One of the keys to developing a lean (highly effective and efficient) management process in your company is by making regular assessments of its psychological infrastructure. Think of it like getting a regular check up of your company’s mental well-being.

Here are seven simple steps to you can apply to your own business based on principles of industrial/organizational psychology:

1. Move about and observe your business as if you were an outsider.
2. Question the why and the psychology behind all the behaviors that you see
3. Take a survey of employees about work satisfaction, concerns, wishes, complaints. There are easy to use web-based tools like www.formstack.com that make setting up surveys easy and you can look at this simple pdf  for instructions on how to design a simple survey
4. Look for patterns of dysfunction or disruption, record the frequency and intervals
5. Look for the underlying mechanisms (psychological states) that create these negative patterns
6. Explore alternative workplace dynamics in small 2-3 people discussions and then as you generate agreement increase the size of the groups.
7. Develop a means of measuring and changes that you are going to make. Be clear about establishing baselines, benchmarks (goals), and the criteria for evaluating progress.

Eventually you will want a social scientist to come in and aid you in your organizational development. It takes an experienced industrial psychologist to properly help with something as complex as organizational development and you don’t want to tax your company resources doing a job that is better done by an outsider. Even so, these are some of the valuable steps you can take toward assessing and addressing organizational issues.

Please use the comment space below to share experiences you have had with assessing the effectiveness of your organization or post comments and questions.

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