If you ask the people in your organisation,
“how easy is it to get things done around
here”, what would be the answer?
Recent research at Arizona State University found that
59% of employees reported experiencing negative impacts of work-related stress and that “hindrance
stressors” crush motivation.
Effectiveness and efficiency are key organisational
goals. Effectiveness is a measure of how easy it is to
get things done, to achieve the desired outcomes
across the organisation. Efficiency is being effective
with the optimum level of resources. A key insight however is, organisations can not be efficient if they are not
effective.
Improving organisational effectiveness is therefore, the
silver bullet that kills unnecessary complexity, reduces
employee stress and drives increased employee and
customer satisfaction.
Effective organisations are scalable, agile and where
efficiency emerges as a byproduct of being effective.
Operational excellence is the science and discipline
that underpins effective, agile and efficient organisations. It encompasses the disciplines and skills required
to understand and harness organisational complexity.
In complex organisations, the links between cause and
effect are opaque and so unskilled interventions, intended to achieve or improve desired outcomes, often
have the opposite effect.
What’s worse, these interventions often create the illusion of succeeding by diverting the problem elsewhere ,
thereby propagating complexity across the organisation
and giving rise to the insight that “todays problems often come from yesterdays solution’s”.
A small sample of “good intentions by
good people gone wrong” and made
transparent through operational excellence practices include:
• The centralised scanning team who
discovered that 65% of the paper they
scanned daily, already exists as electronic documents on their IT systems.
• The HR team who held a weekend pizza party to clear their case backlog,
only to move them on to a surprised
finance team on Monday morning.
• The bank who thought they had a 5
person reports team, checked the tasks
performed by other teams and found
12 peoples effort was being consumed
across a fragmented reporting process.
If your organisation would like to improve its effectiveness, agility and efficiency than contact us today!
Alex McDonnell is an expert in bringing operational excellence to service and knowledge-work organisations. He is a Certified Lean Master Black Belt with over 30 years experience working with complex organisations to help them improve their effectiveness.
Email: amcdonnell@expertivity.com
Phone: +353 87 223 9096
What’s your experience? Compare notes with other members in the forum.
Discuss this with members