Leveraging Organizational Development to Enhance Business Efficiency

An active organization helps boost employee morale as workers feel empowered and valued when a sound company structure is in place. It’s importance also extends to ways in which the company solves internal problems and analyzes a process to find more efficient ways to run the business.

FREMONT, CA: It would be foolish of HR professionals to underestimate the importance of organizational development. By affecting every aspect of decision making, organizational development relates directly to the success of a business. Organizational development can be defined as the maximum utilization of the company's resources to improve productivity and efficiency in the workplace. An active organization helps boost employee morale as workers feel empowered and valued when a sound company structure is in place. It's importance also extends to ways in which the company solves internal problems and analyzes a process to find more efficient ways to run the business. Like any new technology, implementing organizational development demands time and money. However, once applied, it helps chart a healthy course for the company and, in turn, justifies the costs.

Identifying Areas that Require Change

Organizational development can be leveraged to identify areas in company operations that require change. It helps senior decision-makers and managers to analyze each need and project potential effects of transformation into a management plan. This plan should outline specific ways in which the change will improve company operations, which staff members will be affected by the change, and how it can be rolled out efficiently to employees. For instance, it may be identified that productivity reduces in the workplace after lunch, jeopardizing projects with imminent due dates. To tackle this problem, senior officials can front-load projects with critical timelines to the first half of the day and backlog the projects with more flexibility to the second half of the day. This would not have been possible without organizational development as a company could have difficulty in developing effective change management programs. Business owners understand how handling change is critical to a company's success, which is a significant function of organizational development.

Promoting and Managing Growth

Organizational development can also act as an essential tool for managing and planning corporate growth. This can be achieved through organizational development analysis, which brings together sales projections and customer demands to help determine the rate of a company’s growth. For instance, through market research, it is understood that cyber espionage has become a prevailing concern for clients of computer security firms. By sharing this information with the sales team, it is possible to develop strategies that help take advantage of this trend. In some cases, organizational development analysis could alter a company's existing business plan and push them into new and exciting directions.

Aiding Product Innovation

Another essential function of organizational development is product innovation, which involves the analysis of several kinds of information to be successful. Organizational development is critical to product innovation as it helps analyze each element of product development and creates a method for using it effectively. Some of the processes involved in organizational development to assist product innovation are competitive analysis, technology development, consumer preferences, target market research, manufacturing capabilities analysis, and patents and trademarks.

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