Essential Organizational Development (OD) Interventions for HR Practitioner
Organizational Development(OD) main objective is to create long-lasting positive changes in an organization’s culture, structure, systems, and processes. One needs to understand and be able to apply various organizational development interventions to achieve the goals.
Now let’s understand about the OD interventions every HR practitioner should have knowledge about:
Organizational Development
Organizational Development (OD) Interventions are structured programs designed to solve a problem, thus enabling an organization to achieve its goals. These intervention activities are designed to enhance the human resource management functioning and ensure managers and leaders to better manage their team and firm’s cultures. These OD interventions are needed to address the issues that an organization might be facing ranging from the process, performance, knowledge, skill, will, technology, appraisal, career development, attrition, and talent retention.
There are 3 types of interventions that an organization must be able to identify and plan to implement.
1. Individual — Interventions pertaining to an individual.
2. Group — Interventions pertaining to a group.
3. Organization — Interventions that are linked to the organization’s strategy and policy.
An organization must be able to identify the kind of OD intervention required. Once the intervention is identified the organization should then plan to address or eradicate the issue at hand in an effective manner.
Top OD intervention processes, which any organization must possess to address any type of intervention that HR practitioner should have knowledge of are:
· Entering and Contracting — The establishing the fact that the need of Organizational Development intervention is required to address an issue.
· Diagnosis — In this process, the identification of the intervention and establishing the root cause of the issue are done.
· Designing Intervention — In this process the designing the approach to address the issue or intervene to sort the issue out and bring value to the business.
· Leading and Managing Change — The HR maintains a focus group with a management buy-in and implements the designed intervention. Organizational Development intervention is a structured program driven from top to bottom.
· Evaluating and Institutionalizing Interventions — The human resource management evaluate the process of actions implemented and see if they are on track or if they need to re-design the approach so that the objective is met.
Types of Organizational Development (OD) interventions
OD is complex and the interventions are equally as intricate. According to Cummings and Worley, there is no way to know how many various kinds of interventions exist. However, human resource management can usually categorize OD interventions into four main groups:
- Human Process Interventions
Human Process Interventions are organization development interventions related to interpersonal relations, group, and organizational dynamics. These were the earliest form of interventions and HR practitioners are often aimed at enhancing communication within the workplace.
Individual interventions
Group interventions
Team building
Intergroup relations interventions
2. Technostructural Interventions
Technostructural Interventions are targeted toward structural and technological issues, which include organizational design, work redesign, and employee engagement.
Organizational (structural) design
Total quality management
Work design
Job enrichment
3. Human Resource Management Interventions
Human resource management interventions impact areas such as performance management, talent development, DEIB, and wellbeing in the workplace. HR-related activities are grouped under Reward and Recognition, Appraisal, and Career Development.
Performance management
Developing talent
Diversity interventions
Wellness interventions
4. Strategic Change Interventions
Strategic change interventions revolve around transformational change, restructuring, and uniting two or more firms together during a merger. Activities that are related to organizational strategies and policies are grouped under this bucket.
Transformational change
Continuous change
Trans-organizational change
There are different types of OD interventions in human resource management that target many factors of the organization at different levels. This will depend enormously on the issues being addressed, the number of people who need to be involved in the change, and the solution being used. However, an OD intervention strategy needs collaborative management and employees at needs levels of the hierarchy to cooperate for the change to be successful.
According to American psychologist Frederick Herzberg, job enrichment aims to improve the HR practitioner's job efficiency and employee satisfaction by creating a more significant scope of more challenging work, greater autonomy, better professional achievement, and recognition, and more opportunities for advancement and growth.
End notes
If one wants to create lasting change within the organization, one must tailor their approach according to the business’s requirements and also implement relevant OD interventions based on that.
