Organisational Effectiveness

Product / service quality and customer satisfaction and retention reflect the effectiveness of the organisation. 

Both internal and external stakeholders are affected by its performance and are affected by the activity of the business.

Organisational objectives can be achieved when every team member, team leader are aligned and are travelling on a single-track in a constructive way.

Elton Mayo – Effectiveness is a function of productivity resulting from employee satisfaction.

Henri Fayol – Effectiveness is a function of clear authority and discipline within an Organisation.

Frederick Taylor – Effectiveness is determined by factors such as production maximisation, cost minimisation, technological excellence, etc.

Elements of Organisational Effectiveness

They are needed to drive employee engagement. Engagement influences the customer experience and overall performance in terms of productivity and profitability.

Organisational effectiveness can be achieved through an integrated framework of factors.

Strategy

Includes clearly defined roles, purpose, and strategic direction and summarises the division of the work appropriately.

Structure, Capacity, Capability

Capable people doing the right work at the right time in a right way.

Leadership

Leader’s capability and capacity drives business continuity and sustainability.

People System and process

Two-way communication, Collective decision making, interconnected departments, quality management systems.

Culture and values

Attitude behaviour and personality of leader and the employees aligned for desired culture to achieve organisational goals.

Employee Engagement

Employee’s heart and mind in-line with the vision, mission and quality policy of the organisation to achieve success and growth.

Customer Experience

No major complaint OK, customer referring another customer is a delight.

Effectiveness Criteria

Many factors contribute to the organisational effectiveness. The complexity of the organisation makes it difficult to find a simple set of factors that are considered for effectiveness. However, the organisation must be

> Effective in accomplishing its purposes

> Efficient in the acquisition and utilisation of scarce resources

> A source of satisfaction to its owner, employees, customers, clients and society

> Adaptive in seeing challenges as opportunities

> Capable of developing the ability of its members and or itself

> Capable of survival in a world of uncertainties

Creating Learning Organisations

An organisations ability to learn and translate that learning into action rapidly is the greatest competitive advantage.

Continuous learning and its respective implementation to generate desired business outcomes is a core of successful organisations.

Peter Senge defined a learning organisation as the one –

Where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together.

Leaders shall create a culture of continuous learning for individuals and teams. 

The vital factors are

> Drive people to learn by doing – people learn the most when they implement their knowledge to generate meaningful business results.

> Realise that training is just a tool to impart knowledge – learning is also about sharing lessons, telling stories, and doing. Making mistakes and improving constantly.

> Align middle managers to create a learning culture, because they are the one who drive learning, not just the HR team.

> Incorporate learning into the processes – establish rituals like periodic review meetings and retrospectives to track what went well / what could have gone well.

> Expose the teams to diverse learning resources like books, social media, and online videos, working with cross cultural teams across.

> Use technology to accelerate learning and ensure accessibility of knowledge. Great thing is that a lot of useful tools like blogs, wikis and forums are free.

> Involve people in important change initiative to ensure that they learn about managing change (one of the important learning) and working with a diverse set of people.

> Promote the abilities of people to generate alternative ideas and being open to different viewpoints.

> Move beyond metrics to realise that learning is a long term process which cannot be measured in numbers. Learning is tacit and visible only through results delivered by individuals and teams.

> Allow people to make simple mistakes (and learn from them) – people would never experiment if they have to pay a price for trying out new things.

Organisational Climate : It refers to enduring quality of the internal environment that is experienced by the members of an organisation.

All organisations are governed by certain policies and practices. These policies along with the methods of administration create a climate in the organisation. The employee of the organisation experiences the climate purely on the basis of his / her perception. When the employees are happy and satisfied with the organisation, they experience conducive-climate and therefore contribute optimally to the organisation which in turn increases the productivity. But if they are not satisfied the same employees can create adverse conditions for the organisation which can affect both quality and quantity.

We can see opportunities in challenges only when we focus on Business Continuity & Sustainability.

Keywords: Business Continuity, Sustainability, Quality Management System, Employer, Employee, Global Competition, Corporate Governance, Leadership