Must-Have Metrics for Today's Top Workplace Challenges & Human Capital Risks
Due to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of companies were forced to rapidly and unexpectedly shift to remote work. While there are many businesses that allow most of their workforce to work remotely, others are planning an eventual return to the office or looking to leverage hybrid work arrangements. Regardless of the decision, organizational effectiveness is key to maintaining or increasing productivity and achieving desirable objectives.
Organizational effectiveness is also indispensable in a variety of business areas and delivers several benefits including:
Companies with high levels of organizational effectiveness will continuously enjoy the above benefits and ultimately experience long-term success. Savvy business leaders looking to achieve such results in their organizations typically leverage a transformational style of leadership.
Transformational leadership describes a unique management style used by charismatic leaders to inspire and motivate employees. Rather than operating behind bureaucratic and hierarchical management structures, transformational leadership brings communication to the fore, enabling business leaders and managers to interact with employees at all levels, especially frontline workers. Transformational leaders are proactive about:
To achieve these results, let’s take a look at six ways business leaders can improve organizational effectiveness through transformational leadership.
One of the ways transformational leaders improve organizational effectiveness is by raising the commitment of workers at all levels. Engendering a stronger personal sense of commitment from staff pushes individual employees to take ownership and responsibility for their part in achieving business objectives and outcomes. Such strong commitment from employees translates into higher levels of productivity and inspires workers to dedicate more time and effort towards ensuring company success.
Transformational leaders want the best for employees both in their personal and professional lives. As such, they urge employees to pursue further education and training and pull out all stops to help said employees reach the top through professional development.
Assigning tasks and responsibilities to subordinates goes a long way in boosting their experience, expertise, and confidence. This is a great way to help employees acquire more skills that will enable them to climb higher and move on to more demanding and rewarding roles.
Also, as workers take on more responsibilities, they come to see themselves as leaders and this can greatly boost organizational effectiveness by perpetuating a cycle of transformational leadership across the entire organization. This also creates an ongoing managerial talent pool of transformational leaders that companies can leverage to keep on growing and pushing the envelope.
Transformational leaders improve organizational effectiveness by helping employees to effectively manage change and react agilely to the evolving needs of the marketplace. This can be achieved by improving processes, minimizing waste/distractions, and reducing errors, but also includes effective communication and transparency with your workforce
Transformational leaders develop change management systems that help employees adapt to new working conditions, technology and processes through effective governance and communication. Over time, employee feedback can be collated and analyzed to gauge the effectiveness of these systems and improve or adjust them where necessary.
Transformational leaders understand that the key to organizational effectiveness and innovation lies within personal and team collaboration. It’s easier to achieve business goals when team members function and collaborate seamlessly, regardless of location.
To cultivate a culture of collaboration, transformational leaders can organize regular team-building exercises to promote better working relationships among employees, especially for organizations with geographically dispersed teams. But most importantly, today’s hybrid and remote workforces require access to convenient and capable collaboration tools that support effective team collaboration
Savvy business leaders are leveraging transformational leadership to plan and implement their post-pandemic workplace strategies. As such, it’s essential for business leaders to use a data-driven approach to inform decisions that empower the entire organization to succeed.
This makes analytics an indispensable tool for the continued implementation and success of transformational leadership initiatives. Measuring the impact of innovative strategies can help transformational leaders stay on track and measure how close they are to achieving organizational effectiveness.
Humanyze’s Future of Work Report analyzed workplace analytics data and found that there was more collaboration occurring between direct teammates compared to pre-pandemic. However, the report also revealed that collaboration with managers and extended connections decreased.
To combat this and improve organizational effectiveness, transformational leaders must closely monitor weak connections between in-office, remote, and hybrid employees since this can directly impact mid to long-term innovation.
Transformational leaders achieve long-term organizational effectiveness by:
The latter can be achieved by mentoring subordinates and pushing them along the path towards becoming transformational leaders.
Transformational leadership usually challenges the status quo to make fast-paced, disruptive changes that overhaul traditional business operations. However, the disruptions are usually short-term and are necessary to produce long-term improvements in organizational effectiveness.
To reduce the impact of such disruptions, clear, concise communication is essential. Business leaders looking to leverage transformational leadership should provide employees with a clear vision of the company’s vision, objective and strategic direction. This helps employees to toe the line amidst the disruptive changes that may occur.
