One of the most critical questions that executives from all kinds of organizations have is how to boost employees’ performance. After years, experts in human resources and organizational change have developed systematic methodologies and models to improve cooperation and to enhance quality and excellence. The goal of all those models is to present a framework that organizations can follow to initiate their way to a continuous improvement process. However, most of the time organizations know very well what they need to change, but the real challenge is to implement all those ideas that will lead them to success.
Organizations are complicated, and we can say that their culture well defines them. In other words, we cannot expect to achieve relevant results if we do not take into account the company’s environment to increase the performance of people within it. If we think about it, the key to building rich corporate cultures is to improve the relationships between labor and management, but how we can do that. Weisbord’s (1976) proposed six critical aspects that companies and managers need to analyze to improve their worker’s performance.
On their way to build better organizational practices focus on improving employees’ behaviors, the first aspect that organizations need to assess is the purpose. Base on the general systems theory, we know that when leaders decide to change something, they need to understand the relationship and the effects that this change is going to have in the whole system and how it can affect other members and areas of the company (V. Bertalanffy, 1968). Therefore, a simple change as bringing people meaning, dignity and a sense of community can dramatically affect their reaction and commitment. We need to make sure that our workers have a clear view of our goals, which part they play within the system, and which is our mission.
We like to see companies as engines, and the second aspect that leaders need to evaluate is structure. In other words, how is our division of tasks? Taking as a reference the Pareto principle (Pareto, 1963), we can assume that 80 percent of our results come from 20 percent of our resources. That said, it is evident that companies need to evaluate if their resources are well allocated to accomplish the mission. In other words, we need to have a clear view of how the internal designed of our company serve our purpose (Burke, 2017).
So far we have stated that employees need to feel an active part of the system to perform well and that the company’s resources need to be strategically allocated to boost the entire system’s productivity, but what about rewards. The next aspect that managers need to understand is how they motivate their employees. They need to evaluate which are the incentives that positively affect productivity. Team leaders have particular responsibility for securing the effectiveness of the team. In some occasions, leaders will need to pay more attention to products, issues, targets, and sales. In other events, leaders will have to show more concern for people to boost trust and team-working environments and to promote healthy professional relationships (Northouse, 2017).
Of course, we cannot expect to build successful companies if we waste resources. The fourth aspect is to create effective mechanisms. We need to make sure which processes sum up to our goals and avoid complicated tasks that hinder our employees’ potential and creativity.
The next point in the list that we have to diagnose is relationships. In the business environment and practically in every aspect of our lives, relationships matter because of the way we interact and communicate with others can reduce or increase our transactions’ cost. If we trust people and people trust us, things get more comfortable, which leads to higher productivity, higher commitment, and greater satisfaction. The goal here is to create a cross-functional team in which individuals can support each other, and that can solve problems to improve the whole system. Leaders can increase the performance of the followers by merely adjusting the quality of communication. Develop good relationships is difficult, but effective leaders should be able to encourage team-working behaviors and identify when improvement is needed.
Finally, the last point is to evaluate our leadership capabilities. Leadership is the core of any system or organization. We cannot expect better results if we are not willing to assess how our actions or decisions affect others. Leaders need to have the capability to perceive what is happening around them. They need to have the ability to assess their environment, and the primary goal of good leaders should be to develop their followers. Organizations need to invest heavily in the development of their human resources if they intend to compete effectively in today’s business environment (Chughtai, 2016), and leaders have to be able to see the whole picture and avoid micromanagement.
We can conclude that one of the most efficient ways to boost our employees’ performance is democratizing the decision-making process and not only because the more perspectives we cover, the better, but because people tend to show more commitment when they feel part of the process. If we see employees as small task executers, we are done. We need to help people to grow personally and professionally. It is important to define to what extent people can be responsible and accountable for their work. To improve organizational environments, we need to evaluate our external inputs, the understanding of our mission, how our strategies fit with our purposes, which tasks are relevant and which ones are a waste of resources, how people interact with each other, and how effective is our network (Tichy’s 1983).
References
M. Weisbord (1976). Organizational Diagnosis: Six Places to Look for Trouble With or Without a Theory.
N. Tichy (1983). Managing Strategy Change: Technical, Political, and Cultural Dynamics. New York Wiley.
V. Bertalanffy (1968). General Systems Theory. New York: George Braziller.
V. Pareto (1963). The Mind and Society: A Treatise on General Sociology - Four Volumes Bound As Two.
G. Northouse, 2017. Leadership: Theory and Practice. 7TH edition. Sage Publications, Inc.
Burke, W.W. (2017). Organization change: Theory and practice (5th ed.) Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc.
Chughtai. (October 1, 2016). Servant Leadership and Follower Outcomes: Mediating Effects of Organizational Identification and Psychological Safety. Retrieve from: http://web.b.ebscohost.com.proxy.amberton.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=4&sid=a031f941-afec-4b9c-8327-816667ee0505%40sessionmgr101