In an increasingly competitive environment, it’s essential to develop new strategies to ensure the sustainability of your business. While it’s true that marketing actions and the adoption of new technologies are key to productivity, they can become unsuccessful over time. To ensure your business remains competitive, you need to use organizational development. This is a set of practices designed to boost the productivity of every member of your team. Lemon Learning tells you more about this modern approach, which is favored by most companies.
Understanding organizational development
Organizational Development (OD) is an approach based on three essential aspects: the relational, the emotional and the rational. This management method aims to develop and optimize the potential of employees within an organization. This means implementing organizational change while placing people at the heart of strategies.
By identifying and eliminating sources of conflict, this approach creates a working environment conducive to communication and sharing. Employees feel confident, which translates into impeccable results. Based on philosophical principles, organizational development is a process that can be initiated for a few employees, a department or the entire company.
Whatever the context, it requires the intervention of experts in the field. Human resources professionals implement organizational development strategies, but they are limited. To implement such a change process, you need specific tools, initiate learning sessions, carry out surveys and sometimes organizational audits. Experts such as a corporate organization manager, an ergonomics consultant or a social auditor can manage this process.
Key strategies for effective organizational development
While organizations experience different realities, there are some basic strategies they can adopt for effective organizational development.
Strategic leadership
Good leaders or team leaders in your organization must work in harmony. They establish clear objectives and guide other team members to achieve them. Patient and equipped with a deep sense of analysis, they are capable of identifying risks and solutions to overcome them. Also, good communicators, they are responsive and adapt to changes. Not only that, they have the ability to modify their action plan according to circumstances. Leadership then plays a vital role in organizational change.
Agile change management
Organizational changes can lead to significant disruptions in the day-to-day routine of employees and impact their overall experience. To minimize the impact of these changes on employees, you need to monitor the situation carefully. According to experts, the agile approach is the best method for managing all transformations in an organization, whether major or minor.
Based on transparency and the involvement of all stakeholders, this practice enables changes to be integrated iteratively. This helps you to adjust the organizational development process as you go along, and maximize your chances of success.
Innovation and technology
Technological developments are making it easier to improve customer relations, facilitate employee collaboration and optimize the communication process. Many tools also offer you the possibility of tackling certain complex tasks in record time. To help improve your employees’ productivity, it’s essential to keep up to date with the latest technological trends. The complete digital transformation of your organization can be handled by a CIO. They will help you implement effective organizational development to improve your services and boost the performance of your work teams.
SWOT analysis as a strategic tool
SWOT analysis or SWOT matrix (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities & threats) is an analytical tool. It’s one of the most well known best practices to help you make informed, rational decisions to boost your company’s performance. Thanks to this tool, you can identify your weaknesses, market trends and the threats to which you are exposed. With a SWOT analysis, you can verify whether you have the necessary capabilities to meet your customers’ needs.
As part of this analysis, you look at all the indicators of your macro-environment. Whether it’s technological skills, corporate image, values, or even relationships between different employees, everything needs to be examined. It is therefore a useful strategic tool for organizational change, in that it helps define effective actions to transform detected weaknesses into assets. If, for example, employees are not enjoying good working conditions, SWOT analysis detects and helps to correct this.
How can we evaluate the effectiveness of organizational development strategies and fine tune them if necessary?
Evaluating the effectiveness of organizational development strategies can be done in a number of ways. The most commonly used strategy is the definition of specific, realistic and measurable objectives. Setting records is one way of knowing at the right moment whether your organizational change strategies are bearing fruit. To do this, set a deadline for your SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound) objectives. To measure your progress in organizational development, use key performance indicators (KPIs) relating to teams, customers and the business system.
Instead of analyzing data and using measurement tools, get direct feedback from employees on the organizational development strategies they have adopted. They’ll be happy to share their feedback and perceptions of the change process with you. To achieve this, use polls, interviews, or surveys.
Another strategy is to compare your performance against other companies operating in the same field. For a more complete assessment, use at least two of these approaches.
Change management, you said? Making skills and professions evolve in a context of digitization is one of the major challenges organizations face...
Lukas Joseph
Jan 14, 2020
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