subject: Developing Effective Organisation - How Can I Ensure That Each Employee Is Effective? [print this page] Developing an effective organisation is one of those tasks that never end. Just when you think that you are getting there, the goalposts move, and you have to engage again.
All of this activity has a potential benefit which justifies the effort. The treasure at the end of the rainbow for the effective organisation is reserved for your customers, and of course satisfied customers mean profitable business for you. Customers of effective organisations see consistent high quality delivery and value for money. You can achieve this because the processes that you use for developing effective organisation should be focused on satisfying the needs of the customer and reducing the cost of delivery.
Developing effective organisation requires attention to many factors. The role of the organisation needs to be clear. The processes through which the work gets done and the systems that support them need to be excellent. Attention also needs to be paid to the softer issues like values and culture which determine how people approach their work and affect the engagement of individuals. In this article, however, we are going to focus on the impact that you can create by making sure that each individual in the organisation is as effective as possible in their own right.
The Effective Employee
An employee becomes effective when two criteria are satisfied. Firstly the individual must be capable of doing the job. The individual's capability will depend on their history. Capability is accumulated along the way. It depends on the education, training and experience that the individual has had. There is nothing to stop the organisation adding to the capability of the individual while they are in a role and doing that may add considerably to their effectiveness. Before they enter that role though, the organisation will want to check that they at least meet the minimum level of capability required.
The second criterion is engagement. This is the greater challenge for the organisation, because the issues that cause each individual to engage are different and change with time. Last year's star employee could become next year's goose. Even supposing we can identify aspects of engagement such as the motivational needs of a specific employee; it will take a pretty alert and able organisation to respond to each individual's needs in a way that keeps them consistently engaged through time.
To be effective, the individual needs to be both capable and engaged. In layman's language, the individual needs both to be able to do the job, and to want to do it.
Maximising the Individual Contribution
Your goal when developing an effective organisation ought to be to make sure that each individual can contribute as much as they are able. Capability can be increased through training, development, coaching and mentorship. The employee needs to be developed both for the short term and for the long term, and with a number of horizons in mind.
*Each employee will have a specific technical contribution to make. Whether they are administrator or actuary, secretary or solicitor they need to be good at what they do.
*Each individual is also part of a team and will have a team role to perform. They need to understand how to use their personal team skills to make the team work better.
*The team works within an organisation with a clear purpose and to deliver a specific service. Each individual needs to be equipped with skills which help them to identify and address problems associated with that delivery, and to make improvements as they go about their daily work.
In parallel with addressing the individual's capability, the organisation needs to work on engagement. There are many factors that affect engagement and some of these may lie outside of the workplace. Whatever distractions employees suffer, the organisation still wants them to be effective at work. Your approach needs to take this into account.
Employee engagement needs to be handled on two fronts. Firstly, the organisation needs to set policies and put systems in place, such as for pay and reward, which allow managers to deal with employees as individuals and allow the individuals to feel that they are part of the sort of organisation that they want to belong to. Secondly, managers need to be trained to track the engagement of each employee and to use that information to develop a specific strategy for dealing with that individual.
Making your Employees Effective
You need to address employee capability and engagement on an individual basis. If you work at it continuously, within a consistent framework, then you will be rewarded with an effective employee. Effective employees make a significant contribution towards developing an effective organisation.
