Posts from the ‘Quality of organization design’ 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.
