Healthy Management in Healthy Organizations

Healthy Management in Healthy Organizations

We live times where health has become an important value: we eat healthy, we live healthy or at least we wish we would. However, it seems it’s very hard for us to extend these principals to the type of management that we adopt. We think strategic, we plan, we present ourselves as leaders, but do we truly act healthy?

First of all we must ask ourselves what healthy means for an organization. It is clear that the signs of health lay in its profitability, in the economic stability on medium and long term, in its capacity to overcome potential crisis or market problems. Healthy also means a good image on the market, including the working market. Healthy means responsible, both in the environment and in the society, in the community in which the company activates. From the HR management point of view, healthy can be translated by high performances, accomplished by valuable and motivated employees, with optimum costs.

Transposed into practice, healthy HR management encourages the following aspects:

  • Adequate working space and time. Few managers understand the importance of the physical working environment and the overload of tasks. The lack of light or too much light, lower ceilings, little distance between desks, can influent in a negative way and induce stress. The same effect has too much work and, not at all paradoxical, little work.
  • Optimal employee structure. The bushy hierarchy, too much unproductive personnel, always generates adverse reactions in the organization, leading to illness.
  • High known and accepted authority. Where does my work end? Who is the person to whom I can report a problem? Where can I go if my direct superior won’t/can’t help me? These are questions that must always have a answer
  • A favorable climate for professional development, in which the performance indicators are correctly and clearly determined and the development programs have the adequate efficiency. A great deficiency of the HR management is the positive discrimination of the employees who aren’t competitive, who are being tolerated even promoted, due to the lack of management implication or to the existence of uncertain performance indicators.
  • Following the adopted legislation. You can’t ask an employee to respect an organizational standard, as long as your company breaks the legal or social ones.
  • Respecting made promises, due to same mechanism as the one described before
  • A transparent communication system, both horizontally and vertically, both ascending and descending. Companies don’t seem to realize that the alarm signal are hauled in many cases from bottom to top, because the ones on the front have a better view on the effects of the fighting strategies than the ones who just trace them. Therefore, risks that can be easily minimized take by surprise the companies, greatly affecting them.

The list can go on. The important thing is that we are aware of the fact that any unhealthy practice can irrevocably and on long term influence the organizational stability. And that not only the strategic management counts but also the really healthy one.