How has technology disrupted organisational performance?
Hi, this week I’m going to look at how the introduction of new technologies is giving HR professionals a toolbox of innovative solutions to problems that many companies face when it comes to organisational performance & development.
There are two key parts to organisational development; identifying a problem or implementing a change. That is in no way an in-depth breakdown but in general, most projects aim to do one or both.
IDENTIFYING A PROBLEM
You may think that this is pretty black and white and in some cases it is, but in many cases the way a problem manifests itself and the root cause of that problem are different. It is important to know how a problem manifests itself as this will often give you a metric, against which you can measure if your changes actually make improvements.
There are lots of ways to find a problem; You can track your company's KPI's, ask your customers about their experience or run an internal survey to gauge how your employees feel. These are all great ways to find out how a problem is manifesting itself but how are you to find out the true cause. There's no right or wrong way to do this it changes in every situation.
An example may be that you have two sales teams covering two very similar territories but one has significantly higher sales than the other. There is no obvious reason for the difference and the only thing that’s different is the people in those two teams. This is where you can use a combination of personality and ability tools to find out what the differences between the two teams are. We are able to look at this data and find out what the differences are in measurable terms. We do this by taking the unstructured PDF reports and search and analyze them to give metrics to measure differences against. This allows us to get information from the reports that traditionally would have taken a huge amount of manual work and data entry to even get close to. This example is on a fairly small scale but the same technology works just as well when its scaled up.
IMPLEMENTING A CHANGE
There are lots of reasons to need to implement a change in your organisation. You could be fixing a problem you have identified, a new CEO might be implementing their new strategy etc. In order to implement a change, you need to create an adoption plan. For smaller companies, this is often much easier. In a large organisation, this can be very challenging mainly due to the complexity of lines of communication throughout an organisation.
Information flow Information flow
originating from management originating from influencers
Every company will have some form of structure and traditionally information would flow through that exact structure but now we know that isn't the case. In every organisation there will be people that other staff turn to for advice or information. These people are the ones that carry real influence, these are the people that can really effect change. So, how do you find them? Well, we have a network analysis tool designed just for that. Orgmapper | Influence uses a short online survey to build a map of how your organisation really communicates, who your key influencers are and recommendations on how to deploy those influencers to create the most effective adoption plan as well as lots of other useful insights.
Once you know who to use to implement your changes in the most effective way, you can begin the process of implementing those changes and tracking your progress against clearly defined goals. It’s crucial to test whether or not your plan is actually working because if your plan isn't working you can always adapt it based on feedback.