Inspired Organizational Development

Site Purpose

My name is Bob. I developed this website to share information to help improve partnership,prosperity, and the well-being of society and our planet.
I hope the website inspires you to contribute to the positive evolution of our society and our world which is the message in the
Adventure of Consciousness video.

About Bob

The Magic Notes

Few can hear the magic notes and have danced with joy together. Many have been drowned by the noise of fame and their desire for material gain. The universe cries for what could be, the choices that went wrong. It cries for those who pass this way and didn’t awake to sing their song.

Organizational Partnership Capabilities Assessment
of
Factors that Foster Employee Engagement and High Performance

Organizational Partnership Capabilities Assessed

The factors (indicators) included in the assessment were established as a result of OLC’s many years of research. The assessment has been statistically validated. Leaders of twenty (20) companies involved in performance improvement and over 300 employees from two different companies identified factors that were important to their partnership, engagement and performance. These were prioritized and the twenty highest priority factors were organized into five organizational capabilities. The five capabilities included in OLC’s assessment are:

Change Readiness - The ability and openness of an organization and its members to change the existing practices and processes to be fully responsive to both the needs of internal and external customers and to changes in the business environment.

Leadership - The ability to influence and guide people by means of communication and example to establish a shared purpose and to achieve it.

Customer Focus - The ability to recognize, understand and focus on the needs of the organization’s customers, and the knowledge and support of the chain of internal customers and suppliers who participate in providing customers with products and services.

Systems Thinking - The ability of the organization’s members and groups to understand 1) the way their work activities interconnect with the activities of others to form processes that provide value to customers, and 2) the impact of their actions on the rest of the organization.

Teamwork - The ability of a group of people to be committed to a shared purpose and to work together in a spirit of cooperation and mutual support to achieve that purpose.

Value of Undertaking the Assessment

Over a number of years, many OLC customers have provided positive feedback on the value of the assessment in helping them better understand their organization’s partnership capabilities. This knowledge has been used in a number of different ways by OLC customers as a springboard for helping them improve employee engagement and performance.

Some specific benefits of the information provided by the assessment are as follows:

Provides organizational leaders with an understanding of the gap perceived by employees between existing capabilities in areas important to partnership and engagement and the levels needed to achieve and sustain high performance.

Enables the organization to understand variations in partnership capabilities between organizational departments and benchmark its results against those of other companies in the database.

Provides the ability to measure the influence of improvement initiatives on partnership capabilities.

Helps facilitate open and constructive discussion between organizational members in the areas of employee engagement, partnership capabilities, improvement and change.

Criteria Used in Developing the Assessment

1. Both management and employees believe that the capability areas and factors included in the assessment have an important influence on engagement and performance.
2. The factors included in the assessment have the same meaning to both management and workers.
3. Factors defined to indicate capability levels in each of the areas are clearly understood, simply stated, and not ambiguous

Insights from Factor Ratings and Benchmarking Comparisons

There are multiple relationships between the 20 factors covered in the assessment. OLC’s experience is that there are clear relationships between factor ratings, and these illuminate the root causes of problems influencing partnership, engagement, and performance. The following are examples of information that can be gained from factor ratings:

1. The degree to which employees feel free to express their ideas and opinions.
2. Employees view on the willingness of supervisors/leaders to change.
3. The degree to which employees consider the influence of their actions on the external customer.
4. The degree to which employees know who their internal customer is.
5. Employee knowledge of the needs of their internal customers.
6. Employee knowledge of the degree to which they are meeting the needs of their internal customers.
7. The degree to which employees understand the organization’s improvement goals and objectives.
8. The degree to which employees believe they have the knowledge and skills needed to achieve change.
9. How ready employees are to risk doing things in a new way.
10. Employee views on the likelihood of improvement efforts to be successful.

Assessment Survey Customer Feedback

“Our organization has used numerous surveys throughout our history. We find that the OLC Partnership and Engagement Assessment is the most relevant survey we have used.

We have been able to identify internal champions through the survey. These internal champions have mentored others and enabled us to further improve our level of partnership and engagement.”

~Plant Manager

A note from Bob

I hope you found the description of the partnership capabilities assessment we developed and how we developed it interesting and valuable. There are many examples below of assessment results from different companies using the OLC assessment. I suggest you consider the possibility of developing your own assessment following the process we used. In our case we asked over 300 people what was important to them being successful in their daily work. We fed back to them the 50 factors we thought had highest priority and asked them to rate them on their importance. We used their feedback to develop the assessment. Consider the positive influence the people who helped us felt because they had a chance to share their views on what was important to their success and were heard. Developing the survey is a positive improvement project.