Introduction
In the day-to-day running of organizations, a number of issues do prop up requiring organizations to take necessary, appropriate, and applicable steps in order to solve the issues effectively and completely. Issues that come up may originate from individuals, groups in the organization or the interaction of the systems of the organization.
Organizations that deal with a large clientele such as the university that handles thousands of students plus the academic and non-academic staff is likely to encounter many problems. The problems may arise from either the students, the academic staff – lecturers, or the subordinate staff of the organization – University.
These issues may also have a faceted origin that touches on both the students and the two staff. The issues develop to situations, and if not diagnosed promptly, they become threatening to the organization and its practices. Professional aid is thus needed to address the situation (Cummings & Worley, 2009).
Organizational Situations That Require Professional Assistance
Organizational Health
Organizational health is among the most important elements that contribute to the good performance of organizations. Good health automatically leads to high productivity. The health situation of the university is important for delivery of both the students and staff. Symptoms of unhealthy, organizational working environment include rising stress levels, interpersonal conflicts, and work-life imbalance.
All these plus many others may result to a rise in the cost of healthcare by the organization thereby causing a downward trend in productivity.
Unhealthy and unsafe organizational environment is brought out inform of costs to the organization which include absenteeism, a rise in drug benefit costs, increased employee turnover in the case of the university, this will be seen in terms of the rising cases of deferral or termination of studies.
Other indicators of unhealthy environment in the organization are significant drop in the commitment and satisfaction levels of both the staff and students, increase in the cost of healthcare, and the general loss of productivity (Cummings & Worley, 2009).
Programs
Also in academic organizations like the case of the university, new programs are introduced in different faculties. These new programs come with new content and in most cases new requirements on both sides of students and the academic staff. When such programs are introduced into the institution, a lot of guidance is needed by the students and staff.
This is what will ensure that the programs gain a good background in the institution. In such situations, professionalism is needed in the implementation of the programs. Therefore, the university may deploy professionals to help give a right foot of these programs at the university.
Behavioral Management
Student unrest is a common occurrence in academic institutions or organizations. Student unrest mostly results in violent activities. Student unrest is caused by many reasons most of which may be generated by the students themselves or poor relations between the students and the administration. The problems leading to student unrest may either be developmental or sudden in nature.
To ascertain this research has to be done. Such organizational researches are conducted by professional counselors and behavioral management experts. These individuals are able to diagnose the underlying issues through an interactive research and dialoguing.
Organizational Restructuring
Organizational restructuring is also common in modern institutions. Restructuring activities more often aim at improving service delivery through stepping up of efficiency by sealing the loopholes in the prevailing systems of management. Restructuring programs may take place in the whole organization or may be carried out in different departments of the organization.
Organizational restructuring programs are accompanied by training that is conducted by experts in certain fields. If it is the academic restructuring, education experts do conduct the training. When the program is focused on the administrative staff, then it is implemented by experts in the field of academic administration.
Reward Schemes
To achieve good results in the organization, the welfare of the employees must be catered for. This is usually done through remuneration and reward schemes. Remuneration and reward schemes are run basing on different attributes of employee growth and improvement.
The exercise has to be carried out in a fair and transparent way to prevent fiction. Remuneration exercise mostly touches on financial aspects and thus professionals in finance management should be engaged for professional advice when reviewing the salary of the university employees (Cummings & Worley, 2009).
More often than not, universities review the financial payments that are made by students. This is mostly caused by changes in the economy, which in most cases result in the rising cost of operations.
These changes force the institutions to adjust the payments in order to meet the costs of administration. Fees review is done through research that helps reach a rational increment in the amount of fees paid. Professionalism is required to achieve this.
Integration of Organizational Development with HR Frames and Competency Models
Organizational Development
Organizational development centers on the activities of the organization. For this function to work well, it has to be combined with other functions and activities of the organization. The human resource management function of the organization is of great importance to the organization.
This is because it centers on developing and managing the workforce of the organization. Both the organizational development theories and the human resource frameworks aim at increasing efficiency in the organization which would then lead to the betterment of the performance of the organization (Anderson, 2012).
Organizational development is itself a process that involves many activities. Organizational development aims at changing the organizational beliefs, targets, values, attitudes, and the general structure of the organization to enable it adapt to new changes in technology and market.
This thus borrows into the theories of motivation, learning theories, and many other behavioral theories. Behavioral theories can mostly be used min the shaping and modeling the behavior of students in the university (Anderson, 2012).
Research has proved that organizations that have attained excellent performance are known to have embraced training of staff in performance improvement. There is a strong linkage between training and development that takes place in an organization. Training helps in the imparting of skills, knowledge and the change of behavior and aligns all these to the goals and objectives of the organization.
HR Frames
The major goal of the university as an organization are to give high quality education. This will be attained through well developed programs and quality staff to manage these programs. This will enable the university to produce high quality graduates who will be highly absorbed into the industry and the job market. The training needs of the organization must be identified so as to attain these goals and objectives.
In most cases, human resource management strategies do not clearly bring out the real areas that require training in the organization. Competency models are often deployed in the identification of the real areas that need training improvement. Everything in the university centers on competency. In the university as an organization, there are three major workgroups.
The workgroups are the academic staff, the subordinate or non-academic staff and students. Training is important for all these groups although the training that is done on each of these groups varies thus different approaches of training are utilized (Cummings & Worley, 2009).
