Building high performance organisations

High performance organisations aren’t born, they are made. Building them involves paying attention to customers and employees, innovating furiously and making quality a way of life says Ganesh Natarajan

Speaking at a seminar for CEOs, Harsh Goenka, chairman of the 8,000 crore RPG group of companies likened the change in the current global business environment to playing football on Astroturf as compared to the muddy fields of a previous era. The ball moves much faster, the goals have to be aimed at and scored with unerring accuracy and of course, the fitness levels of players have to be at peak levels at all times. Business enterprises today, particularly in fast changing sectors such as Information Technology, demand nothing less and today’s imperative is to set and achieve global best in class benchmarks in every aspect of performance.

What are some of these aspects and what initiatives can organisations take to achieve them? The key characteristics of high performance organizations are:

Product Innovation

A decade back, a poll was conducted among US and Japanese CEOs to determine what they perceived to be the key differentiator between companies in a business segment. While the Americans were equally distributed between quality and customer focus, the Japanese were unanimous that innovation was the key. The success story of Suzuki and Honda in India and Sony and Toyota worldwide bears out the importance of product innovation in today’s fast changing consumer markets.

Innovation is crucial in all aspects of the IT industry, which is why you find hardware providers experimenting with tablets and voice recognition, software firms using development and migration automation frameworks and training centres experimenting with blended learning to provide the ideal mix of classroom and e-learning for their customers.

A climate that fosters true innovation does not happen by accident – rather it is the result of a culture that is defined at the top and percolates to all levels of an organisation. Companies must invest in research and experimentation that pushes the envelope of technology and creativity and enables breakthroughs to happen regularly.

Business Process Optimisation

There was a time not so long ago when Business Process Reengineering was a new management buzzword and the craze to eliminate activities and processes that did not add value and to streamline the functioning of business processes met with both applause and criticism, akin to the BPO phenomenon today.

The fact that there is very little buzz around BPR today is testimony to the fact that it is no longer a fad but an intrinsic part of management in all progressive and successful companies. Many IT firms are engaged in process optimization for their clients during and prior to the computerisation or process offshoring activity and are also aggressively simplifying and streamlining their own internal processes.

While process optimisation is seen as a big bang exercise in some firms the best way to sustain the initiative is to make it an ongoing effort where all business processes and sub processes are put under the microscope often enough to ensure that creeping inefficiencies do not find their way into any process over time.

Making quality a way of life

Quality, as has been mentioned earlier, is no longer a competitive differentiator but something that customers expect from any vendor or partner who claims to offer a world class product or service. Note the deafening silence in the air today that’s in stark contrast to the time not so long ago when every ISO 9000 or SEI CMM attainment would hit the headlines of major newspapers.

In most export-oriented industry sectors, most of all software exports, quality has become an essential part of individual and team actions and the focus has shifted from product and process quality inspection and assurance to a company wide movement towards a total quality environment.

Quality as enshrined in contemporary quality models like the CII-EXIM or Malcolm Baldrige Awards has to be planned and deployed in every significant activity that engages management, from leadership to strategy to processes and people and it is only a well architected and implemented quality system that can deliver the results that are expected from any high performance organisation.

Customer Delight

The best organizations across sectors are those that are able to anticipate and satisfy every stated and implied business need of their customers. Customers today have abundant choices and the days when Henry Ford made his famous statement “I will give the customer any colour of car he wants, so long as it is black” are over. Only the best companies can succeed or even survive in today’s brutal and unforgiving market place.

Customer delight is achieved not only by designing the best products and services, but by investing in frequent customer satisfaction surveys, conducting customer meetings at every level of the organisation and making a continuous effort to engage with and listen to the customer’s voice through formal and informal interactions and forums.

Total employee involvement

Any business enterprise, particularly those in ever changing industries such as IT, the real power of the organisation lies in its people and no stone should be left unturned to ensure the commitment of all participants in the organisation’s journey to sucess. For this every firm needs to have a strong and inspiring vision and mission which is crafted and communicated by management to every stakeholder passionately and frequently.

There also needs to be strong emphasis on a core set of values and management must be seen to “walk the talk” and reward and recognise value champions and be quick to come down hard on any value violation. It is equally important to open multiple channels of communication and feedback. Face to face formal and informal meetings, newsletters and interaction forums, mentoring, 360 degree feedback processes and the creation of a friendly climate where every employee feels free to walk up to any high level executive and voice an opinion or concern – all this and more is what makes an organisation truly a motivating place to work in.

Business results are what every CEO is expected to deliver to the Board, but it is always good to remember that performance is an outcome of meticulous planning and robust execution of all the initiatives mentioned here. Any breakdown can lead to disastrous consequences and the rewards of a well executed integrated plan in these areas can truly build the great organizations that all of us dream to work in or lead.

Ganesh Natarajan is Deputy Chairman and Managing Director of Zensar Technologies