What is Organizational Development? - Human Resources Career Series
Summary
TLDRIn this informative video, the host dives into the realm of Organizational Development (OD), defining it as a systematic approach to enhance organizational effectiveness. They introduce the concept of action research, developed by Kurt Lewin, as a three-step process aligning with Lewin's change model of unfreezing, changing, and refreezing. The host also shares personal experiences, including moving into a senior OD role and engaging with global professionals. The video covers various OD interventions such as training courses, organizational assessments, and team building workshops, emphasizing their impact on both professional and personal growth.
Takeaways
- đ The video is part of a series on HR as a career, focusing on Organizational Development (OD).
- đ„ The presenter recently moved into a role as a Senior Organizational Development Advisor.
- đ The presenter has been connecting with people globally on platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter, emphasizing the importance of networking.
- đ The presenter recommends starting as a generalist in HR before specializing, to have a broad base of experience.
- đ OD is defined as a systematic approach to improve organizations and people for competitive advantage.
- đ§ OD activities are based on rigorous research and analysis to identify and solve issues within an organization.
- đ Action research, developed by Kurt Lewin, is a fundamental concept in OD involving planning, action, and results, aligning with Lewin's change model of unfreezing, changing, and refreezing.
- đ OD interventions are designed to improve organizational or employee experiences and are evaluated for effectiveness.
- đ„ Training courses are a key part of OD, aiming to enhance employee skills and behaviors both professionally and personally.
- đ Organizational assessments or engagement surveys are used to gather employee feedback and inform action plans for improvement.
- đŹ Team building and workshops are common OD interventions to improve team dynamics and collaboration.
Q & A
What is the main topic of the fourth video in the series?
-The main topic of the fourth video is Organizational Development (OD), including its definition, the concept of action research, and the various activities that fall under OD.
What is the speaker's new role in the field of HR?
-The speaker has moved into a role as a Senior Organizational Development Advisor.
What does the speaker recommend for HR generalists before specializing?
-The speaker recommends gaining a good grounding in generalist HR before specializing, as it provides a broad experience base to draw from.
What is the purpose of Organizational Development according to the common definition mentioned in the script?
-The purpose of Organizational Development is to change organizations and people for the better, helping them contribute more effectively and leading to a competitive advantage.
What is the focus of OD activities in terms of organizational change?
-OD activities focus on changing things from a systems perspective, looking at whole departments or structures of an organization and aiming for systemic change.
Who is Kurt Lewin and why is he significant in the field of OD?
-Kurt Lewin is considered the founding father of OD. He developed the concept of action research and was instrumental in shaping OD into what it is today.
What are the three steps involved in action research as mentioned in the script?
-The three steps involved in action research are planning, action, and results.
What does the acronym 'ITUPAR UCL PRELL DE GFI AF' represent in the context of the script?
-The acronym represents a mnemonic device the speaker uses to remember how to draw the action research model.
What is the significance of the feedback loops in the action research model?
-The feedback loops in the action research model are significant as they allow for continuous evaluation and adjustment of the process, ensuring the effectiveness of the interventions.
What are some of the interventions that the speaker has experience with in the field of OD?
-The speaker has experience with interventions such as training courses, organizational assessments or engagement surveys, and team building and workshops.
How does the speaker describe the impact of training courses on employees?
-The speaker describes the impact of training courses as satisfying, noting that they can make a difference not only in an employee's professional life but also in their personal life.
What is the role of OD in the engagement survey process?
-In the engagement survey process, OD is generally responsible for analyzing the results, working closely with business leaders, and helping them come up with action plans to improve the results.
What is the purpose of team building workshops in OD?
-The purpose of team building workshops in OD is to help team members understand how each other works and to improve teamwork by working on activities together.
What personality profiling tool is the speaker accredited in and what is their opinion about it?
-The speaker is accredited in the Facet5 personality tool and considers it one of the best tools they have used as an HR practitioner, being both powerful and easy for employees to understand.
Outlines
đ Introduction to Organizational Development
The speaker begins by greeting the audience and sharing their recent career move to a senior organizational development advisor role. They express excitement about making global connections and encourage viewers to connect on LinkedIn and Twitter. The speaker then outlines the video's content, which includes defining organizational development (OD), discussing action research, and exploring OD interventions. They also share their personal career path, emphasizing the value of starting as a generalist in HR before specializing. The paragraph concludes with a brief mention of Kurt Lewin, considered the founding father of OD, and introduces the concept of action research.
