Joe Kennedy's Professional Journey

Skills Applied: Change management frameworks, employee experience analysis, qualitative research, stakeholder engagement, data-informed decision-making, implementation planning.

This research project examines the unintended impacts of administrative centralization in higher education, particularly on staff morale, workflow efficiency, and trust in leadership. I chose this topic after experiencing a large-scale finance centralization firsthand as a university staff member, where established workflows and reporting structures were rewritten with little employee input—creating confusion, frustration, and a loss of institutional knowledge.

Drawing on higher education retention data, academic literature on employee well-being, and established change management frameworks (Kotter and ADKAR), the project explores why centralization efforts often outpace communication capacity and leave staff feeling excluded from decisions that directly affect their roles. Through comparative analysis and stakeholder-informed insights, I evaluated multiple response strategies and ultimately recommended a structured, human-centered change management communication framework as the most practical and sustainable solution.

The resulting implementation plan emphasizes transparency, two-way communication, and leadership accountability as essential tools for improving employee experience while still supporting organizational efficiency. More broadly, this project shaped how I think about people operations: effective change is less about designing the “right” system and more about how clearly, respectfully, and intentionally that system is introduced to the people expected to use it.