Creating a Great Workplace!

Almost every OD professional and/or organizational leader has creating a great workplace as one critical KRA item for them. They resort to various tools and tricks to ensure that there is sufficient to activity to showcase when questioned on what they are doing to create a great workplace such as employee engagement initiatives, fun @ work activities (which essentially are only fun activities with no direct impact on creating a great workplace), recognition drives etc.

Seldom do we find our respected professionals trying to uncover what actually makes a great workplace and why do we even need a great workplace. A lot of organizations even with lousy people practices and totally disengaged and disillusioned employees may still be busy booking huge orders and delivering the numbers and in this era of 3 year long shelf life for CEO's if you are delivering numbers, does it really matter what kind of a workplace you are creating.

A lot has been written and argued about the need for creating a great workplace and it is always heartening to see every time a CEO puts his/her foot down and ensures that the whole organization is marching towards a common goal of creating a great workplace with a single point agenda of achieving SUSTAINED BUSINESS success. So, it can safely be said that the outcome a business may achieve by creating a great workplace is SUSTAINED BUSINESS success.

Now, coming back to the basic question, what do we mean by a great workplace?? Without an understanding of this basic definition I am not sure how successful we can be in our effort to create a great workplace.

To my mind a great workplace is one where employees have a psychological ownership of the organization, are willing to go that extra mile, look forward to contributing to the business success, have their personal goals completely aligned to the organizational imperatives, are looking forward to making everyday count at the workplace and see themselves as an integral part of a larger purpose.

If the above symptoms indicate that we have succeeded in creating a great workplace, what is that we need to work upon to make sure that the above symptoms start showing on the ground.

On a closer scrutiny of these symptoms you may find that all of them are actually outcomes of the work environment that we are able to create. The biggest player in creating this enabling work environment which necessitates exhibition of the above mentioned behaviors by our workforce is a function of how effective our local level managers are in their interactions with their teams. It is an established fact that managers are the lenses through which an employee visualizes the organization at large and hence it is the ability of our managers to create an enabling environment which can help our workforce exhibit behaviors which are congruent with that of the employees at a great workplace.

While the local level managers are the lead players in our effort to create a great workplace, they need to be supported adequately at an organizational level with necessary enablers to ensure that they are able to positively impact employees in their interactions and hence provide an environment which creates a great workplace.

In conclusion, it may be said that creating a great workplace is a function of creating great managers and hence our efforts of creating great workplace may bear maximum fruits if we were to root them in impacting, empowering and sensitizing our local level managers, with adequate support and role modeling from the organizational leadership. Every time we are faced with a question of creating a great workplace it may be our best bet to success if we were to keep our local level managers at the center of our strategy and design interventions around them. So, always remember, it is not the OD professional or the HR head who can create a great workplace, they can only be facilitators of change and it is our local level managers who can actually be the change and ensure that we are creating a great workplace for sustained business success.