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Unproductive practices in state organisations

Productivity improvement and the reforms in the state sector organization have been at the centre of discussion over the years. Two of the most significant features that can be attributed to the state sector organizations is being too fat and being unproductive. All organizations want to be lean and mean to be efficient and effective. Though the managers are preoccupied with restructuring their organizations to improve productivity in order to meet the competitive challenges from the external environment these efforts time and again have failed to deliver the expected results. These practices of restructuring and downsizing have only offered some short term benefits but they have not been able to persistently meet all the challenges that lie ahead. The most critical aspect that had been neglected here is the adaptation of correct practices which is the key factor for the success for any type of organization.

One should always keep in mind that in all organizations, people are the key factor. Most of the state sector organizations are service oriented and the human factor becomes more critical. The dramatically changing internal and external environment call for new understanding and new people centered solutions. What solidifies the organizational achievement is the adoption of right practices to reinforce your reforms (down sizing or restructuring efforts). Thus it could be stated that the only this reforms galvanized by the correct practices will take you to the desired heights while the reforms alone could derail you sooner or later. While the management continues blindly to believe that the answer to all the ills of an organization could be addressed by restructuring, downsizing, decentralization and introducing strategic business units (SBUs), the worst evil which is the unproductive practices do still linger in our organizations. As such it is important to look at the adverse practices that have been hampering achievements of state sector organizations over the years.

Lack of attention to organisational culture

All organizations have their own unique organizational cultures, but specially the state sector organizations do not pay much regard to the significance of it. What can keep an organization intact in the internal and external turbulent environments driven by the forces such as restructuring, downsizing, financial restrictions, competition and market limitations is a rigid and strong organization culture. Without a strong organizational culture the organizations could disintegrate with time and fall apart. A strong organizational culture could stand tall in trouble times holding the organization together. But what is sadly happening in most of our organizations is the ignorance of the good practices that help in building and nurturing a strong organization culture.

Organisational

The leadership and shared vision are the key factors in building a strong organizational culture. The culture that the founders create has to be nurtured by the top managers with correct practices. Once an organizational culture conceives and begins to develop, there are number of practices that can help to reinforce the core values to ensure that the culture maintains itself.

But this is an area where we could tragically go wrong. The incorrect practices could lead to the destabilization of the organization by wakening the culture. Some of the critical practices that will lead to disintegration of the organizational culture which acts as the immunity system of an organization are as follows:

* The ad hock selection procedures built under external pressures (political) will fail to seek specific traits that tie the effective performance and fail to screen out the "miss fits" whose personal styles do not fit with the organizational culture where by you end up loading yourself with a bag of rotten eggs.

* Without testing the acceptance of the employee of the norms and valves of the organization, automatic confirmation could weaken the organizational culture. Not only you take in the miss fits but you make matters worse by confirming them overloading the organization.

* There is no special reward for those who uphold the vision and accept the values and norms of the organization. Everybody regardless their commitment or ability most of the time will be treated alike. This could have a very adverse effect on those who upholding the values of the organizational culture.

* It is very important to recognize and promote the individuals who have done their jobs well and who can rise up as role models to the newcomers in the organization. By pointing out those people as winners, the organizational encourages others to follow their example. But one of the common practices our organizations adopt is to give promotions entirely on seniority basis or based on fraternities hardly allowing any encouragement for employees to work for due recognition. This could dialute the cultural values.

Inducing negative attitudes 

The term attitude frequently is used in describing people and explaining their behaviour. Negative attitude (NA) reflects a personality disposition to experience negative emotional state. Those with NA tend to feel nervous tense, anxious, worried, upset and distressed. Accordingly those with high NA are more likely to experience negative mental state, they are more likely to have a negative attitude toward themselves, others and the world around them. This attitude tends to persist unless something is done to change them.

Employees attitudes can be changed sometimes. It is in the best interest of management to try to do so. The change of negative attitude to a positive attitude can bring about a significant organizational improvement through job satisfaction, increase productivity and customer/consumer orientation. However, there are certain barriers or rather practices which prevent the positive attitudinal changes taking place where special reference could be made to the state sector organizations.

