Introduction
In order to bring down government spending to reduce the budget deficit and increase money available to the Department of Defense, the US new president, Donald Trump, has proposed the downsizing of contractors and federal staff by around 20% (Devaney, 2017). One of the federal agencies that are going to be affected by the change is the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that has the responsibility of executing federal securities laws and regulates security industry. The main objective of SEC is to protect investors, maintain effective and efficient security market, and facilitate capital formulation. The agency has about 4,300 employees. The aim of the paper, therefore, is to come up with change management plan for SEC with respect to downsizing of contractors and staff proposed by President Trump (Devaney, 2017).
Effect of Staff Downsizing on Human Resource Function
The downsizing of contractors and staff is going to have a significant impact on the HR functions. First, HR managers will be forced to restructure their workforce because some of the employees will be terminated, which may call for the designing of roles. Secondly, it will be hard to determine the staff to terminate because the majority of employees play a crucial role in the running of the entity ( Cascio, 2014). There are chances that HR managers can terminate employees who are crucial to the operation of the agency, and this may end up affecting its effectiveness in achieving its objectives. In addition, downsizing can lead to low morale in the workforce and anxiety, which may end up affecting the performance of remaining employees ( Datta et al., 2010).
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The Purpose of the Change
The primary purpose of the change plan is to come up with effective and efficient ways in which SEC can implement the proposal by Trump without interfering with its core mandate of protecting investors and ensuring smooth operations of the securities market. There is no doubt that the agency will be required to reduce the number of its contractors and permanently employed staff when during the implementation of the proposal. As a result, it needs to draw a plan that will help it know workers to layoff and how the downsizing is going to affect its operations.
People Involved in the Change
In order to ensure smooth enforcement of the change, heads of divisions whose functions touches on the employees will be involved in the change. Therefore, the key people who will be involved in the change will include:
Lecey Dingman- Office of Human Resource
Peter Henry- Office of Equal Employment Opportunities
Caryn Kauffman- Office of Personnel management
John Nester- Office of Public Affairs
Pamela Gibbs- Office of Minority and Women Inclusion
Stephanie Avakian- Division of Enforcement.
The group will be headed by Lecey Dingman who is the head of Human Resource Division in the agency because is well conversant with human resource issues.
Change Implementation Methods
Change implementation will mainly be guided by Kotter’s 8-Step Change Model. Therefore, the first method will be to create the sense of urgency in the organization through open and honest dialogue with employees and the management. At the initial stages, everybody will be involved in the formulation of the plan to reduce resistance and to create a high level of understanding ( Yılmaz & Kılıçoğlu, 2013) . The second method will be to come up with powerful coalition among people who will be involved in the change. The above six influential people will help in convincing employees that change is necessary and they will help in formulating ways of executing the plan. The third method will be the removal of obstacles that can hinder smooth implementation of the change.
Budget Concerns, Timeline, and Measurement of Success
The main budget concern will be the need to compensate workers who will be laid off. Terminated employees will be paid their future benefits, which may be costly to the agency. Even though federal government can providence funds for termination, the agency will be forced to incur some expenses. The timeline, on the other hand, will depend on the instruction from the federal government on when affected employees should be terminated. The success of the plan will be measured in terms of the performance after laying off workers. It will be considered a success when the operations run smoothly after the firing some employees, and a failure when the agency is negatively affected in terms of meeting its objectives.
Recommendations
To review the effect of the change on human resource function, the urgency should determine the morale of remaining employees after downsizing, the number of roles affected, and the magnitude of restructuring by the HR department.
I will recommend that the agency employs additional personnel who have the ability to perform the majority of the roles affected to reduce redundancy and overlap of tasks in the organization.
Recruitment of personnel should be done through public advertising in order to get the best candidate who can effectively perform roles that will be affected by the staff downsizing.
Due to downsizing, some of the divisions that are related to the term of the function should be merged together to reduce the number of staff required and their cost of operations. By combining related division, the organization will reduce the number of clerks, secretaries, and messengers, leading to a reduction in the cost of labor.
Conclusion
The downsizing of contractors and staff is going to have a significant impact on a number of agencies including SEC. It will force HR managers to come up with strategies that they can use to restructure employees to reduce the negative impact on performance. It will also affect employee morale, which may end up affecting their productivity. In addition, downsizing may be costly if poorly managed.
References
Cascio, W. F. (2014). If You Must Downsize, Do It Right. Retrieved from http://50.87.169.168/Documents/EPRN/If-You-Must-Downsize-Do-It-Right.pdf
Datta, D. K., Guthrie, J. P., Basuil, D., & Pandey, A. (2010). Causes and effects of employee downsizing: A review and synthesis. Journal of Management , 36 (1), 281-348.
Devaney, J. (2017). Trump Eyes Federal Staffing Cuts of 20 Percent. Retrieved from http://www.newsmax.com/Politics/Trump-Federal-Cuts/2017/01/17/id/768969/
Yılmaz, D., & Kılıçoğlu, G. (2013). Resistance to change and ways of reducing resistance in educational organizations. European journal of research on education , 1 (1), 14-21.