đ Understanding Action Research and Lewin's Change Model
This paragraph delves into the concept of action research, developed by Kurt Lewin, and its significance in OD. The speaker explains the three-step process of action research: planning, action, and results, which aligns with Lewin's change model of unfreezing, changing, and refreezing. The speaker shares their personal learning technique of creating mnemonic devices and provides an example from their academic experience. They then introduce an acronym to remember the action research model and proceed to visually illustrate the model, explaining each stage and its relevance to the change process within an organization.
đ Practical Applications of Organizational Development
The final paragraph shifts focus to practical OD interventions. The speaker discusses the impact of training courses in HR and OD, emphasizing their value in both professional and personal growth. They mention having facilitated courses on unconscious bias, crucial conversations, and crucial accountability. The paragraph continues with a discussion on organizational assessments and engagement surveys, detailing the process and the OD professional's role in analyzing and improving outcomes. The speaker also covers team building and workshops, explaining their purpose and the benefits of understanding personality differences within a team. The paragraph concludes with a reference to a previous video on the FACET5 personality tool, highlighting its effectiveness in the HR field.
Mindmap
Keywords
đĄOrganizational Development (OD)
đĄAction Research
đĄKurt Lewin
đĄGeneralist HR
đĄIntervention
đĄUnfreezing, Changing, and Refreezing
đĄTraining Courses
đĄOrganizational Assessments
đĄTeam Building
đĄPersonality Profiling
Highlights
Introduction to the fourth video in a series about HR as a career, focusing on Organizational Development (OD).
Definition of Organizational Development as a systematic approach to improve organizations and people for competitive advantage.
Explanation of Action Research, a concept developed by Kurt Lewin, the founding father of OD.
Description of the speaker's new role as a Senior Organizational Development Advisor and networking experiences.
Recommendation for HR professionals to gain a broad generalist HR experience before specializing.
The importance of OD activities being based on research and analysis rather than gut feelings.
Discussion on OD's role in identifying issues, implementing interventions, and reviewing their effectiveness.
The circular nature of Action Research and its alignment with Lewin's Change Model of Unfreezing, Changing, and Refreezing.
Personal anecdote about using mnemonic devices for effective learning and memory retention.
Introduction of the speaker's mnemonic device 'Flintstone' for remembering the Action Research model.
Visual representation and explanation of the Action Research model using a diagram.
Highlighting the importance of feedback loops in the Action Research process for continuous improvement.
Examples of OD interventions such as training courses, emphasizing their impact on both professional and personal life.
Description of Organizational Assessments and Engagement Surveys as tools for understanding employee sentiment.
Insight into Team Building and Workshops, their purpose, and the logic behind their activities.
Personality Profiling as an OD intervention to understand and improve team dynamics.
Encouragement for HR professionals to consider specializing in OD and the opportunities it presents.
Conclusion and thanks to viewers for their engagement and interest in the topic of Organizational Development.
Transcripts
hi everyone welcome back to the channel
i hope that everyone has had a great
break and you're back at work and
getting ready for a big year if you're
still on break i hope that you're
enjoying
time with your family and friends and
staying safe this is the fourth video in
a series that i'm putting together
covering hr
as a career and in this video i'll be
talking to you about organizational
development so i'll talk to you
about a definition of organizational
development
i'll talk to you about a concept called
action research and then i'll also go
through some of the things that
organizational development does just a
quick bit of housekeeping before we get
into that you might notice a rather
unsightly scratch
on my head i went to brazilian jiu jitsu
last night and it seems that i zigged
when i should have zagged
and i ended up getting punched in the
head but it wasn't anything too serious
it was obviously accidental but i just
thought i'd give a quick explanation
regarding that but i'd like to make a
video every week so the show must go on
so i'm filming with that scratch there
but i'm hoping it's not
too distracting for anyone so back to
the content this has been a really
exciting video for me to put together
this week because i've actually just
moved into a role
as a senior organizational development
advisor as some of you
may have seen on linkedin if we haven't
yet connected on linkedin please do add
me and also on twitter as well it's been
really cool making connections and
forming new relationships across the
world
with people from russia and brazil and
new york and even egypt
and it's been really nice to have some
encouraging comments from people i've
only been making videos since
june 2020 and it's been a great
experience so far so i just wanted to
say a quick thank you to everyone who is
watching and commenting
so over the course of my career i have
done different elements of
organizational development i've done
different pieces of od work as part of
my role as a general as business partner
but i've never operated as a true
specialist
my career path coming out of university
has been solely as a generalist which is
something that i recommend for a lot of
hr journalists is to get
a good grounding in generalist hr before
you start to specialize
obviously that's up to you as an
individual but i think once you
specialise it's good to have a a broad
generalist hr