* Empowerment (delegation) has become just a slogan in most of the state sector organizations and there is hardly any room for creativity and innovation which could directly contribute to inducing of negative attitudes.

* Unless the boss can show the individual how and why a negative attitude is detrimental to the carrier progress and to the organization in general the subordinate continues with the negative attitude. But in our organizations no special attempt is made to make a real change. The bosses in our organizations do not believe in putting their necks out to make the changes fearing of the back clash from the resistance to change. Unfortunately this practice continues regardless, resulting the employees to carry on with their negative attitudes.

* When the vision is not shared and the employees are not empowered they will not have enough information to change their attitudes. In our organizations corporate vision and mission is confined only to the top managers. The lower level of employees generally unaware the way in which they are heading nor have any reason to change their attitudes and happily carry on with the way they know best.

* When the competition among peers are not encouraged or rewarded one has no encouragement to bench mark himself against the performance of his peers. Thus in the absence of competition, rewards and recognition for good work the avenues for the change of attitude through persuasion by counterparts or peers will not work.

* When a person is dissatisfied with a situation the best way to change his or her attitude is to change them and get them involved in improving things or place them in positions where they can perform better. But unfortunately the management is reluctant to consider this co-opting approach which involves lot of red tapes thus allowing the employees to continue with their negative attitudes becoming more and more frustrated.

Lack of job satisfaction

The job satisfaction is a pleasurable or positive emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one's job or job experience. The job satisfaction is a result of employees perception of how well their jobs provide those things that are viewed as important. If the employees feel that they are working much harder than the others in the department but are receiving fewer rewards, they will probably have a negative attitude toward the work, the boss and the co-workers. They will be dissatisfied and become extremely unproductive. The following unproductive practices which are common in the state sector will make the situation worse and make the employees more and more frustrated and dissatisfied in their jobs.

* Most of the time employees do not get what they deserve as far as the autonomy and returns are concern. When the employees are not positioned well, not given challenging work, no status attached to the job they tend to be dissatisfied with the job. The indifferent attitude of the management seems to be 'you just survive'.

* Employees often see pay as a reflection as to how management views their contribution to the organization. Money not only helps people to attain their basic needs but is instrumental in providing upper level need satisfaction. Thus a decent pay is a must to keep the employee satisfied and motivated. But unfortunately the state sector employees are underpaid and the situation has led to poor productivity. This is a penny's wise and pound's foolish kind of a situation, which has turn out to be a vicious cycle.

* Promotional opportunities seem to have a drastic effect on job satisfaction. This is because promotions take a number of different forms and have a variety of accompanying rewards. But most of the time promotions are given purely on the seniority basis. But the real effect of the job satisfaction could be experienced only when the promotions are given on the basis of performance. This ritual promotions will make only a very few people happy while making thousands frustrated and unhappy.

* The most state sector organizations do not give the working conditions a great deal of thought unless they are extremely bad. Additionally when there are complains about working conditions the management tend to think that they sometimes are really nothing more than manifestation of other problems. This is an extremely bad practice as the working condition have a great effect on the job satisfaction. Our organizations lack of interest in the petty aspects of working conditions such as lighting, toilet facilities, partitioning arrangements, flooring, cleanliness of walls and quality of furniture could have a huge effect on job satisfaction.

Factors that demotivate

The motivation is a process that start with a physiological or psychological deficiency or need that activates behaviour or a drive that aimed at a good or an incentive. Given below are some aspects that could demotivation of the employees in state sector organizations.

* Job design has emerged as an important application area for work motivation. Here the job has to be well designed to keep the employees motivated. This is the application of the scientific management and the industrial engineering approach. But when the job is not designed well the employees could easily get frustrated and demotivated. However in the state sector the focus is generally on filling the vacancies, not at all the job design.

* The job has to contain higher level of variety, skill, autonomy responsibility and allowance for personnel growth and meaningful work experience. But the failure to enrich the job this way will result in demotivating the employees. In the state sector there are too many positions and overlapping job scopes which are not well defined leading to ambiguities in roles.

