Companies looking to ensure the success of their construction projects often seek out the expertise of construction managers to get the job done. This is because construction managers typically possess both the people skills and technical acumen to seamlessly move a project from the pre-construction and construction phases to project closeout on-time and on-budget.
Construction managers are leaders first, setting the expectations and goals of a project. They ensure their entire team is aligned with the project vision and on-track to reach the end destination. As leaders, they understand that they are held to a high standard of accountability for their own actions as well as the actions of the teams they oversee. This means that construction managers have to know how to select and work with the right team to meet project performance expectations. They must also know how to deliver – providing project stakeholders with the expected results while strictly adhering to the project budget and schedule.
Ensuring that deliverables are met sometimes calls for the development of creative solutions. Construction managers are therefore also often experts in finding ways to increase efficiencies, working to devise and execute time and budget saving measures such as streamlining operational processes or reorganizing organizational structures. In order to know the impact of these changes on the business, construction managers must have the know-how to translate actionable insights into metrics and measurements that can be tracked over the duration of the project lifecycle and beyond. Finally, to be successful in all of the mentioned tasks, construction managers must be adept communicators, able to not only manage the project team but also the expectations of project stakeholders.
It should come as no surprise that the qualities that make for a good construction manager, that is, the ability to be a leader and communicator, to be accountable and deliver results, to ensure team performance, and to know how to devise and track measurables, are the same qualities that make organizations effective. They are the qualities that comprise the six steps of organizational effectiveness.
What is Organizational Effectiveness?
Organizational effectiveness is a concept that measures how a business, industry, operation (or any type of productive entity), gauges how effectively they have reached their organizational goals. Simply put, it is a model that assesses and highlights an organization’s performance that takes into consideration a variety of factors. Everything from internal processes, to leadership development, to talent management, to the structure of the organization may be taken into consideration.
But this isn’t to say that all industries should measure organizational effectiveness in the same manner. On the contrary, each industry or business that is looking to improve the effectiveness of their organization should do so in a way that best aligns with their organizational goals and culture. For instance, the way that organizational effectiveness is measured in the food manufacturing, would not be the same as how it is measured in the retail industry.
How to Measure Organizational Effectiveness
Corporate stakeholders should be continuously measuring the effectiveness of their organization. Fine tuning a project means it’s necessary to track and measure progress regularly, diagnose areas of improvement, develop and strengthen critical capabilities to sustain organizational effectiveness, and resolve and deliver solutions to drive targeted improvements. On each project, progress should be regularly tracked and measured, areas of improvement diagnosed, and organizational effectiveness strengthened.
Organizational leaders also need to establish well-defined goals. These goals might pertain to the overall product or to individual workflows and may need to be adjusted over the project lifecycle. Adjusting project objectives is common: Big ambitious goals can be broken down into multiple smaller tasks, made specific and measurable, and fashioned to align to team members strengths. And since organizational effectiveness is all about improving efficiencies in all regards, goals must be well planned out. For example, if there are repairs that are upcoming, are they planned accordingly so that they don’t disrupt the flow of production? Are safety measures being considered and implemented to satisfy all l OSHA requirements without hindering the output of production? These are all factors that experts in organizational effectiveness take into consideration when they define project goals and execute their projects.
Business leaders looking to increase efficiencies at their companies often turn to outside experts to help them take their most critical projects to the next level. Businesses may choose to bring in teams with expertise in organizational effectiveness to help establish a strategy customized to their clients’ organizations. The expert not only take into consideration their clients’ industries and goals, but help establish easily measurable metrics, open channels of communication, and implement strategies to improve internal processes.
What organizational effectiveness teams do not do is write the script for how their clients’ businesses should operate. They understand that their clients already have a system and a way of doing things that works for their organization. Simply put, they work with their clients’ existing systems and processes and find areas for improvement. Whether they are recommending new KPIs, or simply identifying and recommending a solution for an underperforming machine, an organizational effectiveness team will ensure that all avenues for improvement are uncovered.
Ultimately, companies that make their money in the construction business know that the best organizational effectiveness teams for major construction projects are construction managers, and that the best construction managers are those that excel at organizational effectiveness.