Applying Lewin's Theory: Organizational Change at Neverthere College

This report discusses the challenges faced by Neverthere College in the UK and proposes implementing an attendance monitoring system by September 2020. It applies Lewin's change management theory, outlining the stages of unfreezing, changing, and refreezing, to address issues such as infrastructure, processes, and declining student attendance. The report suggests using barcode scanners and computer systems to improve attendance tracking and data management. It also addresses the costs associated with change management, including fixed costs, variable costs, and asset costs, along with the roles of key personnel like IT managers and HR managers in facilitating the changes. Ultimately, the goal is to foster innovation, improve service delivery, and enhance student outcomes at Neverthere College.

Running head: ORGANIZATION IMPROVEMENT
Organization improvement
Name of student
Name of University
Author note

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Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3
Lewin’s change theory.....................................................................................................................3
Unfreeze.......................................................................................................................................3
Change.........................................................................................................................................4
Refreeze.......................................................................................................................................5
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................6
References........................................................................................................................................7

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Introduction
The report is prepared to discuss about the issues faced by Neverthere College in United
Kingdom. The attendance monitoring system will be implemented by the end of September 2020
to ensure that the problems can be overcome and students will be provided with good quality
education and learning experience. The Lewin’s change management theory is used here to
determine the changes that will be implemented and how it can overcome the issues and
maintain stable business functioning. The Lewin’s change theory involves the various stages
including the unfreezing, changing and refreezing that can help to achieve the desired level of
behavior and manage proper functioning of Neverthere College, UK too (Almeida, Domingues
and Sampaio 2014). The change theory will not only transform the entire way of business
functioning but will also promote innovation, creativity and adapting to changes for sustaining in
the competitive marketplace. With the business procedures becoming adaptable to changes, it
would be easy to enhance the speed up time for managing the production and delivery,
furthermore provide services to the customers to ensure customer satisfaction as a whole.
Lewin’s change theory
The changes within organizations are considered as common aspects needed to improve
the business functioning regardless of the size, industry and age. With the changing business
environment and world, it has created necessity for the business organizations to change quickly
and survive within the competitive business environment properly. The Lewin’s change theory is
one of the major frameworks applied to bring changes in the nature of business as well as its
functioning (Clark, Silvester and Knowles 2013).

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Unfreeze
At first, it is important for Neverthere College to prepare itself adaptable to the changes
and accept it by breaking down the issues and existing status quo to find out a new way of
operating within the industry. The main thing for developing the message or information could
be existing ways of doings that must not continue. One of the most convenient way is to
determine the issues faced by the company such as the lack of improper infrastructure, processes
and back dated procedures. The enrolment and entry grades are reduced and students remained
absent. During this stage, it was found that the college has 8000 students studying on A level,
4000 students taking subjects like English, Mathematics, etc. while vocational students are 3000
and 1000 students take professional courses including CIPD at level 7 (Waddell et al. 2016). The
numbers of staffs are 1000 including teachers, lecturers, individuals who manage seminars and
tutorials and others who manage the administrative procedures. The major issue emerges here
because the administration staffs input manual hand written paper based registers from the
teachers into the Excel spreadsheets on a monthly basis. The reports are provided to the senior
management team and are quite slow and ineffective. Thus, monitoring the attendance of the
students of Neverthere was quite difficult because of the manual hand written registers.
Communicating the senior management team is useful to make the staffs know about the changes
needed to be done and its effectiveness in monitoring the records and attendance of students
(Eason 2014).
Change
Once the people of Neverthere College are unfrozen, it would be easy to change and start
moving towards the right direction for adopting the changes. The College should move in the
new state of being through transition, learn new behaviors, processes, and promote creativity.

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The changes would be possible through proper communication, support and time management
needed by the staffs to adjust to the changes. To carefully plan and execute the change,
Neverthere College must remind the staffs the reasons for change, which should be done at the
unfrozen stage only. The student bar code reader usage is an effective solution to the issue that
can store around 15000 barcodes and scan the identity cards of the students. As the barcode
reader is connected with the computer system operated by the lecturer, as soon as the bar code of
the identity card is scanned, the data will be uploaded to the servers and the students’ attendance
can be recorded (Manchester et al. 2014). An IT manager would be assigned with the role of
converting the data into information for recording the student’s information. It would also
provide better authentication, security and effective transition of the students’ information.
Computer systems could also be used for scanning the hand recorded registers that should
not only record the student related information, but would also determine the time periods of
teaching by staffs, availability of tutor initials and room numbers. The attendance sheets are send
to the Administration staffs, which are later scanned to deliver the data into the computer system.
It is important to bring changes properly and make sure that the attendance sheets are managed
daily to ensure appropriate information stored in the database of the computer system
(Cummings, Bridgman and Brown 2016).
Refreeze
The refreezing stage enables the consistency of the changes that have been made at
Neverthere College in UK. All the changes including the implementation of the bar code
scanner, maintenance of students’ identity cards with barcodes and computer systems scanning
the attendance sheets of students must be accepted and refrozen as the new status quo and new

