What is Organizational Design Consulting? Think of it as a “Check-up”

 

People are often confused by what organizational design consulting is and how it differs from organizational development, organizational effectiveness, company culture, etc etc, and for good reason. These terms are often used interchangeably in  incorrect ways!

You can think of the first step of organizational design consulting as a “check-up” for your organization. What is the first thing the doctor checks? Your heart. These are your company values. Are they healthy?

From then, the doctor starts diagnosing the problem. Is your stomach hurting? Let’s make sure you’re getting rid of wasteful actions efficiently.

Do you get headaches? Let’s make sure you have the right skills and brainpower on the team to meet your goals.

Does your back hurt? That’s the worst one isn’t it? Let’s make sure you have the right foundational infrastructure in place. Get my drift?

If not, I can go on and on with this metaphor. 🙂

Then, once the checkup is thoroughly complete, we can start devising a plan for your optimal health. The first step of this is ensuring values alignment with your behaviors.

Do you want to be healthy? Then stop overeating. Similarly, if you want your organization to be healthy, ensure the values on the wall are being practiced daily by team members.

 

CultureStrategy’s Approach to Organizational Design 

CultureStrategy uses a proprietary analytics-based assessment to measure your organization’s values alignment to behaviors.

Then, we look at how these behaviors are impacting your key operational metrics across teams. Finally, we assess how these metrics are impacting your company’s performance and creating VALUE.

So we come Full Circle from your Values to your Value!

Performance of an organization is not limited to any one capability or dimension. It is an interplay between people, process, systems, organizational structure, and business drivers. So, we collect multiple forms of data, both qualitative and quantitative across the organization.  Combining it all, we draw insights on the cultural factors most affecting performance. As a result, the assessment gives us both a big picture and allows us to drill down into specific areas.

In order to reap the most value from an organizational assessment, however, a business needs to ACT on these insights. This action takes courage from leaders, along with the right support from change management consultants and internal champions. So, before deciding to conduct an organizational assessment, a leader should be clear on her goals and plan for taking action on the insights.

Measuring Feelings

“Feeeeeelings, nothing more than feelings…………”

Actually, there are a lot more than feelings. Especially in the corporate world. There are milestones to be met, KPI’s to reach, money to be made, promotions to get, titles to earn, accolades to receive.

Yet, what if I told you that feelings contribute to most of these? Would you believe me? 

At one of my client’s last year, I noticed within about a week of joining the workplace how unmotivated, dejected, and even resentful the employees were. For the last 2 years, they had been bombarded with constant changes in processes. Yet, they had very little understanding of the rationale for these changes, other than “leadership’s whims.” Also, they were working with substandard tools, despite numerous pleas to management to upgrade.

The lack of engagement was contagious, even to external business consultants on the team. I remember hearing another consultant tell me, “I’m not really incentivized to work harder than I am, so I don’t.” He would ask me everyday if I wanted to go out and get a drink during work!

It wasn’t that the pay was bad — it was actually above market. It was obvious that there was something else missing — a sense of respect. A sense that leadership is listening. A sense that leadership understands.

As you’ve figured out by now, employees(and customers) are not exactly robots(yet) that can be easily measured, understood, and served in a predictable fashion. They have all these complex wants and needs, motivations, objections, life experiences, perspectives — can’t they be more simple?

“How people feel” is becoming more and more of an important factor for businesses of all sizes. Because it’s getting harder for companies to subdue an unhappy employee, or customer, for that matter.

The Good News

 

How employees feel impacts things like how productive they are, how quickly they learn, how they impact the company culture, how they speak about their company to potential customers, etc. The list goes on. Which means, if you actually become an effective leader, you can empower your employees to the point of getting amazing, unprecedented retu 

Luckily, our organizational assessments are a sophisticated way of measuring feelings and being able to improve them, right away

Gone are the days of the clunky, paper-based employee engagement survey that would get ignored by most. We now have new tools that can accelerate the journey of developing a healthy, more collaborative organizational culture.

Want to learn more about working with us?

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