Steps in implementing Organizational Development Interventions

Organizational Development is a process of making an organization more effective in achieving its desired goals. The goal of Organizational Development interventions is to enhance the productivity, performance or behaviors via a set of organized individual and team activities. Interventions may be implemented by a change agent as part of a development program or employed by a client following a process to evaluate the condition of the organization’s health.

Steps in implementing Organizational Development Interventions:

1. Step: Entry: – The requirement for change within a company becomes apparent when an issue is identified. Management, or a group of individuals within the Organization, search for a person who is skilled enough to examine the problem or facilitate change.
2. Step: Start-up: – The change agent gets into the Organization’s environment. He works to describe issues surrounding the problem and tried to secure commitment across the Organization to a change attempt.
3. Step: Assessment and Feedback: – The change agent collects information about the situation and provides the same to decision makers as well as those having a stake in the change
4. Step: Action Planning: – The change agent works jointly with management and other stake holders to formulate a by a step-by-step corrective-action plan.
5. Step: Intervention: – The change agent helps in implementing the intervention and the change process is carried out.
6. Step: Evaluation: – The change agent assists the management and other stakeholders to evaluate the Organization’s change effort progress.
7. Step: Adoption: – Members of the company acknowledge ownership of the change, accept responsibility for it, and the change is implemented throughout the Organization.
8. Step: Separation: -  The change agent prepares to leave the organization. As part of the process, the change agent works to disengage while making certain that development of Organizational Development intervention will proceed after his or her departure. This step is achievable since the knowledge and skills of the change agent have been transferred to the entities in the Organization.

Implementing Organizational Development interventions:

Organizational Development intervention strategy is designed only for scientific research and diagnosis of a problem. This action research helps to understand current system of an organization. Organizational Development interventions   are  designed based on participation & involvement of organizational members. This empowerment helps Organizational Development practitioner to implement Organizational Development interventions successfully.

Survey based feedback also gives valuable inputs to Organizational Development professional in applying Organizational Development interventions.

The Organizational Development intervention strategy can be summarized as below:

1. Diagnosis: The search for performance gaps is called as diagnosis.  These gaps help to know w here client’s performance is less than desired. For accurate diagnosis of the current scenario, there should be a trustworthy relationship between the consultant and client. This relationship helps in collaboration to find out real need of the change. For successful diagnosis it is necessary to link performance improvement strategies to achieve business goals.  Underlying causes for this performance gap are analysed.  Causes can be categorized into internal or external.  Internal causes may lead to adoption of new   strategy or setting new goals.  External causes m ay leads to designing new actions regarding actions of competitors or by regulatory or social related changes.
2. Designing an organizational development intervention: Diagnosis leads to designing an Organizational Development intervention strategy that is problem based. Objectives of Organizational Development intervention strategy are   developed to have a direct link with business goals. Designing an Organizational Development intervention strategy represents the best solution, outlines specific outcomes, and role of each component in the entire process.  Designing also gives specific points to keep watch on for evaluation of the process.
3. Development of Organizational Development intervention strategy: Design is a blueprint of developing an Organizational Development strategy. The Organizational Development intervention strategy is designed and developed with the evaluation objectives. The development of Organizational Development intervention strategy is crucial step as it is directly related to desired outcomes.
4. Implementation of Organizational Development intervention strategy: Action takes place and progress is evaluated, organizational members can be engaged at this stage.  The deployment needs high level of energy and creativity of participants.  Participants need to have clear picture of change and their role at each step.  Meaningful feedback helps to reinforce accountability for process to be effective.  Evaluation can be carried out by constructing pilot studies and data collection.
5. Evaluation: It can be studied by understanding impact after implementing Organizational Development strategy.  It can be done be checking immediate feedback or learning gained   through the process, or by evaluating performance. This is continuous process.

Few examples of implementation of Organizational Development interventions in Indian scenario: –

• Larsen and Toubro introduced Organizational Development as a separate/function and department for effective implementation of Organizational Development interventions.
• Wipro adopted for internal organizational restructuring to meet customer specific needs.
• ONGC relies on succession planning, employee participation, training, organizational remodelling and climate surveys as Organizational Development interventions.
• TCS has extensive Organizational Development interventions in the form of goal alignment, balanced scorecard and culture building intervention.
• Bharti Airtel focuses on coaching, mentoring and career planning as Organizational Development interventions.
• Aditya Birla group implements Organizational Development interventions like rotational job assignments, career planning, leadership development.
• Infosys has a broad base of Organizational Development interventions like Leadership development programme, personal development initiatives, cross functional assignments, 360 degree feedback, psychometric testing (MBTI) for individual personality assessment.
• Tata Motors reorganized the organization through restructuring, training was extensively used and flexible communication pattern was introduced.
• Sail introduced new modified performance management system as a part of change initiative.
• Bank of Baroda implemented reorganization at all regional and zonal levels.

The above Organizational Development intervention implementations are merely representative data and there are many such initiatives taken by Indian organizations for individual, team and organizational effectiveness.

Promotion of Organizational Development interventions may be Organization-wide or may apply to a department of the Organization depending upon the extent and intensity. Sometimes interventions implemented are confined only to a part of the Organization due the changes in the external environment having a major effect on the working processes of that area.

The Organization along with the change agent must carefully evaluate the level of change desired in the Organization and then start working towards introducing and implementing the desired changes as per the steps prescribed and keeping in mind the requirements as well as capabilities of the Organization’s personnel.