Could These Effective Organisation Guidelines Help To Focus Your Improvement Project?

Organisational effectiveness is easy to aspire to but not so easy to deliver

. How do you know you are doing the right things? We introduce a set of effective organisation guidelines that will focus your efforts on four key factors around role, employees, work systems and improvement. Understand them, and drive your organisation quickly towards becoming a more effective organisation.

If you are a manger charged with making your organisation an effective organisation then you have my sympathy. There are thousands of things that you might address, but effectiveness is a concept that is hard to define. So how will you know where to put your effort?

The key is to focus, and to concentrate on two principles. Firstly make sure that you only do the things that are essential. Secondly, make sure that those things that you do, you do well.

With that in mind, and based on my experience, here are some straightforward guidelines that will help you to focus on making your organisation more effective.

Effective Organisation Guidelines

I offer four guidelines that will help you to focus on the key things that will make your organisation effective.

*Make sure that each part of your organisation has a clear, distinct and essential role.

*Make sure that each individual employee can contribute as much as they are able.

*Make sure that the systems of work are of high quality and are focused on the delivery of the service. Set them in a context of continuous improvement.

*Develop your improvement process to balance internal knowledge, ownership and motivation with external ideas, experience and challenge.

Let's deal with them in turn.

Clear Distinct and Essential Role

It's impossible to judge whether or not an organisation is effective without knowing what its role is. The role should ideally express what the organisation does for its customers. Customers, employees and other stakeholders should be able to look at the role and understand what the organisation is about. If that is not the case, or if the role needs to change, then clarification must be the starting point. There is no point in trying to make efficient that which didn't need to be done.

All of this applies to the departments in your organisation as well. Don't take it for granted that they exist, and simply seek to make them efficient. Make sure that each has a clear and distinct role and that they are all necessary!

Employee Contribution

The contribution from each employee will have a major impact on making the organisation effective. There are two aspects to this.

You need to develop the capability of each employee. You can extend their skills, knowledge and experience through education, training coaching and other techniques. They may have been deemed to have met the minimum requirements of the job when they were appointed. Let them add to that capability and they will be able to do the job even better in the future.

You need to work at getting each individual engaged. Being capable is not sufficient if the employee is not willing to apply that capability. Engagement depends on context, and an individual can move from highly engaged to disaffected fairly quickly. The challenge for the manager is to understand the motivational needs of each individual and address them within the framework of the organisation's values and processes.

An employee who is capable and engaged will be an effective employee, and their contribution to the organisation will be maximised.

Systems of Work

Adapt your business processes to ensure that your systems of work produce high quality customer focused output. The main customer facing processes will determine the quality and consistency of your output, but don't forget the internal support processes. Many of them have a significant bearing on how your employees feel about the organisation, and as a result how motivated they are to perform at their best.

Your business processes need to be set in a continuous improvement context, if the organisation is going to be able to respond to the changing environment that it lives in.

The effective organisation needs to choose to do the right things. They are defined by your systems of work.

The Improvement Process

It may seem a bit of a truism, but an effective organisation will own an effective improvement process. To achieve that you need, in addition to creating a continuous improvement culture, to strike a balance between internal and external influence.

Internal influence comes through your employees with their deep knowledge about your customers and the problems that they encounter with your delivery. It comes through employees supporting and owning the changes that are made and then working to make sure that benefits are sustained. It comes through employees being motivated by having a legitimate way of influencing the way that the business performs.

External influence comes through importing proven improvement processes and tools, from making sure that your employees are trained and effective in making improvement, in making sure that the organisation is challenged to make the right degree of improvement and in bringing in new ideas.

The Outcome

Follow these effective organisation guidelines. Focus on clarity of role, the employee contribution, your systems of work and your improvement process and you should be able to drive your organisation quickly towards becoming a more effective organisation.

by: Eric Thompson

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