Introduction In Part I of this paper I outlined a plan to improve the employee development practices at the Westinghouse Electric Company while minimizing the impact to corporate financial objectives. This plan utilized the Kotter’s eight steps as a guideline. Part II of this paper will review the first phase of the change to be implemented, development of employees on the smallest group level of the organization. Change Implementation To improve the employee development practices at Westinghouse while minimizing the impact to the financial objectives requires some potentially drastic changes to be made. The plan to that was implemented utilizes Kotter’s eight steps for implementing change as a guideline (Kotter and Cohen, 2002, p.7). …show more content…
Because of the organizational culture at Westinghouse described in Part I of this paper, reducing the impact to the financial performance is a key challenge to the plan. The urgency of losing key resources to retirement and the potential termination of the training budget require the plan to makes some drastic changes. The most significant change is a requirement to participate in a weekly “lunch n’ learn” training sessions. The lunch n’ learn sessions are on the employees own time and requires them to give up one lunch hour per week. Obviously this was met with very strong resistance. Even though Westinghouse requires all salaried workers to work 8 hours of casual, “unpaid”, overtime per week most people do not. In fact this is the time in our group where someone has been explicitly asked to work the required casual overtime. The most resistant to this requirement was Nick. Nick never works any casual overtime and is a person that comes in at 8:00 AM and out the door by 4:30 PM every day. Ironically Nick has the most to gain from learning this code and become a technical expert and move up the ranks quickly if he is willing to put in the extra …show more content…
In this role he is responsible for setting up the meetings and organizing the documentation output from the project and providing regular status updates to management. This will hopefully help build Nick’s confidence allow him to see rewards for his effort. Eric is serving as an overseer, as I have him tabbed to be the lead on the next technical area, the reactor equipment system model. Eric will also be helping to roll out the training to the department level. Ali is the technical expert for the THIVE computer code and is responsible leading the lunch n’ learn sessions and has developed the curriculum. To create short term wins the curriculum has in place several practice analyses to help get the Nick up to speed. These practice analyses are based on real problems encountered over the years of performing this analysis for plant modifications. The practice problems will help serve as an assessment of Nick’s performance and his ability to take on real