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way of business functioning. It would also ensure that the staffs do not revert back to the existing
functions and embrace the existing ways of thinking, rather become habituated with the changes.
Once the new systems of recording the students’ information would bring positive results, it
should be cemented into the organizational culture for enhancing the way of thinking. There
must also be rewards and acknowledgement of the people whose efforts had helped in
reinforcing the new state (Hossan 2015). The new way of managing changes would bring
stability, consistency, improved services delivered by Neverthere College, furthermore make the
students habituated with the actions, and employees should feel more confident too. With the
changes, the College would foster creativity, innovation and even replace the back to date
infrastructure and processes with new ones for ensuring higher attendance, better grades and
enhanced rates of progression too within the educational field in United Kingdom (Havens and
Anderson 2014).
The costs incurred during the change management theory are fixed costs, variable costs
and cost of assets during a certain time. The costs that did not change during the transformation
of organization were considered as fixed assets while the variable costs changed with time,
which also impacted the output of the organization. The depreciation costs and change in market
value were considered as costs of assets managed during the change management theory
implementation. There are other asosicated costs incurred for making sure that the right
individuals are involved during the management of changes at the college such as IT manager
and maintenance person. By providing the right wages to them, they will remain motivated and
will contribute fully to the management of changes at Neverthere College.

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PERSONS INVOLVED IN
THE CHANGE
MANAGEMENT
PROCESSES MANAGED COSTS INCURRED
IT manager The databases are handled to
record student related
information and about the
business processes
£ 15000
Maintenance person The maintenance person
maintains the records properly
and even prepare the budgetary
planning based on the expenses
that may be associated with the
changes at the college
£ 10000
New HR manager The HR manager will manage
the processes of recruitment
and selection to bring new
talents and assign the right
roles and responsibilities to the
right individuals
£20000

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Figure: Costs incurred during change theory (Havens and Anderson 2014)
Conclusion
From the report, it was understood that Neverthere College was suffering from issues like
back to date infrastructure, absence of a positive and innovative culture, because of which, the
students were absent and the grades fell too. To improve the functioning, the organization should
bring changes and that would be possible by implementing the bar code scanner for scanning the
students’ IDs and even use computer systems to scanning the attendance sheets. This could be a

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huge change, transform the ways of managing a good workforce, and deliver the best of services
to the students for remaining successful within the field of education and learning at UK.

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References
Almeida, J., Domingues, P. and Sampaio, P., 2014. Different perspectives on management
systems integration. Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, 25(3-4), pp.338-351.
Clark, D.M., Silvester, K. and Knowles, S., 2013. Lean management systems: creating a culture
of continuous quality improvement. Journal of clinical pathology, pp.jclinpath-2013.
Cummings, S., Bridgman, T. and Brown, K.G., 2016. Unfreezing change as three steps:
Rethinking Kurt Lewin’s legacy for change management. human relations, 69(1), pp.33-60.
Eason, K.D., 2014. Information technology and organisational change. CRC Press.
Havens, W.H. and Anderson, D., Honeywell International Inc, 2014. Bar code scanner with
integrated surface authentication. U.S. Patent Application 13/865,607.
Hossan, C., 2015. Applicability of Lewin’s change management theory in Australian local
government. International Journal of business and Management, 10(6), p.53.
Manchester, J., Gray-Miceli, D.L., Metcalf, J.A., Paolini, C.A., Napier, A.H., Coogle, C.L. and
Owens, M.G., 2014. Facilitating Lewin's change model with collaborative evaluation in
promoting evidence based practices of health professionals. Evaluation and program
planning, 47, pp.82-90.
Waddell, D., Creed, A., Cummings, T. and Worley, C., 2016. Organisational change:
Development and transformation. Cengage AU.

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