Monday, July 27, 2015

A ‘Happy’ Organization

A happy organization has a positive and healthy working environment in which employees enchant, enrich and enjoy to the best.

Many forward-looking organizations are shifting from the industrial silo mode to interconnected digital mode. Digital organization is more organic than mechanical; more sociological than hierarchical; more hybrid (multi-generational; multi-geographical and multi-devicing) and antifragile. So which mood is the digital organization more often in, and how to build a “Happy Organization” with both happy employees and happy customers?


A happy organization has a positive and pleasant working environment with high-level employee engagement. Often people define happiness at work as being derived from engaged, active interest in the work, deriving meaning from the work being performed and performing the work in a pleasant or harmonious environment. In such a working environment, self-management, autonomy, self-discovery, and mastery are inspired, cross-functional communication and collaboration are enabled to reduce the frictions caused by unnecessary politics, unprofessional competition or overall unhealthy culture, creativity is encouraged for better problem-solving, and collective wisdom is inspired via inclusiveness. When one is so correlated to the other that with engagement, comes improved performance, and good performance - if measured effectively will demonstrate higher levels of employee engagement. Engaging not only helps in performance but help the employee to go the extra mile for achieving more with a joy.  


A happy organization is more purpose-driven and customer-centric: Intentional human behavior always has a purpose. Organization is intentional, and therefore, it must have a purpose for forming the strong teams to achieve a high-performing result. Organizations and their people learn through their interactions with the environment: They act, observe the consequences of their action, make inferences about those consequences, and draw implications for future action. If one of the significant purposes of business is to create customers, then a happy organization will attract happier customers, it strives to become a customer-centric organization.


A happy organization has built a creative working environment to take inclusive approach: Many talent professionals attribute their happiness due to the cultural norm of inclusiveness --everyone is involved, feel they have a say and their opinion is valued. It makes everyone aware of opportunities to participate and encourage leaders to take an inclusive approach. Leaders and their teams are responsible for inclusion. They monitor participation via interactions with the teams and designated transition "ambassadors." They highlight the importance of enabling users through knowledge sharing in the process of generating new product ideas and new value. When managing change initiatives, they seek to involve the broadest possible audience as early as possible to tap into the collective wisdom of the organization and create ownership for the change outcomes.


A happy organization is more flexible with a high-engaging work environment. To transform smoothly from an overly-rigid process-driven mode to an agile people-centric mode, organizations engage teams early in the process via robust communications, training, and core process workshops to identify issues, concerns and strategies for making the transition. While there are bumps along the way, in the end, the organization that made the transition showed a significant improvement in overall engagement, a  higher likelihood to recommend the company as an employer to others in search of a harmonious environment, and an impressive increase in motivation to go "above and beyond" for the company in pursuit of meaningful work.


The happiness comes from the heart, many thought that the heart of an organization should start at the top. The heart consists fundamentally in the recognition of the value of its people. If the leadership team has no set of values and creates a culture to make both employees and customers happy, then nothing else matters. The sky's the limit for performance, and when an employee enchants, enriches and enjoys to the best - the organization benefits along with the employee. A happy organization is indeed achieving a high-performing result.


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