Organizational Development

What are your organization’s key performance indicators?

Community organizations and private businesses create change in response to the values and beliefs of a community. Testing for these values is a particular strength of nonprofit community service organizations, but small businesses also perform well in this area.  Small companies and charitable nonprofits advance the opportunity for growth by adapting well to change.  Here are three examples:

• Risk Management – How does your organization define and manage risk?
• Timely Evaluations – What steps are taken to preserve capital and leverage public confidence?
• Conduct an Effort to Outcome Analysis – Do you use client management software?

The Organizational Development Report often precedes a Strategic Plan.  OD creates levels of goal assurance. Efforts are evaluated as individual tasks combine knowledge with interpersonal behavior.  New sources of capacity occur with acknowledgments that confront impediments. 

Strategic Planning is a tool to advance an organizations development with an external environmental scan. The scan examines competitive and cooperative relationships that are possible among the full range of civic, business, and public agencies. The SP Report produces a road map for the executive staff that improves operations, and interpersonal communication with flexible, scalable, and reasonable procedures.

Knowledge Capital Assessment 

In the United States, an entire generation has been fundamentally untouched by global war, disease, or famine.  This group is rapidly becoming “fifty-something,” and that is reasonably good news because human resource managers and executive directors face the dual challenge of retaining key people in their organizations. Most jobs are knowledge-based, and older workers, in increasingly large numbers, can fill these challenges into their 60s and beyond.  Along this line of thinking, is your organization prepared to address the following set of questions?

QUESTIONS

Organizational Development (OD) reports suggest the following quality of thinking:

1. As an employer, you cannot guarantee your future, so how can you secure the careers of your employees?
2. Are employees encouraged to be responsible for their own careers and life planning?
3. Will new ways to offer career options such as flexible time encourage your most experienced staff to explore fewer hours, with less stress and less pay?
4. Will older workers help or hinder in developing the careers of younger workers?
5. What the differences in how older vs. younger workers seek advancement?
6. Have you developed succession plans for employees eligible to retire over the next five to eight years?
7. Have you measured the gap between the talent you need in five years in comparison to the ability currently available?
8. Are you training products on your list of investments to ensure employees of all ages can achieve ‘sustainable’ employability within your organization or elsewhere?
9. Has the question, ‘Is there a retirement ‘life plan’ been asked of the older staff? Is a plan in place to assure this occurs at least five years before retirement date?

FACTS

The United States produced 99 million jobs in 1980, with 107 million workers in the labor force looking for jobs. By 2010 a reversal is expected. There will be 168 million jobs but just 158 million workers,  a shortfall of 10 million that includes recession impacts.

By 2010, about 64 million people(40%) in the labor force today (2007)  will reach retirement age. This will be the healthiest, longest-living, and the best-educated group of retirees in American history.

Mark Freedman, in Encore: Finding Work that Matters in the Second Half of Life,  examine the national implications of the old/young staff and anticipates many questions about keeping this resource affordable. (See Questions)

These and many other issues face organizations of all sizes and missions.  We will be pleased to explore the OD report option with your organization.

For more information on this particular question, we recommend the Urban Institute’s Retirement Project website for its research briefs.  The economic influence caused by a higher percentage of the older people in the population we love to call the boomers will be with your organization for some time.  Try these brief papers:

1. Will Retiring Boomers Form a New Army of Volunteers? (8 pages, PDF)
2. Retaining Older Volunteers Is Key to Meeting Future Volunteer Needs (6 pages, PDF)
3. Are We Taking Full Advantage of Older Adults’ Potential? (8 pages, PDF)