Your organization's capacity to do its job changes year to year and even month-to-month, and the past few years have called for some major changes in how companies do business. Your company, too, has had to adjust to new realities in both the economy and your employees' ability to take on more work. Even with the best employees in the country, you've got to face the facts and do an honest assessment of what your company can handle, and determine what changes you'll need to implement to reach goals you're not currently reaching.
Life Re-Evaluations During and After COVID
You need to start with what your employees can do — and are willing to do. Many lost a lot of family and friends over the past couple of years, either because they died or because they ended up on the extreme other side of political and social debates. People have had to re-evaluate what they want, including more time for themselves and their families, away from work. This re-evaluation may express itself as people wanting to work more from home instead of throwing away time on a commute, or it could express itself as people cutting back on what they do while still fulfilling job requirements. (Forget the term "quiet-quitting" that's been floating about; this is not quitting, but just doing what they were hired to do instead of taking on three people's jobs for one person's pay.) This will cut into your company's organizational capacity if you don't handle it correctly. Look at where people are now cutting back to their original job requirements and see what hiring you'd need to do to get your organizational capacity to where you want it to be.
Societal and Economic Pressures
Also, cutting into your capacity is the effect of various pressures on your employees' psychological states. Even if your employees all work from the office and have not cut-back on any work, they can still have more limited capacity to deal with crises and stressful projects if they are already being affected by financial stress due to inflation or the uncertainty around student loans, for example. They may have second jobs due to inflation pressures and rising rent prices. They may also, at least in summer, be under physical stress from heat and humidity. All of that can subtly affect your employees' ability to meet heavy deadlines or be as creative as you need them to be.
An organizational capacity assessment helps you spot areas where you may need to hire more people or may need to reorganize a production schedule. You have to protect your employees since that will help counter some of the stresses they may be facing.
Continually Changing Technology
On a more obvious level is how your company's software, hardware, and equipment are doing and whether they need to be upgraded or replaced. For example, do your computer operating systems need to be merely upgraded with the latest version, or are you at a point where replacing the systems with new computers is a more frugal choice? How are supply chain issues affecting acquisition or delivery times?
Organizational capacity assessment services offer an unbiased look at how your company is doing regarding its ability to function as you say it should function. Please contact one of these companies as soon as you can so that your company can stay on track with its goals while helping its employees weather one of the tougher times in this country.
