Chapter 5: A Re/Org Requires Alignment with Organizational Support
An often ignored re/org element is that of assuring that there exists a healthy culture within which work is executed. Culture should not be simply something that exists and is ignored. A healthy culture is critical to alignment with the various levels of work and must be attended to on a continuous basis. The Language of Work Organizational Support Matrix is introduced.
Re/Org Is Not Just about How the Work Is Organized and Who Manages It. What Is Needed To Support Getting the Work Done?
Addressing the Organizational Support
Model: The Culture
Finally we come to what may be, for many, a never-before- considered, newly realized aspect of organizing or re/organizing enterprises. It's the notion of organizing the culture of a business to support the expected work execution. We have called this attention to culture in other places as "Aligning the Work Support Layer with the Four Levels of Work Execution." Here we will simply refer to it as organizational support.
A successful re/org will not occur if we only concentrate on what work must be executed in an enterprise, which has been identified here as the work associated with the business unit, the core processes, the jobs and the organization (of teams [work groups] and management).
Understanding, improving and re/organizing for work execution is vital, since it most directly achieves the business goals, strategy, etc. It is critical to align the work perfectly from the business unit (WHAT) by way of well-defined and understood core processes (HOW), through individuals who do the jobs (WHO) and through the ORGANIZATION(teams and management). This alignment allows everyone to work together and be well-managed by those in charge.
However, think for a moment about competitive swimmers (in individual events, in relays or on a synchronized team). They need water quality that allows optimal performance: not too hot or too cold, not polluted. The Summer Olympics swimming events are always in the most technologically clean and constructed facilities, so as to make possible maximum performance. Just as great swimmers cannot perform well in polluted water, every business needs to operate in a healthy work environment. We describe this healthy environment as one which provides and ensures organizational support for work execution. Without a healthy work environment, lost productivity wastes time and resources, and much worker angst can occur.
A variety of organizational support factors must be accounted for to foster a healthy culture. Generally, these factors have been addressed in most companies in separate, random ways. For example:
Organizational support is usually provided by the enterprise primarily as organizational interventions, or processes, or practices, or programs and so forth. We have previously identified nearly 120 different forms of organizational/work support. We will take a brief look at a few of these, by example, as part of the ways to operationalize and align work using the Language of Work Model(tm). An overview will suffice to explain why organizational support is so important as part of the Re/OrgSystem. We approach this by illustrating how organizational support influences each of the four levels of work execution.
Organizational Support for the Business Unit(s)
Can you imagine a business not having a well-thought-out mission/vision statement, strategic plan or set of goals and objectives? Imagine the impact their absence would have on work execution at the business unit level. Other needs at the business unit level include budgets, a decision/authority hierarchy, governances, and regulations. Businesses may measure success with such items as client feedback, public relations and business plans. Of course, all of these and others are important as they support or fail to support the work of the business units. It is important to ask which elements of organizational support impact which aspects of work execution, and how. Not knowing the answers would potentially reduce efficiencies and effectiveness of work, as well as leaving unsettled what to measure and improve.
Organizational Support for Core Processes
Once the core processes have been identified, a business needs to ensure that those core processes will be planned, implemented and followed, while producing desired results. This involves determining the elements needed for the core processes to be optimally realized. These are elements such as capital equipment, raw materials, intellectual knowledge, the application of professional ethics and standards, automation, measurements and quality improvement of processes. An enterprise must know all the organizational support means that affect core processes and which of them are most critical to success.
Organizational Support for Jobs
Although they can suffer from the lack of consistent means and measurement of its cause and effect relation to work execution, organizational support needs at the job level are generally well-known. For example, a worker's performance review is a typical means of job-level organizational support in most enterprises. It is the organizational provision for assessing one's job performance and determining what is being done well or needs improvement. Performance reviews are often used as well to identify training needs, other performance improvement opportunities, compensation adjustments and future goal-setting. There is a direct cause-and-effect relationship that is easy to see here between work execution (doing the work) and organizational support (seeing that work is done well). Thus, when a manager performs an accurate job review and improves individual performance, this is a means of organizational support. Unfortunately, while performance reviews are provided, few of these are effective; indeed, they are often described as worthless by employees.
In this case, organizational support at the individual job level is provided, but the organization does not maximize its use. Incidentally, there are ways to make performance reviews much better using the model for defining job models being introduced in Chapter 6.
Another example of organizational support at the job level is the job description. Often the descriptions are not realistic and therefore are not helpful. Job descriptions should reflect what the expected work execution is to be, and they should be good enough to support other means of organizational support, such as performance reviews. This need for accuracy applies to many organizational support means, relating not only within a given level of work (e.g., job organizational support means), but between the levels of work (e.g., how a good job description relates to operationally achieving the mission/vision at the business unit level).
Organizational Support for Organization
Organizational support related to teams and management includes such elements as leadership practices, conflict resolution, management systems, partnership arrangements and the like. As an example of cause and effect, conflict resolution, say, can have a much-needed positive impact on the work execution of teams, as well as that of individuals. When individuals or teams can't resolve long-standing issues with one another, productivity is negatively impacted; thus organizational support by the enterprise in this instance has failed. The same is true of any of the many means of organizational support.
How the various organizational support means are used, implemented and improved in a business will not be a major focus of this book—other resources exist for this purpose. Rather, our focus is on their existence and alignment as part of a re/organization. We will show a convenient and useful way to collect organizational support data as a part of the re/org effort. Approaching organizational support in a disjointed way, without regard to impact on work efficiency and effectiveness, is less than ideal. We often see businesses improving one or another means of organizational support without regard for its impact on other organizational supports—or even on the work execution it is supposed to support. Isolated attention to just one or several means of organizational support can undercut any overall effort. Such a "program approach" to improving performance is far too piecemeal and will not achieve the results desired in support of work execution.
If, for example, you mandate that every manager fill out a form that has been designed for a performance review, a filled-out form can become the goal, rather than an improved employee performance. Perhaps the form isn't even that good. Perhaps these reviews get in the way of daily execution of work, rather than building on that work execution as it is being done.
Thus, the focus of organizational support in this book is that it is to be systematically identified and provided in all its necessary dimensions as it relates to the organization or re/organization of work execution on an ongoing basis. An alignment between work execution and organizational support is something that requires real and constant attention; otherwise the work execution suffers and ultimately the business is harmed.