Organisational Development can be a rather grey area, with few people, even HR Professionals truly understanding the term.
We thought it might be helpful to outline a simple 5-step Organisational Development (O.D.) Process to shed light on its key role within an organisation.
1. Identify the strategic direction of the organisation
Step one is about identifying the current processes and skills within your organisation and determining whether they align with the direction you want to go in. This should be done in a structured way and be given some serious thought. For example, it could be forecasting a significant number of retirements within 5-10 years which may leave a significant skills gap. So, it is about identifying risk and deciding how to deal with it. The use of diagnostic tools such as PESTLE Analysis for strategic planning or conducting a SWOT Analysis can help to make the process robust and objective.
2. Decide on how to address those needs
Step two looks at addressing the needs that have been identified. The key is to be as objective as possible and to think carefully about the various solutions before selecting any. There are a number of framework standards that are quite useful to help benchmark against. For example, the ISO framework or Investors in People, that provide another set of questions to evaluate your organisation against.
In addition, it may be worth looking at McKinsey’s 7-S Model or Burke Litwin’s O.D. Process Model where you can analyse how everything interrelates within the organisation. This can help with deciding on the outputs to be achieved and aligning the interventions against them.
3. Select the O.D intervention
The CIPD identifies four types of interventions to choose from:
Human: Coaching people, carrying out training programmes, getting people to work in groups or facilitating teams of people to do things differently.
Business: Including Business Process Engineering and Lean Six Sigma.
HR: Looking at performance management processes, using psychometrics to identify personality types and evaluate the workforce.
Strategic Processes Interventions: These could include transformation programmes or culture change.
4. Implement the intervention
A structured well-managed approach should be taken to implement the intervention as all too often change fails when it isn’t thought through properly. This isn’t easy to do, and is a topic we have covered in other blogs and is talked about on The HR Uprising Podcast series: The 5 Secret Powers Of A Change Superhero.
5. Evaluating the impact
The final stage is to evaluate the change. So, if managed effectively from the start, then there should be clear goals and clarity on what the aim is to achieve as a result of the initiative or change. The following critical questions should be asked:
How did we do?
Did we achieve the desired outcome?
Do we need to do more?
What else so we need to learn?
This content is based on an episode of The HR Uprising Podcast, hosted by the CEO of Actus Software, Lucinda Carney. The Podcast is intended to help HR and L&D professionals to elevate the way their role within the organisation is perceived by delivering real, lasting value. Listen Here.
For more information, why not download the white paper on making sense of Organisational Development below:
