Description

Initial situation: 

An Irish Tourism Company with headquarters in Dublin and a branch in Kenmare, Co. Kerry, has been so severely affected by the ongoing Covid crisis that the management has decided to radically change its business purpose. As more and more Irish people want to make holidays in their own country and they are also open to alternative forms of holiday, the company now wants to specialise in the distribution of backpacks and tents. The company currently employs 25 staff at its headquarters, who are mainly responsible for its own administration and for co-operating with hotels, restaurants, coach companies and the managers of tourist attractions in Ireland. A further 40 staff are employed in Kenmare. They have so far mainly worked as tour guides. On paper, the change project has already been completed. The company's existing structures and business processes should be comprehensively restructured. The task of the headquarters should continue to be the company administration. These activities are limited to the selection of suitable suppliers of backpacks and tents and the negotiations with these suppliers. The management assumes that all tasks can be performed at the headquarters with a staff of 15 persons. The employees at the Kenmare site will also be given new tasks. They will be responsible for the distribution of the backpacks and tents in Ireland. It can be assumed that the workforce will also be reduced here. A precise number of redundancies has not yet been communicated, however. The employees at the Kenmare site have so far worked exclusively in the field tourism – many of them from a personal conviction. But now they will become pure salespeople. This is leading to great resentment and prejudice among some employees who like that idea. Other employees, however, see this as an opportunity to participate in really important changes and make a difference. Since the management is aware that such a major change process not only requires a great deal of time and money, but also a lot of resistance on the part of the employees, they would like to support the change process from the very beginning with suitable measures to avoid dissatisfaction and declining performance among the employees. In the course of the planned phase-out of the Tourism sector, the management has formulated a new corporate mission statement and drawn up a 100-day plan to make the goals and next steps of the changes transparent, highlight their importance and thus relieve employees of uncertainty. Both papers are publicly available, but few employees have read them, as they are still too busy processing the changes personally.