Posts from the ‘Evaluation’ Category
How can leaders get feedback about the quality of the design of their organization? There are of course multiple sources of information that leaders may attend to, both formal and informal. In this post, let me describe how one can derive useful feedback from including organization design items in employee surveys. Employee surveys – when appropriately designed and executed – have some interesting features. They provide quantitative data that can be used to study trends in employee perceptions over time. Unlike data about financial performance, which are historical, employee surveys may potentially provide predictive information, that is, they may tell us something about future organizational performance. Finally, if employee survey items are standardized across a company, they provide a means to compare the situation at different hierarchical levels and in different sub-units.
Most surveys already contain questions about the work environment, satisfaction with one’s manager, development opportunities, and so on. The responses to such items may indirectly say something about the quality of the organizational design of the company. However, it is possible to include items that tap employees’ perceptions of the organization more directly.
A few years ago, I was responsible for an employee survey that was distributed to around 18,000 people in an organization. We developed several items to assess the organization, related to the clarity of goals, the interfaces between sub-units, and roles and responsibilities. In addition to ratings, we also allowed employees to make comments – and spent considerable time analyzing those comments – which provided us with a lot of useful information about potential causes behind perceived problems.
Based on a suggestion from a colleague of mine at the time (his name is James Tastard, currently with Statoil in Houston), we also developed a “Leadership confidence index” that aggregated the evaluations provided by employees in a given unit about their leadership teams (it was officially called “Feedback to leadership teams”).
In the statistical analysis of the data, we looked at “summary items” such as the propensity to quit and the willingness to recommend the company as an employer, and tried to see which other items predicted the results for such summary items. It turned out that confidence in the management team was the strongest predictor of the willingness to recommend the company (see illustration – click “menu/view Fullscreen” to enlarge).
When we then looked at the items that made up the Leadership confidence index, we found that the strongest correlation to the overall score was for the item that read “Our leadership team has communicated a clear strategy”. Second in importance was the statement “The management team has made specific efforts to improve the way we organize our business”.
In other words, what the results indicated was that the quality of the organization design in this organization was critical not only to its current effectiveness, but to its ability to retain and attract people in the future. The results suggest that people will not stay in an organization – or recommend it to others – if they perceive that leaders are unclear about strategies or unable to address organizational issues. Ignore the design of your organization at your peril.
Even the most carefully designed organization will not be perfect. Unexpected challenges can emerge during the implementation process. Intended effects may fail to realize. Stakeholders who were counted on as supporters may in reality only show lukewarm enthusiasm. As Russell Ackoff famously said, “Man cannot conceive of an organization that others are not capable of subverting”.
For this reason, evaluating a new design – and considering corrective actions – should be the last step of the organization design process.
I was therefore pleased when one of my clients recently asked me (together with another independent consultant) to interview the top 40 managers in the company to evaluate the new model that was introduced a few months ago. We have asked the managers about whether the original design intent has been realized, how the implementation process proceeded, and discussed what actions need to be taken to ensure that the potential of the new organizational model can be fully realized.
In my experience, however, few organizations initiate similar reviews. There may be several reasons. Once a new organization has been implemented, people may be too busy with other priorities. Maybe the choice of a new model was highly contentious and people rather would want to leave the issue behind them. Or perhaps there is a certain amount of hesitation in terms of facing the facts (I have seen a couple of firms investing a lot of time and energy in implementing new models that have clearly failed to deliver the intended benefits.) Or perhaps key executives have a concern that carrying out a “review” or an “evaluation” would signal a lack of commitment to the new model and create the impression that some of the changes are reversible.
The key must be to view the evaluation as a learning process. We need to acknowledge that organization design is a complex task and that one can only optimize a system by continuous improvement. At this point in a design process, we are not opening up for a new discussion about reverting to the old organizational model, but we are asking “How can we ensure that we exploit the opportunities the new model provides us with"?
In my experience, if a company has conducted a reasonably systematic design process, there is a fairly high probability that one will find that the main design intentions have been realized. But at the same time, there will nearly always be a need to make some adjustments, for example, with regard to resources, KPIs, or the IT infrastructure. We also have a tendency to think that people resist change and thus mainly have complaints about their company introducing too many changes. Yet in my current project I have learned that people in two units were disappointed that the reorganization didn’t go far enough!
The outcome of an evaluation should not be limited to a list of “improvement areas”, although there will usually be a need for some corrective actions on a large and complex change journey. In the spirit of appreciative inquiry, why can’t we utilize an evaluation to identify internal best practices? An evaluation could provide units and individual people with the chance to demonstrate how the new model has enabled them do things in a new and more effective manner.
What is your opinion? Add a comment below if you have experience in this area that you would like to share.
