At step one, in consultation with your community, you wrote your mission statement. Step two involves conducting a review of current practice. This will show you the extent to which you are already:

• achieving the aims and
• living up to the values expressed in your mission.

In conducting your review you will identify organisational strengths and weaknesses in relation to the achievement of your mission. This will enable you to build on the former and eliminate the latter.

INVOLVING EVERYONE

Everyone, at every organisational level, should be involved at step two. All can benefit from reflecting on their:

• job, the way it’s done and its place in the scheme of things
• department, its function and relations to other departments
• teams, their contribution and the way they function.

Such reflection will increase clarity about:

• What they do.
• Why they do it.
• How doing it contributes to organisational success.
• The extent to which their success depends on others.

Such clarity reveals the structure of the organisation: the way each part fits with every other part. Clarity about organisational structure will help you.

• understand relationships throughout the organisation
• maintain the coherence of the organisation
• avoid unnecessary duplication of effort
• track the causes and effects of good and bad practice.

REVIEWING EVERY ASPECT OF ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR

Your review needs to be comprehensive. No part of the organisation should escape scrutiny. You will want to examine:

• departments
• committees
• teams
• individuals
• relationships, formal and informal
• power balances
• communication systems, internal and external
• written policies, strategies, procedures and rules
• resources and their allocation
• the environment, internal and external
• the use of time.

This list is not exhaustive, you may well be able to add to (or subtract from) it on the basis of your knowledge of your own organisation and its structure.

Deciding your timetable

You will need to decide in advance when you will have completed your review. Care needs to be taken in deciding how much time to devote to it. Too little time and you might fail to gather enough information. Too much time and the information you gather might be out of date before you can analyse it.

CONDUCTING YOUR REVIEW

Your review will involve gathering information about:

• The contributions made to the organisation’s achievement of its overall mission.
• The contributions made to the achievement of each of the organisation’s instrumental goals.
• The way in which these contributions are made.
• The relationships that support these contributions.
• The key values that inform these contributions and the way they’re made.
• The morale and reputation, or the impact on organisational morale and reputation, of each aspect of the organisation.

In each case you will want to:

• analyse current practice so you know what you are doing, and
• evaluate current practice so you know how you are doing.

It is only by doing both that you will be able to identify all your strengths and your weaknesses: the actual and potential contributions made to organisational success by each aspect of the organisation.

GATHERING EVIDENCE

In acquiring the information you need you will find it necessary to:

• gather ‘hard’ facts such as:
  • staff turnover
  • absenteeism
  • bullying, abuse, harassment
  • complaints
  • awards won sales figures
  • league table placements
  • mortality figures donations received
  • participation rates
  • rates and speed of response to enquiries, applications etc
• solicit opinions from people across the organisation about:
  • morale
  • reputation
  • relationships
  • the use of space, time, resources
  • the distribution of power
  • what works well
  • what works badly
  • barriers to success
  • the improvements that might be made
• consider different interpretations of both.

It is particularly important not to neglect consideration of different interpretations of the facts and opinions you gather. If, for example, you discover that last year there were no incidents of bullying, this might be because:

• Relationships are excellent, people are behaving well and there is no problem with bullying.
• You do not have any systematic means of recording incidents of bullying.
• Bullying is so bad that no one dares report incidents despite the excellent system.
• The system for recording incidents of bullying is so inefficient that people prefer to deal with it themselves.
• Organisational culture is such that people do not recognise incidents of bullying as such.
• The reward system is such that there are disincentives for recording bullying.

It is only by considering each of these facts and opinions in the light of all the others that you will begin to form a true picture about organisational practice.

It is particularly important to recognise that much organisational practice is implicit. Many rules, for example, are not written down, they are simply part of ‘the way things are done round here’. It is often in these unexpressed rules, regulations, procedures and processes that the true values of the organisation are made manifest.

The very fact that these ‘rules’ are implicit, exhibited only in what people do, can make them difficult to identify. These difficulties must be overcome if you want to formulate a true picture of where your organisation currently stands with respect to its values. Several methods for making explicit the implicit ‘rules’ of your organisation will be discussed below.

CHOOSING YOUR METHODS

You can make a useful start by gathering as much documentary evidence as you can. Useful documents might include:

• job descriptions
• codes of conduct
• statistics
• annual reports
• representations of organisational and departmental structure
• written policies, rules, systems
• proformas/standard letters/questionnaires
• schemes of work
• staff handbooks/training manuals
• prospectuses/handouts/fliers and other promotional materials.

It is not just the content of these documents you need to consider. You will find it useful to reflect on whether such documents are:

• interesting and easy to understand
• clear and concise
• informative and accurate
• appropriate (not patronising, hectoring, insulting or impersonal)
• widely (and appropriately) distributed
• actually distributed to the appropriate audience.

