2010-08-11T22:00:00.000-07:00

A healthy organization:

"achieves its goals based on an environment that places importance on both improving organizational performance and supporting employee well being"

The health of an organization's performance is not difficult to see. Even a visitor notices an organization's performance through employee responses, management attitudes, and the “feel” of the workplace.

So assessing organizational performance can be formal and also informal and personal. But in one way or another it looks at stakeholder satisfaction, such as:

Shareholder satisfaction in financial performance;

Customer satisfaction in products and services;

Community or regulator satisfaction in environmental management;

Management and employee satisfaction in HR and IT services;

Employee satisfaction in employment conditions, work relations, and the way they are managed.

Organizational Health uses Systems Thinking methods, such as a Human Activity System (HAS), to improve Organizational Performance at the organization, process, and role levels.

Assessing Employee well-being is based on the effects of the work environment on employees. How employees are affected impacts on organizational performance (think of the impact of employee commitment and presenteeism can have). Examples of work environment effects include:

Workplace harrassment;

Fair treatment;

Coaching/mentoring for personal growth;

Stress or physical injury from the job;

Team relations and teamwork.

So how employee well-being is supported either contributes to workplace productivity or saps an organization’s health in compensation costs, effort, and damaging consequences.

Organizational Health is an evolving concept providing users with ways to understand and take action to improve performance and well-being.

For a fuller explanation please click into the Google Knol Organizational Health .

Here's wishing you work in an healthy organization, and if not that Organizational Health helps identify those issues and a way forward.

Organizational Health: An Introduction