The Organizational Synergy Assessment (OSA) is a powerful tool that can help you identify strengths and weaknesses in your organization’s strategic planning processes. A thorough assessment will highlight current or potential issues that are critical to address in order to maximize performance and success.
Why should you consider an OSA? Organizations often make decisions utilizing disparate planning and analysis reports that fail to consider synergies and links related to organizational performance. For instance, when reviewing a Human Resources (HR) report highlighting employee attrition, you should question the impact these issues are having on the organization. Simply considering adjustments in recruitment and retention processes is not enough. How is attrition affecting other areas of the organization such as productivity and quality?
Why are employees leaving and if the attrition level is too high, how can we reduce it? Attrition is not just an HR issue; it is an organizational issue with organizational impacts. Consistently successful organizations create synergy by understanding how performance in one department impacts performance in another.
The first component in the OSA process is an examination of your current mission, vision, and goals. Are they well understood by top leadership, your workforce, and other stakeholders? Are your goals actionable and quantifiable with the appropriate assignment of responsibilities for successful completion? Will successful achievement of these goals create competitive advantage?
The second component in the OSA process is an understanding of the culture of your organization. The culture you want to create and nurture should be aligned with your mission, vision, and goals. Southwest Airlines has created a culture of humor and empowerment to support efficiency and customer focus. They believe that happy employees can use humor to support the customer-focused culture that Southwest has embodied.
The third component of the OSA process is an examination of the operations of all areas of the organization. Measuring the performance of your firms operations requires a clear understanding of effectiveness, efficiency, quality, timeliness, productivity, and safety in all parts of the organization. Every area of the organization should be able to measure their performance and the manner in which it impacts the entire organization.
The three components of Organizational Synergy Assessment should be examined in an integrated fashion to get a full and complete understanding of your organization’s performance. When performing at optimal levels, these three components create organizational synergy supporting clear competitive advantage. Click here to see a diagram of the Organizational Synergy Assessment Process.