Organization Structure and Work Processes for High Performance Work Systems

Energizing leadership - using the best of high performance management ideas - backed up with effective organization structure and work processes will enable your organization to operate at its optimum.

We discuss energizing leadership elsewhere in the site, here we focus on the organization structure and work processes (in other words organization design) that lead to high performance.

Hiring talented people is not enough to ensure organizational success. The best and brightest employees will not be able to do their best work in a poorly designed workplace.

Poor organization design is one of the leading causes of low employee morale and productivity. There are four critical signs that your organization structure and work processes need improvement:

• High employee turnover (particularly of your most talented people)
• Low productivity
• Increased customer complaints
• Decreased profitability

Organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get. In other words if you want different results from your business you will need to scrutinize and somehow change your organization design structure and processes.

Organization design is not new. You may have heard it referred to as (amongst others):

• open system design,
• socio-technical systems design,
• high performance work systems design
• total quality management,
• participative management and
• re-engineering

The name you apply to organization design is not that important. What is important is that the change is approached systematically and you have long-term commitment from the leadership team to follow through, even when it gets tough. Whether you choose to use an organization design model or not, you are constantly making design choices that impact on the performance of your business.

Benefits of Improving Your Organization Structure and Work Processes

An organization specifically desgined with high performance in mind, creates the organization structure and work process which enable each person to contribute their full potential through tapping into their talents, skills, ideas, energy and creativity.

Typical Elements of High Performance Work Systems:

• Focused on a common vision
• Business focused
• Integrated design of people and equipment
• Flat organizational structure
• Multi-skilled team members
• Principle based rather than rule based
• Committed to training and learning

Should You Attempt An Organization Re-Design?

It depends. Organization re-design can be a timely and costly process (in fact it can take up to 2 years to re-design a business and 15 years of implementation!). The readiness of your business to begin a re-design process is determined by two factors:

Ideally you should only begin a re-design process after you have acceptance and ownership of the need to change by everyone who is to be impacted by it and most critically you have strong and real commitment from your most senior leadership.

You have probably heard someone comment about the "latest flavour of the month". This cynicism is bred when new and seemingly unrelated change programmes are put in place by a leadership team who either doesn't fully understand or communicate the reasons behind their shift in priorities and change strategies.

A fast and effective employee survey is one way of establishing both the need for change and the commitment to change.

If you find you have low readiness for change you may be able to build readiness for change by sharing the following information with your people:

• Business data
• Changing customer requirements
• Competitive Forces
• General Economy
• Organisational Performance
• Bench-mark data
• Local business unit performance (compared to other sister sites)

As you analyze these areas you may well identify gaps between current performance and required performance. This will help you to identify the parts of the organization that need to be changed and the magnitude of the change required. It may be that many of your internal processes and systems are spot on, capable of successfully meeting the needs of the marketplace. There may be other processes and systems that require radical re-thinking and redesign.

The processes and systems that are on track should be constantly monitored and improved (continuous improvement). But if radical change is required this is where a systematic organization re-design process is called for.

Pitfalls That May Cause Failure

Watch out for these pitfalls as you re-design your organization structure and work processes:

1. Loss of support from senior management
2. Leadership (particularly front-line) holding on/reverting to traditional command and control style leadership
3. Leadership not leading by example or exhibiting the behaviours they require from their people
4. Not understanding that team and people evolve over time and not giving the people the time to grow into the new way of operating
5. Forgetting the vision you have for the future
6. The redesign is faulty - the elements are not in alignment
7. Team members are changed or rotated before the culture becomes institutionalised

This is a very short overview of what is a dynamic and intricate process - whether you are designing for the start-up of a new business or whether you are refitting the design of an organization that has been running for several decades.

There's no magical answer to implementation, but avoiding the pitfalls listed above and engaging an expert change consultant to help you with the process will substantially increase your chances of success.

Re-design of your organization structure and work processes is an exciting time. Enjoy your journey as you deliberately design and create a workplace that will be successful for the long term. You will feel exceptionally proud to have been a part of the process. Guaranteed!