What Constitutes a Successful Organisation - Assignment Example

 Successful Organization Organization is a group of two or more persons coming together with a common goal. There are two types of organizations: profit making and non-profit-making organizations. Profit-making organizations aim at maximizing their profits by utilizing the limited and available resources while minimizing their costs. On the other hand, non-profit making organizations aim at providing quality and free services without intentions of making any profits. Most of these organizations are non-governmental organizations and the charity organizations. They aim at helping the less fortunate people in the society by providing them with accessible services and products. Organizations have a structure and management that guides its operations to achieve its objectives. This structure guides the members on whom to do, what to do, when to do, where to do it and to whom. This structure helps in smooth running of the activities (Cohen et al., 2008). Each organization has stakeholders who play different roles to achieve its goals. For instance, profit making organizations stakeholders are: employees, customers, government, shareholders, investors, suppliers, creditors and society as whole. All these stakeholders are very important to any successful organization. The market is becoming competitive day in day out. Therefore, for any organization to feature in the local and global market, it has to meet the current trends of business. The following qualities constitute a successful organization. Firstly, a successful organization must have a management structure. Management is the foundation to a successful organization. The management provides leadership to all the workers in the organization. For instance, researchers consider the mixed type of management best when dealing with a large organization whereas a flat management is preferable in small organizations. Mixed management consists of three levels of management: top, middle and operational or low level. The top management makes the final decisions for the organization and the head is general manager or the chief executive officer. Additionally, top managers make the strategic decisions that aim at achieving the organization goals. Middle management makes the department decisions (Daft & Marcic, 2013, p. 54-56). The departments include sales and marketing, finance, accounting and so many others. Departmental managers head these departments. The manager is responsible for making decisions that facilitates effectiveness and efficiency in the department. The middle managers are answerable to the managers because they act as a link between to managers and the operational managers. The operational managers get the work done by the workers. They help in quality production and defining each employee’s duty and responsibility. They supervise work by ensuring that every employee performs the job entitled to him/her. Therefore, every level in management is significant. Additionally, leaders should be moral and ethical. Any decision made should be fair and just. This is because the management has the power to motivate or decreases the morale of the workers. For instance, motivated workers achieve employee satisfaction and this will always increase their productivity that aims at achieving success of the business. All the management decisions must be transparent to all the stakeholders. This will always promote the ethical behavior. This is because an honest management means it is trustworthy (Notter & Grant, 2011, p. 178). This will promote ethics in organization thus reducing negative behavior like fraud that always leads to organization failure. Honesty also builds a good public organization image or reputation. This leads to attraction of investors who have interest in investing in the organization and this automatically increases the organization’s economic resources. Moreover, it retains and attracts better human resources that are more productive and ready to work with it (Drucker, 2011, p.10). Secondly, accepting and adapting to change. Globalization is real. Any organization that wants to fit in the global market must fit in the current trends. The trends can be an opportunity to increase the competitive advantage of the organization. For instance, adapting to change can be costly and challenging. However, a positive change has positive results. In current years, technological changes are really affecting the organizations. The organization is adapting the innovative changes that are facilitating quality and mass production. Technology is doing all this faster and cheaply. However, the initial cost is very high because of the purchase price and the installation costs. The consumer’s tastes and preferences are changing too because of technology (Ross et al. 2009, p. 47-52). Therefore, the organization must work harder by stretching their resources to meet the customer’s demand. If not, their competitors will do that and therefore the organization will end up losing greatly. For instance, communication means are now faster, reliable and adaptable. This is because of use of internet to in social media and website pages. Poor communication leads to failure because it means there will be poor coordination of activities. Therefore, any successful organization accepts change; otherwise, the change will change it (Bennis, 2003, p. 166). Thirdly, the effectiveness and efficiency of the internal structure is significant for any successful organization. The internal