Chapter 9: Aligning Organizational Support:
We conclude the Re/OrgSystem with what it takes to ensure and align a healthy culture in support of work execution. Without such support, work execution cannot reach its maximum potential. A Work Support Matrix will bring your enterprise to work alignment and a continuous healthy culture.
Fifth: Identify and Align the Organizational Support
A wise colleague once stated that any good process can be negated in its effectiveness and/or efficiency by a negative work culture. We all know this to be the case. Most of us have worked in companies that are toxic in one form or another and experienced how work suffers as a result. For example, there is the manager who has to have everything done his way. Or the resources that we need to do our job are slow in coming from the outside vendors or from poorly trained individuals internally. Or there is no mechanism for making suggestions. Goals are poorly communicated, and the hierarchy is a "good-old-boys" network. Or a career path is nonexistent. All of these and many other environments have to do with the culture of an enterprise or what we will label here collectively as ORGANIZATIONAL SUPPORT. For more details on these and other situations that demand interventions, you might want to look at our book Intervention resource guide: 50 performance improvement tools (Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 1999).
As we describe here how to organize or re/organize an enterprise, we don't want you to do careful analyses to define and align work execution and then have it not be effective because the enterprise doesn't provide a healthy work environment. Thus, enterprises need to periodically, if not continuously, conduct due diligence. As a previous analogy noted, due diligence ensures we have healthy water for our swimmers, divers, water polo teams and the like to swim/work in. Otherwise, continuing the comparison, they will perform poorly and may even drown.
You can think of ORGANIZATIONAL SUPPORT as all the things an enterprise puts into place so that work execution can be as effective and efficient as possible. It's a series of permanently implemented interventions provided by the company to support accomplishing work at various levels. You would not, for example, send an engineer out to do his or her work without the technological tools, management support, skills, training and so forth needed. You would not decide on a core process for an assembly line without the latest hardware or software to support it. Neither would you think of forming your business unit level without objectives, strategies, mission/vision and the like. These, and many other work facilitation needs, are all aspects of organizational support and, when done or provided well, represent a healthy organization. By contrast, if you decide to ignore these support considerations, provide them at minimal levels or don't continuously attend to them, you must accept that performance will not be at the levels you desire for yourself as an enterprise or for the customers you serve.
Organizational support also applies to decisions governing the acquisition and retention of appropriate personnel. Just pay an engineer minimum wage and see what effect that has on your entire enterprise.
Every fair-sized business will require varying degrees of organizational support. Operationally, the administration of these support items usually manifests itself in departments (e.g., Human Resources, Labor Relations, etc.) that coordinate/deliver such support. Other facets are directly in the hands of management (e.g., hiring); still others, by workers with one another or by teams (e.g., quality circles). You might have or need a Human Resources group to handle organizational support related to hiring, training, career development, performance review and benefits, all of which support work execution. You would not want—though most enterprises do—to determine the scope and provision for such organizational support without knowing the scope and purpose of the work to be executed. That is why we first emphasize defining and aligning work execution. Only then can you define, provide for and improve the organizational support.
As it turns out, for all the complexities that organizational support can involve—and there are many—identifying organizational support needs and problems is rather easy when you use the Language of Work ModelTM to do your re/organization. That's because the Language of Work ModelTM uses the same six-word work paradigm for this identification as it uses to define and align work execution. In the Language of Work ModelTM, we have arranged organizational support needs as they relate to business units, core processes, jobs and organization. As an example, the table below shows the organizational support interventions that are typically needed at the jobs level:
You see listed a number of provisions to support work execution of jobs. For example, for the process steps element you find such items as:
Having support designated as work flows and work tools would obviously help better execute job processes, use of inputs, adherence to governance, and promoting feedback. This is also true of provisions for maintaining job skills, such as training and other performance improvement interventions.
On a more long-term basis, when the enterprise provides career development opportunities, it supports long-term commitment to the workforce and management in the enterprise so that employees are less likely to jump ship. As you review the various interventions of organizational support at the job level, you can see that these and perhaps other provisions of support need to be constantly attended to if you are to have a healthy organization for work execution. This is what we mean by due diligence—to pay continuous attention to the work environment.
Below is a chart of what we call the Organizational Work Support Matrix. It's a summary of most of the things that need to be attended to in an enterprise to have a healthy organization. It's organized around the four work execution levels on the vertical axis and, on the horizontal axis, the six elements that comprise the Language of Work ModelTM. Thus, at the intersection of these axes are listed the kinds of interventions that need to be in place and attended to. You can add others or tailor the matrix as it would best apply to your enterprise and specific work environment. Note that each box is labeled with a reference number (e.g., B2) to provide an easy reference to a set of interventions at a given work level (i.e., 2 is for core processes) and work element (B is for governances).
Generally, the best and easiest way to utilize the Organizational Support Matrix is to do assessments of organizational support needs while defining work models at the four levels of work execution. One should also conduct ongoing periodic assessments as the enterprise goes about its business. Thus, at the end of any modeling session in which you have modeled business unit, core processes, jobs or work group models, you can ask questions and make observations that assess current and missing organizational support. For example, when we have completed the facilitation of a job model, we ask the assembled group of exemplary performers, "What it is that the enterprise could do better to support the work you trying to accomplish as depicted in the job model you just defined?" In other words, while the work itself is clear and agreed to in the minds of this group of workers (and/or managers), and agreed to as the "work," we are asking what else could be done or what could be done better? The "verbatim" answers, as we call them, illustrated below, identify trends about what support isn't the best it could be or is simply missing:
As an ancillary form of further data gathering as modeling occurs, an attentive facilitator will note comments and complaints by individuals about what's not being adequately supported. You can note these on flipchart paper and park them there for future inclusion with the verbatim collected at the end of modeling sessions. Additionally, as the models are shared with others in the enterprise for their buy-in, you can elicit their verbatim on what needs better support in the business.
As illustrated below, these sources of verbatim will accumulate from one modeling session to another and as they are contributed when the models are shared. You will be systematically gathering the organizational support data that needs to be acted upon. You will begin to note trends and frequency of certain comments and code them to the Organizational Support Matrix. We use a version of our work support Excel spreadsheet to enter the data and sort it for trends.
Above you can see color-coded areas of organizational support on the matrix that represent what especially needed attention in the ATIS enterprise, according to the verbatim that were collected. Those coded in yellow are for improvements that stem from an analysis of the verbatim in terms of their frequency and what items of organizational support (e.g., lack of good job descriptions) need improvement or are simply lacking (e.g., career development opportunities). The matrix becomes part of an easily grasped report to management showing where the organization is weakest and how its weaknesses impact work execution and client satisfaction.
The Organizational Support Matrix can also be used, after modeling has long been completed, to look systematically at what support does or doesn't exist and how it can be made better. It is used as a kind of checklist of support items to be periodically reviewed by management and others (e.g., an HR Department) for suggestions. The positive effect this will have on overall organization and re/organization will be to get and keep the cultural aspect of your enterprise organized the right way.