Organisational Health- Do you check it??

Organisational health is the latest buzzword in business circles. This involves corporate culture, commitment, ethics, employee morale and organisational stress. In healthy organisations, managers find committed and loyal employees with high morale. In other words, healthy organisations are those, where people like to come to work and are proud to be a part of.

Diagnosing ill health

A checklist of symptoms:

# Declining profits and productivity

# Increasing absenteeism

# Decision-making by the top management

# Disregard for organisational reputation and ethical behaviour

# Low employee morale and motivation

# Barriers to communication

# Lack of commitment and trust among employees, goal setting,

# mentoring and development programmes

# Assessing health

This assesses employee perceptions and includes critical examination of eleven organisational dimensions:

Communication:

Adequate communication typifies a healthy organisation. Facilitating communication among co-workers and between managers and subordinates is essential. The communication process needs to be friendly, two-way and across all levels of the organisation. Apart from written documents, personal interactions need to be encouraged.
Participation and involvement: Employees at all levels should be involved in decision-making process. Employee ownership in decisions aids efficient implementation of measures.

Commitment:

Trust cultivates organisational health. A sense of pride among employees about the place of work results in commitment. This, in turn, leads to a willingness to attend work-related meetings.

Morale:

Employee morale is reflected in the friendly atmosphere where employees interact with each other, both professionally and personally. This gives them enough motivation to perform their jobs enthusiastically.
Organisational reputation: Positive reputation of the organisation is a reflection of organisational health. Employee involvement in improving relationships with the community is critical for such reputation.

Ethics:

A positive ethical behaviour can be facilitated by an employee-developed code of ethics. This would create value to "character" and remove unwanted "politics" from the organisation.
Performance recognition: When employees are encouraged and supported to attain their potential, they feel valued and appreciated.
Goal alignment: Departmental goals are usually achieved in a healthy organisation. Employees can identify the focus of their departments and set the goals accordingly.

Leadership:

Leaders have well perceived working relationships with people at the top, peers and subordinates. They are generally friendly and approachable and contribute significantly to organisational health.
Development: Employee development is an essential component of organisational health. Formal development and training programmes are mandatory. Accordingly, planning, execution and participation need to be facilitated.

Resource utilisation:

Appropriate use of resources is a measure for organisational health. Employee perception about shared resources results in goal achievement.
Managers well trained to assess employee perception should be able to identify the specific areas that require improvement for optimal organisational health. This exercise enables employees to enjoy a healthy organisational environment and help the company to prosper.

Hi archana...


Yes orgaisation health is now the buzzword in the corporates... even i have come across a live study of organisationa health survey of Grasim Industries ltd. Of ADITYA BIRLA GROUP....it really helps the management to study the health of the organisation....its a complete health study....you can catch the disease spreading in the organisation....

Thanks for this informative post about organisational health study....

Regards,
Gunjan

Archna,
it was a very good article posted by you. But i wanted to ask you a question:
Assuming your organisation undergoes such a health check-up, how would it fare? I am of the belief that barring a few high league organisation, most of the other organisations (medium & small businesses) would really fare badly in this 'health check-up'.
What do you think?
I work in a 500 employee IT organisation, and i have to say that we fail miserably at this check-up simply coz of the fact that we are a 'growing organisation' (in terms of maturity)
I believe that Small & medium businesses constantly face such challenges. So how do we face this challenge?


rgds,
sridhar

Hi , nice article.


An organization doesn't become healthy when it reaches the top. Things mentioned ought to be practiced from the begining. In short a good organizational culture is what makes an healthy organization. Size should not be a constraint for an organizations good health.


Thanks

That Was Great article Ms. Archana. Thank you Very much.

Can you pl let me know where can i find more articles, and white papers on "ORGANISATIONAL DIAGNOSTIC STUDY"

Dear Archana,

A nice write up on organisational health!!

Thought I must share this with you.

A Bangalore based company PeopleHealth, has come up with something called as a health assessment which measures organizational health using several parameters similar to those referred by you.

This is typically combined with an annual health check as there are some clinical parameters also involved.

It would rate the individual and the organization with respect to

• Some Clinical parameters (BP,Cholesterol etc)

• It also includes several other non clinical parameters like employee well being, stress levels, adaptability to work environment etc

The data is collected through a self disclosed questionnaire and is kept confidential.

The data leads to the generation of an individual health scorecard and the corporate health scorecard which will help in arriving at an the organization's health from several perspectives.

Unlike the prevailing methods of judging the health of an organization or an individual......this is a more holistic approach......