For the students, personality and motivation is very important to jeer them towards good academic performance. The performance of students is assessed in the curriculum and extra-curriculum activities. Therefore, motivational and personality theories will be used to assess the student performance.
Through this, areas that need improvement on the part of students will easily be identified, and training programs initiated to seal the gaps. The dean of students is the major body that deals directly with the affairs of the students.
Therefore, it is very important to empower this department by providing enough resources for the effective running of the department. The department should be equipped with professional staffs that have a good grasp and experience in handling the affairs of the students.
The staff or workforce of the university is composed of people who perform different roles and functions. These workers are placed in different departments in the organization for instance the finance department, the registry department, the catering and accommodation department and the library department among many other sub-departments.
Competency Models
The management of the non academic staff squarely falls under the human resource or administrative arm of the university. Since this is a big organization, the degree of specialization is very high. The competencies of the staffs play an important role in determining the level of output of these workers. It is the human resource department which determines the competencies of the workers.
Competencies of these workers are carried in the abilities, skills, interests, traits, motives and most importantly the knowledge of the workers. The human resource department has to ensure that these attributes of competency are transferred and vindicated in the performance of the workers and the general performance of the university (Anderson, 2012).
For the competencies to be of value to the organization, they must be translated into job competencies. This will be done through the use of human resource management approaches like performance management and appraisal. This is used to assess the performance of the workers in the organization to determining performance levels and identifying the areas that should be improved.
Performance Management and Appraisal
Improvement of performance is usually done through training. The good thing with performance management is that it assesses and evaluates workers and through this identifies certain areas of weakness. This usually eases the role of training. Specified training is done to streamline competencies in the areas of weakness or incompetency. Performance appraisal programs will be accompanied by a reward programs.
Reward is a motivational function and entails giving some benefits or rewards to the employees depending on how they have performed in their roles and duties in the organization. Reward encourages hard work through which competency is improved.
The workforce of the organization plays a very big role in order to achieve organizational change. The development of the workforce is the responsibility of human resource officers and the top management of the organization (Anderson, 2012).
Steps Involved to Effectively Managing Organizational Change
Organizational Change
Organizational change is not a simple event but a process in which several steps are included to attain desirable change in the organization. Organizational change works to ensure the enhancement of effectiveness and efficiency of organizational systems in order to make the organization to reach the peak of performance.
Proper planning and implementation can be facilitated by change in the organization, thus planned change is the appropriate change that is desired by organizations. The organization or management must first ascertain the need for change and show that they are committed to planned change.
After this, the development of a systematic and logical approach should be created which will lead to the accomplishment of change objectives. The logical steps must be followed to ensure the successful implementation of change in the organization (Blokdijk, 2008).
Organizational change is a managerial function thus it can be attained through change management. Change management has several tools among them the change management process itself, readiness assessments and communication planning. Other tools of change are change coaching and training of managers and the employees, sponsorship activities and roadmaps and research.
Steps
Research is conducted to identify areas that need change in the organization. Three major steps are involved in change management. These are preparing for change, management of change and reinforcing change. Change preparation includes the definition of change management strategies, the preparation of the team that will manage change, and the development of the sponsorship model to sustain that change.
The second step, which is change management, entails the setting up of plans of change management and the implementation of the change plans. In the last stage – reinforcing change, feedback is collected and analyzed; gaps diagnosed and resistance to change managed; and the corrective actions are implemented (Cameron & Green, 2009).
The comprehensive process of change management in organizations has seven steps. The need for change must be recognized as the first step. More often than not, the need for change in the organization is recognized by the top administrators of the organization. Change in the organization may be facilitated by either external or internal factors (Green, 2007).
Upon the recognition of the need for change in the organization, the management will be required to develop goals and objectives of change. The necessity of change has to be ratified first before any further action of effecting change is undertaken. The needed changes are defined with relation to the organizational structures, values products and technology. The problems and opportunities will have to be evaluated (Green, 2007).
The third step in the management of change in the organization is the selection of change agents. Change agents refer to individuals responsible for implementing and effecting change in the organization. The agents must be highly alerted on the issues that the change needs to address and thus come up with brilliant ideas that will foresee the implementation change (Green, 2007).
The diagnosis of the current climate of the organization follows. Data is gathered about the prevailing climate of the firm. This information is used in preparing organizational workforce for change. The fifth stage involves the selection of the change implementation method. These methods can be derived from other organizations that have effectively implemented change. Also, external performance standards can be used (Green, 2007).
The change plan is then developed. This stage identifies certain events that must be undertaken and the means through which these events will be run.
Certain responsibilities are coined and delegated to the change agents. Lastly, the plan will be implemented ensuring that the steps that I have established in the change plan are followed. Implementation must be accompanied by follow-ups and evaluations so as to detect leakages and seal them in the process (Green, 2007).
References
Anderson, D.L. (2012). Organization development: The process of leading organizational change. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage Publications
Blokdijk, G. (2008). Change management 100 success secrets: The complete guide to process, tools, software and training in organizational change management. S.l: s.n.
Cameron, E. & Green, M. (2009). Making sense of change management: A complete guide to the models, tools & techniques of organizational change. London: Kogan Page.
Cummings, T.G. & Worley, C.G. (2009). Organization development & change. Australia: South-Western/Cengage Learning.
Green, M. (2007). Change management masterclass: A step by step guide to successful change management. London, U.K: Kogan Page.