Element O: Organizational Climate
“If you don’t define your culture, your culture will define you…and your results.”
– Ethan Schutz
Element O provides measures of satisfaction within an organization by surveying employees’ opinions about the current state of the organization and how they would like the organization to be. It gathers information about the relations between each employee and the organization or team, and how each employee feels while at work.
Element O uses all the dimensions of FIRO Theory and provides measures at the levels of:
- Organization
- Team
- Relationships
- Self
… as well as a measure of Productivity.
The focus of Element O is on behavior and feelings in the organization rather than the more typical areas of compensation, physical atmosphere, policies, resources, and so on. This is because Element O, and the Human Element approach, is based on the idea that productivity, innovation, teamwork, safety, and quality all increase when people feel good about themselves when they are at work.
The survey is simple and quick to administrate and links directly with all of our FIRO-based Human Element programs.
The results of Element O provide information that allows organizations to address change in two ways:
By facilitating changes in the organizational atmosphere—policies, procedures, ways of working together, decision-making methods—so that people are most likely to feel good about themselves at work.
By training individuals and teams, through our Human Element programs, to reduce defensiveness, increase aliveness, self-direction and responsibility, and honesty. These factors increase engagement, collaboration, trust, creativity, focus, and drive, and thus increase productivity.
The survey can also be used as a pre- and post- measure for change interventions or to evaluate the effects of any previously enacted organizational change. Organization-specific items can be added to the survey to gather additional information.