* The lack of certain job characteristics, or the job scope lead to demotivations of employees. Generally task significance lead to make the experience meaningful, autonomy leads to feeling of responsibility and feedback leads to knowledge of results. However in our case autonomy is hardly given to the employees leaving aside the very poor feed back systems leading to demotivation.

* Nothing can have a more devastating effect on a employees than the poor leadership. The "useless boss" could demotivate the employees than any other factor in an organization. The ritual promotions could put lot of drift wood in front of enthusiastic employees which could have an devastating effect.

* When your organization goals are not clear and the vision is not shared it could be a very significant cause for demotivation. Generally people strive to attain goals in order to satisfy their emotions and desires. Goals provide a directional nature to people's behaviour and guide their thoughts and actions to one outcome. In absence of a goal people will go astray and face conflicting situations. These ambiguities and conflicts are the main cause for dissatisfaction among employees.

Communication barriers

In practice, effective communication is a basic pre-requisite for the attainment of organizational objectives. Managers in their day to-day work dedicate about a third of their activity to routine communication. Ineffective communication is not only the major cause for the problems in our organizations but the root cause for practically all the problems in the world. Lover's quarrels, war between nations, generation gap, industrial disputes and organisational conflicts all could cause by ineffective communication.

The classical hierarchical organizations have formal recognition only to vertical downward communication. Nevertheless vertical downward communication has to be supplemented with the horizontal lateral communication specially when the organization becomes larger and more complex. The failure to recognize the importance of horizontal interactive communication could lead to lot of organizational conflicts. The horizontal interactive communication is the key for the functions such as task co-ordination, problem solving, information sharing and conflict resolution.

One of the vital unproductive practice in the state sector organizations is the failure of the classical hierarchical organizations to recognize the need of interactive horizontal communication. The senior management comfortable with the status quo generally possess a negative perception about horizontal communication. This will force new organizational forms to emerge and these informal organizational groups will tend to fill the communication void at the same time act as an alternative means of informal interactive communication. This informal system of communication can either lead to spread of false rumours and destructive information or it can effectively supplement the formal channels of communication. It can quickly disseminate the pertinens information that assists the formal system to attain goals. Usually this could easily go out of control and false rumours and information will become extremely difficult to manage. Thus proper practices have to be in place to avoid the build up of these harmful informal communication mechanisms by giving due recognition to horizontal interactive communication channels in state sector organizations.

Poor decision making

Decision making is almost universally defined as choosing between alternatives. When a manager plans, organize and control he or she is making decisions.

The decision makers have cognitive limitations because of the complexity of the organizations and the world in general. They must act in a situations where uncertainty prevails and in which information are often ambiguous and incomplete. In this type of environment the managers tend to deviate from rational (economic based) decision making to more irrational (social) type of decision making. They tend to make decisions based more on past experiences and intuition over stepping the rational threshold. Generally this could lead to a very bad unproductive practices harmful to organizations.

The impact that the information technology (IT) explosion has had on organizations is truly amazing. But the way and organizations utilize the Information Technology (IT) for their day to day management processors is not very convincing. IT technology has provided a very sound basis for decision support systems (DSS) and management information systems MIS revolutionarizing the decision making processes.

However most of the state sector organizations do not process strong MIS to support economically rational decision making processes. There is a inherited lethargy or inhibition for the use of IT (Internet/ Intranet), DSS and MIS specially shown by the old guards. The decisions shall be properly supported by financial and accounting systems that will fall in line with the concept of profit maximisation. However in the absence of proper accounting systems such as ABC (Activity Bond Costing) the decisions are taken most of the time based on feelings, emotions and instincts guided largely by ones unconscious desires. These practices will end up with managers making poor decisions which could put organizations into peril.

The participative decision making through formal or informal groups too are very important in organizations. Nevertheless the state sector organizations do not give due prominence to participative decision making techniques such as quality circles or employee empowerment which in turn has hampered creativity and innovation of the employees.

Unproductive group decisions

Group dynamics is a very important aspect in organizational behaviour. A highly cohesive group is analogue to a time bomb in the hands of the management. The direction in which a highly cohesive group goes depends on how it is led. The most common formal group which has an officially prescribed goal is a committee. Our organizations are inundated with committees. The committees are an instrument designed to solve problems, reduce conflicts and promote coordination between departments.