An analysis of written material may provide you with some questions to ask as you conduct your review.

In gathering opinions you will need to be creative in order to ensure that the picture you construct is accurate.

There are many factors that might prevent you acquiring an accurate picture of employees’ opinions. These include employees’:

• ignorance
• wanting to please
• desire to cover themselves
• desire to protect others
• loyalty to friends, bosses and departments
• suspicion about your motives in asking
• misunderstanding of what you want to discover
• belief their benefits might be affected.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. If you want to construct an accurate picture of organisational practice you will need to take steps to eliminate or allow for these factors. Furthermore you need to do it consistently with the values expressed in your mission statement. This will probably mean that your methods need to be as transparent as possible. They will need to respect people’s loyalty, desire to protect themselves and others and defuse their suspicions about motives and possible harm to themselves and others.

Gathering evidence

Here are some possible approaches to the gathering of evidence:

• 1.‘Sensing’ – use focus groups to ‘sense’ organisational morale, reputation and stakeholder attitudes about particular aspects of organisational behaviour or provision.
• 2.Shadowing – shadow an employee/pupil/patient/fundraiser for a day (or a week) to see how the organisation looks from their perspective.
• 3.Mystery ‘customers’ - employ ‘mystery’ shoppers, parents, patients, carers to report on their treatment (make sure employees know about such shoppers).
• 4.Questionnaires - the old stand-by, but no less useful for that. Try to provide feedback to avoid cynicism and try not to stretch people’s goodwill by sending them out too often.
• 5.Walkabouts - walk around departments and outlets talking to employees and asking them about themselves, their work and the organisation. Take lunch in the canteen. Watch people arrive and depart. Sit in on training sessions, departmental away days.
• 6.Benchmarking - visit other organisations, both in your sector and sectors quite different from your own. How do they do things? Is morale high? What makes you say that? Is there anything you might learn?
• 7.Interviews - conduct or ask outside consultants to conduct interviews with stakeholders.
• 8.SWOT analyses - invite all stakeholders to conduct analyses of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
• 9.Critical Incident analyses - using illustrative case studies ask people to say how certain imaginary situations would be dealt with by the organisation. Is this how they believe these situations should be dealt with?
• 10.Helpful friends – ask what advice people would give to a friend or relative about to start work with the organisation?

These methods are not, of course, mutually exclusive. You could combine several of these methods, checking their results against each other.

TROUBLESHOOTING

To embark on step two is to show that the identification of the organisation’s values was not just an exercise in public relations. The realisation that things really are going to change is likely to trigger some resistance to your activities.

You might usefully treat such resistance as an opportunity to rehearse the arguments for what you are doing. Certainly you should ask people to share with you their reservations. Some of them may reveal real difficulties in your approach. The fact you have listened can only add to your credibility.

Other reservations you may find quite difficult to grasp: resistance to change is often emotional rather than rational. Your task will be to demonstrate that the perceived negative consequences of change are outweighed by the positive consequences. You can only do that if you know what the negative consequences are perceived to be. You will need to tease out people’s fears and address them head on.

Be aware that people can resist change actively or passively. Active resistance can involve generating and maintaining the sort of whispering campaign that undermines confidence. Passive resistance can involve simply failing to provide information or do what is asked: something always getting in the way.

Again you can only be open and honest about what you are doing, and about what you perceive as their resistance. This might encourage those who are resisting to be as open and honest about the fears that are causing them to act as they do. In the final analysis there may be people you cannot carry with you. Only you can decide whether their continued presence in the organisation will inhibit organisational success.

CONCLUDING THE REVIEW

The information gathered from each area of the organisation will need to be collected and collated. Then it will need to be assimilated, summarised and expressed in a clear picture of current organisational practice. It is at this point that organisational strengths and weaknesses will become clear.

Departmental, individual, systematic weaknesses will, of course, become clear before this point.

Step three will provide an opportunity to set objectives by which to build on these strengths and eliminate these weaknesses.

SUMMARY

At step two you will conduct a review of every aspect of organisational practice by methods devised to give you a complete and accurate picture of your organisation.

This will involve gathering:

• hard facts, and
• opinions

and considering different interpretations of these facts and opinions. This will enable you to:

• analyse, and
• evaluate

current practice in the light of your organisational mission. You will be rewarded by an accurate and full picture of:

• organisational strengths (which can then be celebrated)
• organisational weaknesses (which can then be addressed).

In Chapter 5 we shall be considering how to set objectives by which to build on these strengths and eliminate these weaknesses.