Organisational Health- Do You Check It?? - PDF Download

Organizational health is the latest buzzword in business circles. This involves corporate culture, commitment, ethics, employee morale, and organizational stress. In healthy organizations, managers find committed and loyal employees with high morale. In other words, healthy organizations 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 organizational reputation and ethical behavior
- Low employee morale and motivation
- Barriers to communication
- Lack of commitment and trust among employees, goal setting, mentoring, and development programs

Assessing health

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

Communication:

Adequate communication typifies a healthy organization. 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 organization. Apart from written documents, personal interactions need to be encouraged.

Participation and involvement: Employees at all levels should be involved in the decision-making process. Employee ownership in decisions aids efficient implementation of measures.

Commitment:

Trust cultivates organizational 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.

Organizational reputation:

Positive reputation of the organization is a reflection of organizational health. Employee involvement in improving relationships with the community is critical for such reputation.

Ethics:

Positive ethical behavior can be facilitated by an employee-developed code of ethics. This would create value to "character" and remove unwanted "politics" from the organization.

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 organization. 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 organizational health.

Development:

Employee development is an essential component of organizational health. Formal development and training programs are mandatory. Accordingly, planning, execution, and participation need to be facilitated.

Resource utilization:

Appropriate use of resources is a measure for organizational 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 organizational health. This exercise enables employees to enjoy a healthy organizational environment and help the company to prosper.

Hi Archana,

Yes, organizational health is now the buzzword in the corporate world. I have recently come across a live study of organizational health survey at Grasim Industries Ltd. of Aditya Birla Group. This study greatly aids the management in assessing the health of the organization; it provides a comprehensive health analysis, enabling the identification of issues within the organization.

Thank you for sharing this informative post about organizational health studies.

Regards,
Gunjan

Archna,

It was a very good article posted by you. But I wanted to ask you a question: Assuming your organization undergoes such a health check-up, how would it fare? I am of the belief that barring a few high league organizations, most of the other organizations (medium & small businesses) would really fare badly in this 'health check-up'. What do you think?

I work in a 500-employee IT organization, and I have to say that we fail miserably at this check-up simply because of the fact that we are a 'growing organization' (in terms of maturity). I believe that small & medium businesses constantly face such challenges. So how do we face this challenge?

Regards,
Sridhar

Hi, nice article.

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

Thanks

That was a great article, Ms. Archana. Thank you very much. Can you please let me know where I can find more articles and white papers on "Organisational Diagnostic Study"?

Dear Archana,

A nice write-up on organizational health!! Thought I must share this with you.

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

Hi All,

This is getting more and more interesting as organizations are adopting proven scientific ways to assess organizational health. Healthji provides scientifically proven tools and services for corporates to:

- First, assess the Health Quotient of an organization (Health Audits) and
- Ways to improve the Health Quotient of the organization with well-designed interventions for high-risk employees.

You can check out all the details at [link no longer exists - removed] and [link no longer exists - removed].

Feel free to get in touch for all your employee health and wellness needs.

Best Regards,
Mandeep Vats

These tips are really great, but in my opinion, most organizations don't have these health policies. They just want their work done, nothing else. Nowadays, the law is very strict regarding some of these policies; otherwise, no one would even think to spend money on these purposes.

Hi,
We provide Pre employment, Annual Health check up to corporate. We already have tie up with Clinics, Diagnostic Centers PAN India. We also provide In House Doctors services to corporate. After completion of health check up our doctor’s team will give suggestion to each employee after looking at their reports and Also MIS for the company.
Please contact me on 7738088282 for further discussion.
Regards,
Ankit