Organisation Development Process
….think twice before spending money on organisational development. It’s better that the money and time is invested on buying equipment, software, or simply on employee entertainment.
Manoharan Rathinam, Principal Consultant, Prashna Enterprise Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
Organisation Development framework is one large canvas that encompasses a list of key elements like learning & development, change management, processes, policies, leadership & managerial capabilities etc. It requires to be approached with a larger perspective. If you are willing to deep dive, read on!
Organisation Development is often linked with solution to an existing problem. But it is much larger a canvas as I mentioned earlier. Approaching Organisation Development with a hoodwinked perspective to resolve existing issues or short-term requirements may yield you a short-term success and a false sense of achievement.
Visualize a lake that is chocking with sludge and garbage. If you are asked to find a solution, which of the following would you choose?
a. Clean the sludge and garbage
b. Construct a fence around the lake
c. Penalize people for littering and dumping garage in the water body
d. Keep dustbins around the lake
e. All of the above
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Manoharan Rathinam
A Thought Leader at Prashna and a nature enthusiast at heart, Mano has invested 26 years in Sales & Marketing Management, Management Consulting, Digital Transformation, and Human Resource function. His raison d'etre can be summed up in one statement - to make facilitate organisations to achieve their goals. When he isn't nurturing and working towards accomplishing his dreams, you'd probably find him engaged in adventure activities, woodworking, cooking or gardening.
If you choose any one of the above solutions or if your option is ‘e’, you may see results but would the solution be the optimal one? Let’s look at this situation from a different perspective. If you are asked to find a solution to maintain a healthy ecosystem of lake, which of the following would you choose?
1. Educate people about the importance keeping the water body clean
2. Deploy natural and organic ways to remove sludge
3. Implement long-term solution to reduce formation of sludge
4. Involve residents in the upkeep of the lake
5. All of the above
I am sure by now you would have got a hint about what I am implying. Yes. You are right. Its all about the perspective. When the perspective changes your vision changes and you get new insights. The new insights may lead to long-term solutions that are sustainable and cost effective in comparison with recurring expenses of quick fixes. Of course, you may want to include ‘e’ also as part of the larger solution.
Let’s look at organisation development with a broader perspective. It’s about creating a process that is competent enough to facilitate leaders to visualize opportunities and threats that the organisation may face in the coming years; prepare people, processes, and policies to harness the opportunities and overcome the challenges; Monitor, control, and review strategy implementation effectively to identify shortcomings proactively.
1. Define Organisation Goals
This is the step that sets the perspective right. A SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic & time bound) Organisational Goal should clarify the company's purpose. This purpose is the true north of the organisation and anything it thinks, speaks, and does should be in line with this goal.
Organisation goal helps you from getting carried away with a new opportunity or existing problem. Remember, organisation development process is not a root cause analysis process, hence don’t base it on finding solution for an existing problem but base on broader vision of the organisation. While taking a step towards a new opportunity or a problem, check if your actions are aligned with the goal of the organisation. Your organisation’s goal will guide you like a north star, a light house even during difficult times.
2. Assessing Organisational Competencies
Now that you have defined your organisational goal, you need to assess whether the organisation is competent enough to achieve the goal. You may also want to set the goals based your assessment on:
- Where does the leaders, managers, individual contributors stand in terms of technical and behavioural competencies to perform their job optimally
- Efficiency of organisational processes
- Effectiveness of policies in supporting employees to perform their roles
- Employees engagement level
- Proficiency in customer life-cycle management
- Success rate in attracting and retaining talent
- Public relationship management
3. Design Learning Architecture
Organisation development process should help in creating a system that is capable of identifying opportunities, threats and deal with them. The back bone of such a system is called ‘Organisational Learning Architecture’. The entire organisational development structure is built on the learning architecture.
Learning architecture is about how various stake holders of an organization support and complement each other in the process of continuous learning. In other words, it shows the structure of how an organization learns.
Till such time all stake holders play their role in supporting each other, it is almost impossible to bring in any change in an organisation. The learning architecture not only focus on the learning requirements but also on providing the right environment to nurture talent in an organisation.
4. Develop & Implement Solution
It is this area where many organisations falter and it is not about how much they invest in to this step but it is about:
- Using the in-house capabilities to develop and implement the solutions. Nobody understands your organisation better than your employees
- Identifying consultants who are capable
- Not treating consultants like job workers. If you hire a consultant and still tell them how something has to be done, then there is something fundamentally wrong with the engagement
- Designing ROI evaluation tools before rolling out solution
- Defining milestones for conducting ROI
5. Monitor, Control and Review
This step is again connected to organisational competencies. You have to answer these questions before rolling out solutions:
- Are your leaders and managers capable of performing Monitor, Control and Review?
- Is there an MIS system that efficiently captures this data and smartly present it to the stake holders?
- How much of this data is being used in performance evaluations and promotion discussions?
- How the data is helping you with strategic decisions?
- How much time, effort and resources are invested in collecting the data and what are the returns?
This step should help you with evaluating return on investment and publish the reports. Mid-course corrections are not possible without performing this step. In fact, if you don’t have the ability to publish ROI reports, you should think twice before spending money on organisational development. It’s better that the money and time is invested on buying equipment, software, or simply on employee entertainment.