experience base to draw from so what i
wanted to do is just go back to basics
and just update my knowledge a little
bit so that's what this video will be
covering
there are many different definitions for
organizational development but one that
is
common and key that comes through in
terms of the research that i was doing
is that it's a way to change
organizations and people for the better
to help them contribute in a more
effective way and lead to
a competitive advantage to go into a
little bit more detail
organizational development activities
are really focused on changing things
from a systems perspective
so they look at a whole department or a
whole
structure of an organization and they
really want to change things
in a systemic in a in a systems-based
way so od
activities they're not just made up on
the fly based on what an od professional
thinks should happen or a gut feeling
it's often based on the identification
of an issue or a problem that needs to
be solved through research and rigorous
analysis and then once you've identified
that issue then
as an od professional you'll come up
with an intervention which is designed
to
improve the organization or to improve
the employees
experience or their ability to get
things done and then once you've
implemented that it's a case of
understanding whether the intervention
was effective
or whether you need to go back and
review what you did and maybe tweak
things a little bit so it's important to
note like a lot of things in
hr od doesn't actually own the problem
but they help organizations to
essentially help themselves
so you can't discuss od without
discussing action research which is a
concept that was developed by
kurt lewin who is widely thought of as
the
founding father of od so as a little bit
of a history lesson of kurt lewin he was
born in 1898
and he died in 1947. kurt lewin was
instrumental in developing od
to what it is today so back in the early
1940s he was conducting research
in organizations and trying to develop
ways
of doing things and ways of making
organizations better he was
experimenting using a process of
planning
taking action and then looking at
results and then reviewing it and that
process there
is what is now commonly referred to as
action research which has obviously been
built upon
since his research back in the early 40s
and it's something that is used by a lot
of od professionals today
so action research essentially involves
three steps so there's planning action
and
results so those three steps align to
lewin's change model which
is unfreezing changing and refreezing
it's probably best to explain this model
using a bit of a diagram so i'm going to
draw one for you shortly but before i
did that i thought i would explain
why i think drawing things and
recreating things is a great way to
learn
back when i was completing my master of
marketing at university
i used to use mnemonic devices to
remember things so i'd go through each
topic i'd make my notes and then i would
turn those notes into
abbreviations or mnemonic devices which
would summarize an
entire concept into a few words and by
the end of my exam revision i would have
a couple pages double-sided or sometimes
i'd be able to get the whole semester
onto two pages where i would have all
these different acronyms that wouldn't
make sense to anyone but made sense to
me and helped me to remember things so
i'll show you an example of one now so
you can get an idea
of what i'm talking about and that'll
make it easy to understand the
the model that i'm going to show you
shortly so as you can see on the screen
here this is an actual example of one of
my
marketing cheat sheets that i put
together at the end of one of my
subjects when i was preparing for an
exam so i'll just draw your attention to
the one on the top left the consumer
decision making process
so i distilled that down to an acronym
which is
as you can see there pris a p to p m
pale which obviously it doesn't make any
sense at all but i remember at the time
i was able to memorize just that acronym
by itself and then when i'd get into my
exam i'd write all these out
really quickly and furiously so i
wouldn't forget them and i'd write them
out on the
the note paper and then as i was writing
my exam i'd be able to refer to them
obviously everyone is different but i
found this to be a really effective
method to remember things and that's
what i'm going to show you now
when i'm going through the action
research model the acronym that i've put
together to remember the action research
model is
itupar ucr prel de gfiaf
liebus cherdipogem or for short the
flintstone
it does sound a little bit like i'm
having a stroke i am not
but that acronym there is something that
i've put together that will help me to
remember how to draw the action research
model which i'll show you now i am using
good notes now
uh which if you are thinking about
switching from a paper notebook to
an ipad app i highly recommend goodnotes
i have put together a video covering
some tips in terms of making the switch
so i'll include that in the description
as well so i'll just write down the
bottom here
isopar ucr it's probably a bit big so
i'm just going to make it a little bit
smaller
one of the the obvious examples of
writing on an ipad you can just change
things around so easily the next part is
prell der g v app
reapers okay
so i've got the mnemonic device written
out so what i'm going to do now is just
populate the model itself so
i know at the top it's going to be
across the top
input transformation and output
so then i might just change the color
here to red and i'll just zoom in a
little bit
and the first stage is planning next one
is action
and the next one is results the final
part i think i might make this one
a different color again and i'll go with
green is lewin's change model
which is down the bottom here you have
unfreezing
changing and refreezing so in terms of
the unfreezing the planning stage what
i'm going to do
is i might just get rid of this section
here so it's easier for me to see
i'm just going to bring that up here so
