated, this could be a vision of the university and another change in the future.  For now, everyone is getting prepared to take part in learning this new system.

After speaking with a few other team members on my team and other teams that have the system as well, there are both positive and negative effects being felt so far from this change.  Everyone that I have spoken with all have the feeling of “flying blind” as one woman named B. Parker put it (personal communication, January 23, 2013).  Instead of knowing how the day will be organized by the number of people we need to reach out to, we now just spend the day pressing a button and calling whoever the phone system puts in front of us.

E. Stark mentioned that on her team, the few people that get in the earliest manage to call all of the new inquiries so by the time she comes in there is nothing for her to call except the few students she is currently working with (personal communication, January 23, 2013). 

Leadership at the university never took into account our thoughts on whether we would like the system or not.  This phone system is widely used at other large university enrollment centers, so that is why the decision was made for our school to do it as well. After reviewing Kotter’s Eight Steps to Transforming your Organization, I have to believe that our leadership did follow this because this large scale change did happen rather smoothly and quickly (2006, p. 243).  There was a sense of urgency at some level and a powerful guiding coalition was created because the change was implemented.  However, the failure was in the fourth step which was communicating the change to employees.  All eight steps happened, I believe, at the very highest levels in the company, but not down to the users of this new system. 

On the positive side of the change there has been some stress alleviated from the advisors workload.  No longer do advisors have a large database to manage that each were personally responsible for making sure of compliance regulations such as calling not Hawaii before 11:00 a.m. MDT.  The phone system does that for us and having a community database relieves pressure of having to have all calls completed each day.

On the other hand, it may be a little impersonal to have inquiries left open to whoever gets a hold of the person first.  They are getting phone messages from each advisor that calls which may be confusing. 

Enrollment and Academic Advisors have a lot to consider and think about since there was a huge lack of communication during the implementation of this change.  The direction of the new phone system within the advising teams is still unclear.  The assumption is there has to be a bigger picture need for it but leadership is not coming forth with sharing this information.
References:

Beach, L. R. (2006). Leadership and the art of change: A practical guide to organizational               transformation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.

Kotter, J. P. (2006). Leading change: Why transformation efforts fail (chap. 10, pp. 239-251). In           Gallos, J. V. (Ed.), Organization development: A Jossey-Bass reader. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.