But Organisational Development is not about corporate structures and absolutely about how your people experience working for you and your company. It stops bottlenecks, creates structures and processes and ensures work continues to flow through the business. 

In the same way UX asks the stakeholders what is the problem you want to solve. OD asks your people, what is the experience you’re having and what could be done to improve it.That means looking beyond individual performance and considering the organisation as a whole: its structure, leadership, roles, processes, behaviours, communication, culture and employee experience.

OD asks questions of each area of the business and often explores the relationship between business strategy and how that is communicated and achieved. 

• Are expectations clear?
• Do people know who makes decisions?
• Are workloads realistic?
• Do managers have the skills to lead effectively?
• Are teams duplicating work
• Do people have the information they need?
• Are incentives encouraging the wrong behaviours?
• Is there enough psychological safety for people to flag problems early?

Good OD looks at the relationship between people and the environment in which you're asking them to perform. That's why OD reaches beyond HR. It's a way of thinking about organisational performance. How easily does workload flow and what is standing in the way.

Employee Experience is Part of Your Operating Model

OD and Employee experience are really closely connected, in fact it's here that engagement thrives or fails. If there’s too much control in the systems and not enough freedom to act autonomously trust fails and with that your people underperform, and/or leave. Employee experience isn't simply whether people enjoy working for you. It's what employees encounter as they try to get their jobs done. People need certainty and direction. They need to know what you’re trying to achieve and how you want them to get there but they also need the freedom to achieve this through feeling empowered. 

Think about someone's everyday experience:

• Can they make decisions?
• Do they understand what's expected of them?
• Can they challenge something safely?
• Does their manager help or hinder them?
• Are processes straightforward?
• Do different teams cooperate?
• Do decisions seem fair?
• Can they see how their work contributes to what you're trying to achieve?

In simple terms, if you ask someone to wash your car without explaining what a good job looks like or giving them the right equipment, you may be disappointed with the result. But it’s hard to say they’ve underperformed when they didn’t know what you expected and by your standards. But what's important here, is they will have felt they were doing the absolute best job they could. This mismatch in expectations happens regularly. Explaining, communicating, providing a healthy environment, having the best tools you can reasonably afford and explaining your focus and goals all help. That shared environment matters.

Empirical research shows time and again, that engagement is associated with performance and other organisational outcomes but the relationship is complex and shouldn't be reduced to “make people happy and productivity goes up.” OD looks at how you get the best from your teams rather than driving towards an unachieveable goal. 

Don't Forget Employment Law

There's another reason leaders need to think systemically about organisations - you can't redesign how people work without considering the employment law relationship. Changes to structures, responsibilities, working arrangements, reporting lines, policies or ways of working can potentially intersect with contracts, discrimination law, reasonable adjustments, redundancy requirements, TUPE, collective consultation and other employment rights.

At Fresh Seed this is the common problem we see. Businesses often approach employment law as a thing the lawyers can solve. The issue with that is that these days it's super costly, but also there’s a very high likelihood that ignoring the employee experience will lead to really complex employment relations issues and involve the unions. The avoidance of understanding UK employment laws is leading businesses to far more complex and costly outcomes which not only affect your existing teams but also impact your brand. This trend has begun to show up in every studio and with it the rise of union usage is creating a demand for change. 

It's How You Change That Matters

Acas emphasises that consultation should be a genuine two-way conversation in which employees can understand proposals, give feedback, raise concerns and have alternatives properly considered. It also notes that effective consultation can maintain trust, motivation and productivity during uncertainty. In some circumstances, consultation isn't simply good practice, it's legally required. But consultation feels like a misaligned word here. Consultation is simply about including people on the journey ensuring they understand the role and you understand their issues, or challenges and respond appropriately. 

Back to the car analogy, do you want to be driving a badly cleaned car, or would you prefer to pay for something shiny that you’re proud of? There is an interesting overlap here between good OD, good employee experience and good employment practice.

All three encourage us to consider if your employees have enough autonomy and a safe environment in which to thrive. So involving people in organisational change isn't simply something you do to make them feel better about a decision that's already been made. They often know things leadership doesn't.

They understand where processes break down, where customers get frustrated, where work gets duplicated and where seemingly sensible decisions create unintended consequences. Employee voice can therefore improve the quality of the organisational decision, not simply people's acceptance of it.

So Where Do You Start?

You don't need an enormous transformation programme. Start by becoming curious about how your organisation actually works.

Start with the business problem. What does the business want to achieve?

Get clear about the problem before designing the intervention. Most often the business wants to achieve better financial outcomes but its not translated to a how. 

Discover: What do you want to achieve?
Understand: How are you doing that?
Develop: What structures can you apply?
Implement: Roll it out and see what happens. 

Listen to the people doing the work

Don't assume the leadership team's experience of the organisation is everyone's experience. A great question one of our team regularly asks "what is the story this business isn’t talking about but is what you all feel?".

Look for systems

If the same problem keeps appearing in different people or teams, then look at what is stuck. 

Structure - Leadership - Roles - Processes - Communication - Capability - Culture - Employee experience.

People need certainty and direction, they need to know their path. Whether that's the business goals or the individual goals they need to understand where they fit. 

Check the legal and people implications

Before making significant changes, ask:

• Does this alter people's roles, responsibilities or contractual arrangements?
• Could particular groups be disproportionately affected?
• Do we need to consult?
• Are reasonable adjustments relevant?
• What employment law advice do we need before proceeding?

Change something, then learn

OD doesn't have to mean spending six months diagnosing the organisation before anything happens. You can start with small changes as you would in any project that’s not meeting milestones or deadlines in the way you’d hoped. When something isn't working, resist the temptation to immediately fix the person, introduce another policy or send everyone on a training course. Instead ask:

"What is happening in our organisation that is producing this experience or behaviour?"

Then go back to the basics:

• Discover
• Understand
• Develop
• Implement. 

For our support with any of this or more information about our services please email info@freshseed.co.ukand we will be in touch.