the first one is preliminary diagnosis
data gathering then you have feedback on
results
and action planning so those are the
types of activities that you would do
in that first stage that planning stage
where you're starting to
discuss with the organization what is
the issue that we have here and and what
could we
what do we think we could do about it
the next stage is action planning
where you look at learning processes and
then you
look at action planning
and then action steps the final one in
results
is change in behavior where you're
hoping that something has changed and
you're hoping to
re-freeze and reinforce and lock those
behaviors in
and then there is again data gathering
to make sure
that the change that you wanted to
implement was actually effective and
then the final one
is measurement the action research
model is circular innate in nature and
so there are various feedback loops
which i'll just add as well
where you're at each stage in the
process you're
trying to determine whether you're doing
the right thing and you're giving
feedback to the previous stage of the
process
to see whether you need to go back and
change the intervention or change what
you're doing
so now that we have a complete model i
just wanted to highlight the
aspects of lewin's change model in terms
of unfreezing
changing and re-freezing so in
the unfreezing stage here that is the
stage
in which the organization or the
individuals start to explore
a different way of doing things in the
changing stage here that is where
the action planning occurs and where
you're trying to find
a new way of doing something a new
behavior the final stage
refreezing that is where the
organization
embeds the behavior and they try to
reinforce it
so i'm not going to go through the whole
model in detail because i think that
would make
the video too long but i will include
some links in the description
if you'd like to learn more about it and
read some of the things that i was
reading as part of the research for this
video
so in terms of what od does it is going
to be different based on the
organization
that it is operating in but i wanted to
go through
a few interventions that i've had
experience in and ones that i think are
quite powerful as well so i think the
training courses are one of the most
satisfying parts of a career in hr
and od it's really nice to see employees
learn something new
and apply it and then come back to you
later and say oh you know that training
course
it really made a difference in terms of
what i was going through at work
but it also helped me in my personal
life because a lot of the training
courses
that i have facilitated so i facilitated
unconscious bias
i've also taught crucial conversations
and crucial accountability
and those courses they really make a
difference in not only an
employee's professional life but a
personal life as well so i'll include a
link in the description to
some of the books that the training
courses are built from
and if you get the opportunity to have a
read through them they are really quite
powerful and they can make a big
difference in your life the second
intervention that i wanted to talk to
you about is organizational assessments
or engagement surveys as they are most
commonly seen in organizations
so an engagement survey is where an
organization will send a survey to all
of their employees asking them various
questions about
how they feel about different processes
in the organization
is there too much structure are there
too many rules how is decision making
made
what do they think about leaders and
many other different topics
and once the results are finalized od
is generally the custodian of the
engagement
survey process and they're responsible
for analyzing the results
obviously working closely with the
business leaders and helping them to
work through the results and come up
with action plans and ways to improve
the results they've received so the
final intervention that i wanted to talk
about is
team building and workshops so this is
probably one of the most
commonly known interventions from an od
perspective i'm sure that many of you
have been to
a team building day or a team building
workshop where you and your team members
have gotten together and maybe
tried to build a tower out of straws and
sticks to hold a marshmallow i know i've
done a few of those in my time
and whilst they can be a bit of fun the
logic and the theory behind them is that
working on something together as a team
will help you to learn and understand
how each other works and how you can
work better together i've participated
and also facilitated other more
structured team building workshops
one that i've done quite a bit is where
employees complete
a personality profile assessment and
then as a group we come together and
look at how
different aspects of personality work so
during the personality workshop we will
often look at
how one person's personality might have
a different view on things to someone
else's personality
and how can we work together as a team
to work through those different aspects
and to get things done so if you are
interested in personality profiling i
have made another video where i go
through the facet 5
personality tool which is the tool that
i'm accredited in
it's one of the best tools that i've
used as an hr practitioner it's a
pleasure to
debrief as a practitioner but it's also
something that is really powerful
and easy for employees to understand so
i'll include a link in the description
if you'd like to watch that okay so
that's been a quick overview of
organizational development i really hope
that that has been useful for you and
you've learned something about od that
you maybe
weren't aware before if you are new to
hr as a career and you're thinking about
where you want to go in the future and
what you might want to specialize in
i'm hoping that this has given you an
idea of different things that you can do
thank you so much for taking the time to
watch the video
and i will see you in the next one
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