structure include the processes, systems, knowledge, models, knowledge, skills, experience and professionalism that combine with the employees competently in the organization. The organization must make sure that the internal structure not only improves efficiency of their tangible assets like machines and equipment, but their non-tangible assets like the knowledge and skills of their employees. For instance, the management should focus on the employee recruitment, training, performance appraisal, motivation and rewarding. The management of a successful organization formulates a recruitment policy that focuses on the required person’s knowledge, skill, experience and other goal-oriented qualifications (Phillips & Edwards, 2009, p. 122-125). This enables the organization to keep up the needed professionalism and the competence that will add value to the organization. When it selects professionals, it will be able to increase the efficiency because these professionals will be able to handle the organization systems and processes. This will increase not only the productivity of the organization but quality control as well. It also increases the number of the experts in the organization. This improves the decision-making processes because of wise opinions, ideas and experience that the experts possess. For example, the Wal-Mart Stores is one of the most profitable firms in U.S because of how they value their employees. For instance, the management involves the employee ideas and opinions in decision-making because they understand the firm’s organization operations than the managers. For instance, they are able to advice the management on the design, packaging and the quality of the products and services that the customers wan (Wentland, 2007, p. 26). The management rewards these employees when they contribute in making the strategic and operational decisions of the firm. Additionally, a successful organization will always formulate training programs to add more knowledge to its employees as this will increase their productivity and competence. Training will also help the employees in adapting the technological change. For instance, when the organization introduces a modern machine, the employees who should operate it may not be aware of the technology it applies. Therefore, this training will help improve their operation and efficiency because of the increased knowledge and operational skills. Training helps the employees develop their specific careers. For example, the Springboard for the Arts is an organization that aims at developing careers of the artists for them to earn living from their talent by nurturing their skills. They offer the art schools and seminars that help these artists grow their career. Training cuts off organization’s costs of hiring an external expert who is very expensive. This achieves the organization goal of minimizing its administration costs (Sveiby, 1997, p. 65). A successful organization management motivates its employees. This is through compensation benefits and other non-materials benefits. For instance, the management can provide overtime pay, health insurance, leaves, sick days off and so many others. This leads to employee satisfaction thereby increasing their effectiveness. For example, the same Wal-Mart firm is motivating their employees Fourthly, a successful organization values its people. For instance, it values its employees and customers. An organization that values these stakeholders will always have a competitive advantage because it gains a higher market share. Most of the declining organization that faces unfair competition ends up cutting their costs in expense of their employees and customers. This is not the solution to facing a stiff completion. The organization needs to formulate and implement a strategy that is helpful in solving this organization rather than hurting its people. These strategies help in improving the customer relationships, employee-employer relationships and the market share. Organizations that practice the employee layoffs end up having a high turnover at the end of their business year. This discourages any other interested personnel out their because of fear of the job insecurity in working with the organization. When these organization cuts off some customer services like advertisement, customer care and other services, it weakens their relationship. This becomes very difficult for their customers to deal with them and therefore moving to a more reliable and convenient organization. On the other hand, a successful organization looks beyond their labor costs in implementing the minimum cost strategy. For instance, they try other means like charging the customer services, hiring external advisors and other favorable strategies. This means extra costs but a long-term success because it is able to gain a higher market share and thus increasing their market returns. This is because they base their competition on people relationships and services. For example, the U.S banking sector in 1980s applied the approach of cutting labor costs and customer service costs. This strategy led to sector maximizing their profits for a shorter time and weakening their people relationships. This further led to decline in the market share because of high rate of turnover, absenteeism, reduced productivity due to reduced salaries and benefits, reduced advertising and promotions and poor customer services. On contrary, the Germany banking sector applied a different strategy to improve their people relationships. For