But the experiences over the year have shown that committees have most of the fine been made use of as a scape goat by the managers who are afraid to take responsibility for decisions. The improperly lead committees have been so unproductive a number of well known jokes have been made up about committees.

* A camel is a horse designed by a committee.

* The best committee is a five person committee with four members absent.

* In a committee minutes are taken but hours are wasted.

* A committee is a collection of the unfit appointed by the unwilling to perform the unnecessary.

Thus this overt unproductive practice of use of committees as a shield to avoid personnel responsibility for bad decision must be avoided as much as possible.

Leadership

Our organizations are full of managers and of course you need good managers for good management and leaders for good governance. But in our organizations we give less emphasis to the importance of leadership. The managers, the way our organizations perceive are those who are confined to the prison cell of planning organizing and control process and of course the good managers do it well. However in to-days ever changing chaotic environment management itself is not sufficient to keep the ship on course in turbulent seas but correct leadership is of paramount importance to see the distant light house and to navigate the ship to the safe waters (vision). The leadership calls for aligning of people toward a common goal and empowering and motivating them to take actions needed to reach them. While managers do the things right the leader does the right thing.

One of the most preconceived practices in our organizations is for the managers to confine themselves to the traditional management practice of planning decision making and controlling only. Our organizational focus is mostly on good managers with a scant regard to the importance of leadership. But what we really need is successful effective managers cum leaders to be persistent in achieving goals in this chaotic environment.

The successful leader/manager shall deviate from traditional routine communication and traditional management to give more attention to other important areas such as human resources management and networking activities. The present practice of just the paper qualification and experience for the selection of a manager shall be enriched by giving due recognition to the following skills possess by a successful manager. The correct organizational practices have to be redefined with the focus of modelling or absorbing the manager's who are open towards embracing and enhancing following leadership skills.

* Verbal Communication (including listening)

* Managing time and stress

* Managing individual decisions

* Recognizing, defining, solving problems

* Motivating and influencing others

* Delegating

* Setting goals, and articulating a vision

* Self awareness

* Team building

* Managing conflicts

Quality management slogans

Not only the workplace and the basic nature of the organization and the management of human resources have dramatically changed over the years but the surrounding environment that drive these changes too have changed. In this dynamic and volatile environment the quality of services have become the critical factors for survival. Delivering quality in the ever expanding service sector has become a buzz word. The quality concept specially in the service sector in my opinion is the critical aspect that catalyse all the organizational efforts in making the customer/ consumer delight.

The counting the defects and re doing and re adjusting was the quality assurance approaches practised up to now. But now we talk of total quality management or simply TQM, the widely publicized approach that focus on trying to meet or exceed customer's expectations getting things right in the first place. TQM encompasses the product bases as well as the services bases which heavily depends on organizational culture. Also the TOM differentiate the approach from the traditional inspection, quality control or quality assurance approach. TQM is a well organized strategy that is formulated at the top management level and then is diffused through the entire organization. Everyone in the organization from general manager to the lowest level shall be involved in the TQM process.

The TQM encompasses the feeling that the internal customer (employee) and the external customers (suppliers) are looked upon the same way the real customer/ consumer is looked upon as the "King". As such the TQM shall be considered as the tailor made solution to ensure the service level quality standards in the service sector. However through we talk of QC (Quality Control) and TQM they have become just talk and slogans only. Our organization failed to deliver and sustain the quality promise though there has been many attempts to introduce quality management systems.

The crucks of the matter is that our organization shall have a strong cultural valves for quality not just empty slogans. The cultural values must be accepted by the employee and their behaviour shall be driven by those values to actually deliver the quality to the customer/consumer. This is the only way that the sustainability of the quality management can be ensured.

Conclusion

In conclusion it could be stated that the organizational structure could be compared to a structure of a building. Constructing a building is not so complicated compared to the commitment and dedication one should possess to keep the building nice and clean in order to make the best use of it. But how well you maintain the building and how effective you utilize the building depends on how effective and good your practices are.

The most strong, elegant building, could become a pathetic eye sore in no time if correct practices are not adopted. The same is true for our organizations as well.

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