Image by Moondance from

By Matt Mayberry

Measuring organizational health has become as complex as it is essential to success for today’s companies. It is no longer a matter of looking at basic performance, productivity, and profit indicators.

There is a broad spectrum of parameters to take the pulse of a company’s health and well-being that provide insights into the financial, physical, emotional, and mental health of a company. This holistic approach to gaining organizational insights provides crucial data, primed and ready for analysis and action.

3 ways to measure organizational health for your company

As an organizational leader, you want to ensure that everything is operating in peak condition. However, you understand the challenges of doing so in today’s business landscape, filled with a vast array of potential metrics. You want to make sure you find the best and most meaningful health indicators to keep everyone happy, fulfilled, and productive.

Here are three ways you can take your company’s temperature to enjoy optimal health, well-being, productivity, and profits for years to come.

Determine your company’s definition of “good health”

There are some commonly agreed upon attributes of organizational health, and those include internal alignment, quality of execution, and renewal capacity.

Internal alignment is vital and focuses on alignment with a center, focusing on the people, and alignment with a movement, wherein you focus on their talents and energies related to the execution of the strategy intended to move your business toward achieving its vision.  It’s just as important to know that you can continually maintain and renew this strategy for good organizational health.

Create and nurture a structure that supports your definition of good health with these steps:

-Encourage leadership to engage in meaningful conversation with the participation of everyone, from top leaders to each employee.

-Create a clear mission and set of core values to be understood as your company’s new center of alignment.

-Ensure that everyone understands, agrees with, and is committed to maintaining your core values.

-Engage in developing a shared vision and future strategies.

Encourage and foster employee engagement

Employee engagement is a strong indicator of your company’s health. Even better, you can measure it daily through data and real-world observations. It is crucial that you understand how much your employees care about their work and are committed to productivity and their interest in growing within your company.

When your employees are engaged and looking toward a bright future with your company, they are far more likely to be productive and stay with your company.

Here are a few ways you can gauge employee engagement in your company:

-Identify what your employees value. These values might include career development, teamwork, trust in coworkers and leadership, confidence in the future of the company and their place in it, transparent communication and change management, and value and recognition.

-Send out engagement surveys, periodically, but at least annually. Encourage employees to provide candid feedback and allow them to submit their surveys anonymously.

To get a full prism view of how your employee engagement strategies are working in various contexts, measure engagement across individuals, departments, and project teams according to how each of these groups engage with and feel toward the company.

Provide strong leadership to shepherd good organizational health

Strong leadership is the backbone to good health for top organizations. With effective leaders, you can establish your mission and help everyone see it through with encouragement and creating an atmosphere based on trust, accountability, and collaboration.

An effective leader or leadership speaker can tell you that it’s essential for leaders to keep the company’s vision at the forefront of everyone’s daily thoughts, providing encouragement, inspiration, and motivation.

All of this leads to increased and higher-quality productivity and better business outcomes, such as higher profits.

Strong leaders can also decipher when things aren’t working optimally and can help you focus on the means of course correcting to put everything back into alignment for success.

Therefore, you might consider investing in leadership programs that help to reinforce your company’s values daily to help your company stay healthy and succeed.

With these steps and strategies, you can establish effective ways of protecting and improving your company’s health to ensure the best outcomes for your employees and your business.

_______________

Matt Mayberry is president of Matt Mayberry Enterprises, Inc. He is also a bestselling author, an internationally acclaimed corporate keynote speaker, and one of the world’s foremost thought leaders on leadership development and culture change. His insights on business performance have been featured on Harvard Business Review, Inc. Magazine, Fortune, Business Insider, NBC, ABC, Men’s Journal, Chief Executive and many more major media outlets.