instance, German bank trained their employees to gain more knowledge and skills, innovation, and providing better and quality services to their customers. This improved market share, reducing the turnover rates and gaining a competitive advantage, therefore, German banks became more successful (Pfeffer, 1998, p. 21). Fifthly, a successful organization promotes the ethical behavior within and outside the organization by drawing a code of ethics. It starts with a good and a moral leader. When the members in the top management make ethical and fair decisions, they are able to influence the same behavior in the organization (Todnem & Burnes, 2013, p. 23-26). This is because an employee will not behave in an unethical manner because the employer is morally upright. The employee ethical behavior will reduce internal and external fraud in all departments. Fraud is one of the challenging trends in organization because of improved technology. When the management compensates its employees fairly, the fraud reduces. Additionally, the employee absenteeism will reduce because every employee will be able to do their job accordingly, at the right time, at the right place and with the right people. Ethical behavior promotes teamwork as well-this increases the employee productivity. Additionally, ethical behavior in the organization promotes social responsibility of the organization to its stakeholders. For instance, it is always socially responsible to its employees, suppliers, customers, creditors, investors, government and society. It will not go against what is right and expected of them (Deb, 2009, p. 268). Therefore, for any organization to stand and succeed, it must consider the above factors. This is because they are the main factors that influence the success or failure of the firm; whether private, public, profit making or non-profit making organization. There are performance indicators that measure the level of success or failure of an organization is. Performance can be internal or external. Internal includes the internal process, employees, systems, and management while external performance includes customers, society and other stakeholders. First, the level of innovation and invention of the organization indicates success. For example, Apple is one of the most innovative companies that provide products and services like phones, computers, electronics and many personal and online services. Their level of innovation is very high. They are producing new and better product and services day in day out. They apply the newest technologies to meet their customer’s needs in adopting the technological changes. This indicates high performance rate of the company. Second, the level of employee turnover measures the success of an organization. For instance, if the rate of turnover is high it means the employees are not getting satisfaction they expect and the opposite is true. For example, Wal-Mart stores in U.S have a strategy of managing its human resource. For instance, they apply a motivation strategy to keep their employees and attract more and this reduces the level of turnover and absenteeism. Third, the global competitiveness of an organization measures its level of performance. Evidently, an organization with a high market share locally and internationally means it is competitive and offers what the customers want. On the other hand, if the market share is low, the organization is performing poorly. For example, coca-cola company is globally Perfoming Company. This is because its quality products and services are competitive and this gives them an advantage to have a high market share worldwide. Fourthly, the organization level of social and corporate responsibility towards its stakeholders measures its success. For example, Unilever Company is one of the most successful organizations in the food industry that confirm high level of corporate responsibility. They are making a positive impact in protecting the environment, supporting the society development projects, meeting the customer’s demand by opening many branches in different countries. This makes easy for them to access their products. References Bennis W.G. 2009, On Becoming a Leader. New York, Basic Books. Cohen, S., Eimicke, W. B. & Heikkila, T. 2008, The Effective Public Manager Achieving Success in a Changing Government. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass. Daft, R. L. & Marcic, D. 2013, Understanding Management. Australia, South-Western Cengage Learning. Deb, T. 2009, Managing Human Resources & Industrial Relations. New Delhi, Excel Books Drucker P.F. 2011, Management Challenges For the 21st Century, Butterworth-Heinneman, Oxford. Notter, J. & Grant, M. 2011, Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed In A Social World. Indianapolis, Ind, Que. Pfeffer, J. 1998, The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First, Harvard Business Press, Boston. Phillips J. J. & Edwards L. 2009, Managing Talent Retention: An ROI Approach. San Fransisco, Pfeiffer. Ross, H., Verclas, K. & Levine, A. 2009, Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission: A Strategic Guide for Nonprofit Leaders. San Francisco, Ca, Jossey-Bass. Sveiby, K.E. 1997, The New Organisational Wealth; Managing and Measuring Knowledge Based Assets, Berret-Kohler. Todnem, R. B. & Burnes, W. 2013, Organizational Change, Leadership and Ethics: Leading Organizations towards Sustainability. New York, Routledge. Wentland, D. M. 2007, Strategic Training: Putting Employees first. Amherst, Mass, Hrd Press. Read More