Annual Organizational Health Checkup

If you are like most people, you probably go to your doctor for an annual checkup. You want to know if something is wrong. You want to know if you are in good health. If something needs improvement to get your back to your optimal health, you want some kind of plan. The annual checkup helps you to know that you’re staying healthy and can take action to handle little troubles as they emerge rather than leaving things until you are seriously ill.

Can you imagine taking care of your team or organization in the same way?

The Value of an Organizational Health Checkup

First, let me explain why this is valuable to consider. In leading your organization, you want to continue to close the gap between potential and results. This means keeping your people engaged. For people to sustain their engagement, the condition of the organization must be life nurturing, not life depleting. Organizations tend to drift into life depleting habits and patterns. And this is where the annual health checkup comes in.

If your organization has drifted into having life depleting conditions for the people involved, you want to have a timely understanding that this is happening. You also want a plan that will regenerate your organization into a life nurturing environment. You want to reduce the gap between potential and results and put a stop to conditions that could widen the gap.

Please note that it is not only you that wants to have a timely understanding about the continued health and well being of your organizational climate. Your people also are invested in this organizational health. Studies suggest that people are more likely to leave a job because of the organizational climate than they are because of dissatisfaction with the actual work they do. Therefore, we can conclude that people who work in a life nurturing organizational climate are more likely to stay. The people within your organization have their fingers on the pulse of your organizational health. When it begins to drift into a life depleting climate, you want them to be informed. When they are informed and engaged, the are also engaged quickly with implementing the regeneration plan.

Achieving and Regenerating Organizational Health

Organizational health includes 2 phases: diagnosis of the current organizational health followed by development and implementation of a regeneration plan. We designed our Achieving and Regenerating Health and Balance work (and accompanying workshop) keeping in mind the importance of engaging all of the people in the organization. Here is what we built in:

Development of the capacity in your organization to carry out the annual work of diagnosis and development of a regeneration plan.We begin with an in-house training. Key people in your organization take the Achieving and Regenerating Health and Balance workshop together, as a team.
People are engaged throughout the diagnosis so that they are informed every step of the way. We involve as many people in your organization as possible in the diagnosis using participatory meeting method Whole Person Process Facilitation.
The plan for regeneration begins during the diagnosis. During the process, people are enabled to examine the organization with the help of a few simple tools. They engage in conversations with each other. Once the process has started, it is almost impossible to stop them from generating ideas of what to do to shift to a life nurturing workplace. Often, the ideas are simple to implement resulting in a big difference.

You won’t want to slow the turnaround down. People are engaged, solutions are found, and a life nurturing workplace is strengthened. The resultant re-energizing of engagement reduces the gap between potential and results! This can all be achieved fairly quickly. And then with the annual organizational health checkups that can be done by the key people who took training with us, good health can be maintained.

Organizational Health Checkup for Any Sized Organization

An organizational health checkup can be done within a variety of organizations. A small business with a handful of employees can train everyone in the process and work together towards consistent organizational health. A team or business unit goes through the process within days, and results start immediately. A large organization takes a little longer to complete the process. The results are also experienced immediately.

Can you imagine an organizational health checkup that is actually life nurturing as a process? Would this appeal to you for your team or organization? Leave your insights in a comment below.

_{Photo Credit: Sasha Dunaevski – FreeImages.com}