HR Basics: Organizational Health

HR Basics is a series of short courses, designed to highlight what you need to know about a particular human resource management topic. In today’s HR Basics, we explore organizational health, describing the four steps organizations can take to improve health.
Organizational Health is defined as an organization's ability to function effectively. Organizational health is about making a company function effectively by building a cohesive leadership team, establishing real clarity among those leaders, communicating that clarity to everyone within the organization and putting in place just enough structure to reinforce that clarity going forward.
A healthy organization is one that has all but eliminated politics and confusion from its environment. As a result, productivity and morale soar, and good people almost never leave. For those leaders who are a bit skeptical, rest assured that none of this is touchy-feely or soft. It is as tangible and practical as anything else a business does, and even more important.
What exactly does an organization have to do to get healthy? There are four simple but difficult steps. They are: Step 1: Build a Cohesive Leadership Team, Step 2: Create Clarity, Step 3: Overcommunicate Clarity, Step 4: Reinforce Clarity.
Cohesive teams build trust, eliminate politics, and increase efficiency. Healthy organizations minimize the potential for confusion by clarifying. Healthy organizations align their employees around organizational clarity by communicating key messages. Organizations sustain their health by ensuring consistency.
Can a healthy organization fail? Yes. But it almost never happens. Really. When politics, ambiguity, dysfunction and confusion are reduced to a minimum, people are empowered to design products, serve customers, solve problems and help one another in ways that unhealthy organizations can only dream about. Healthy organizations recover from setbacks, attract the best people, repel the others and create opportunities that they couldn’t have expected. At the end of the day, at the end of the quarter, employees are happier, the bottom line is stronger, and executives are at peace because they know they've fulfilled their most important responsibility of all: creating an environment of success.