organizational planning

Sleep time. Dream time.

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Her message is simple and powerful – Get some sleep.

Click Here to Watch a Video

After viewing this clip, you may be thinking, “What has this got to do with HR professionals and strategic planning?”  The answer lies in the power of giving organizations time for dreaming.  Especially when those organizations invest in the creative processes of shaping their own mission and vision.  Strategic planning should not be the production of a management checklist.  Rather, it should arise from the power of creative thinking.

When are our thoughts the most creative?  When we are given time to rest and to dream.

As Ms. Huffington states, we are in a society that seems to value the sleep-deprived state of one-upmanship.  Organizations, reflective of this society, seem to be caught up in the busy-ness of the business.  How much time is spent resting instead of doing, in order to allow for big picture thinking, planning and looking out for the future?  There seems to be far too much emphasis on a frenetic goal oriented checklist that narrows our work-life focus into the minutia and drains us of organizational life.  Getting ‘stuff’ done becomes critical so that we can prove our busy-ness worth in comparison to each other.

What gets lost in all of this frantic detail driven activity?  The ability to see and create mission, vision, and values, which come from, and enable, big picture clarity.

Organizations are living creations, made up of valuable human energy that ebbs and flows in natural rhythms.  All living things need to rest so that they can be re-filled and re-charged in order to meet new challenges in positive ways.   At the very least, let’s give ourselves a break and start building in some ‘organizational dream time’ on that checklist.

Maybe, we should sleep on it first.

Discussion Questions:

  1. How much time in your workday is devoted to thinking and not doing?
  2. When you are tired, how would you rate your ability to be creative?
  3. When are you most creative and productive within your workday?
  4. What is the value in being sleep deprived?

Needs Analysis: Keep it Simple

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Very often, organizations get caught up in over complicating and over analyzing what employees need or want.  As with most things, the more complicated a process is, the more opportunity for misunderstanding, miscommunication, and missing the mark.

Source: Ivelin Radkov/Shutterstock
Source: Ivelin Radkov/Shutterstock

This is definitely the case with needs analysis related to employee learning.  We hear how important it is to drill down into the core of an organizational psyche so that we can prepare and respond to multiple employee challenges through various analytical methodologies.  It does not have to be so complex.

Click here to read the article.

In this article, there are three simple questions to ask employees about their work life, including the very powerful but simple question, ‘What do you want to learn this year?’ . Simple questions can provide an abundance of responses.  The answers to simple questions will give us a wealth of material that we, as HR Professionals, can work with in order to provide appropriate learning tools to fit what employees tell us they need.

Asking questions should be the easiest part to creating understanding about what employees need.  Making sure we respond to what employees tell us they need is where the real challenge lies.

Discussion Questions:

  1. How would you respond to each of the three questions from this article in your current (or past) work environment?
  2. What types of responses from these three questions would indicate employee satisfaction?
  3. What types of responses from these three questions would indicate employee dissatisfaction?
  4. What tools would you use in the workplace to ask employees these three questions?
  5. What is the biggest risk to an employer when employees answer these three simple questions?