Experiences about change and its management - early stage of change process

Banking sector is going through big structural changes and the shift from the “old way” towards the “new way”, when almost everything happens online, is one of the burning topics in the banking sector. Banks need to re-evaluate their way of doing things and fundamentally change how they interact with customers. This research aims to increase the understanding on how different organizational levels views differ from each other about the change of moving conventional face-to-face appointments online and how they see this change has been managed? Since the change is in progress and has not yet reached its final phase, this research focuses on the early stage of the change process. The theoretical frameworks focus on the key concepts and definitions related to change management. It offers a holistic overview of four popular change management models as well as presents the new synthesized model for managing change, which is based on the Bridges transitional model with the support of Kotter’s 8-step model. Research strategy is a qualitative comparative case study, in which one specifically selected case is investigated. Most of the empirical material was collected through nine semistructured interviews. The results of the research illustrate that the change process has preceded well and the differences in viewpoints between the employees and the managers were quite small in some issues but bigger in other issues. In general, the differences were more like different emphasis on issues. In the beginning of the change process there was some change resistance perceptible, but today it is exactly the opposite. The employees were well aware what Danske Bank tries to achieve with this change. The employees were also able to pinpoint more challenges and possible risks than managers and one of the most often mentioned challenge was the feedback process.