State of the Organization

Even a criminal organization like McKinsey can be occasionally right. So ocasionally I’ll read their stuff for free, but any organization that pays them is basically just paying the mob and should be ashamed of themselves and stop it.

In the McKinsey report The State of Organizations 2023: Ten shifts transforming organizations (April 2023) the authors Patrick Guggenberger, Dana Maor, Michael Park, and Patrick Simon (all of which we can assume would probably be liable for some RICO charges if the Justice Department had any courage) lay out 10 key shifts:

Increasing speed, strengthening resilience
‘True hybrid’: The new balance of in-person and remote work
Making way for applied AI
New rules of attraction, retention, and attrition
Closing the capability chasm
Walking the talent tightrope
Leadership that is self-aware and inspiring
Making meaningful progress on diversity, equity, and inclusion
Mental health: Investing in a portfolio of interventions
Efficiency reloaded

This closely aligns with the key challenges facing Quality.

The Challenges Ahead for Quality

A few thoughts.

Resiliency takes time and effort to build. I discussed how Business Continuity Planning is critical to an organization (and a regulatory requirement in Pharma). Building resilience deliberately, and leveraging it as part of change management, allows us to ensure our organizations can meet the challenges ahead of them and continue to transform. The conditions for building resilience and scaling up an organization’s change capacity are speed, learning, and integration. These three conditions are the principles of transformation. When organizations build around these first principles, they can enable the understanding, engagement, adoption, and endorsement needed for successful organizations. They can also simultaneously lay the foundation to achieve the speed, learning and integration needed to evolve.

I assume the majority of the quarter of respondents seeing their leaders as inspirational and fit-for-purpose were in fact the leaders in their respective organizations.

Democratic Leadership Style

We shouldn’t talk about organization efficency without talking about effectiveness and excellence. I relly wish folks would widely adapt the principles of organizational excellence.

As usual, interesting information with some poor or impartial takes published by an organization that should be RICO’ed out of existence and join the Arthur Anderson graveyard of consulting companies.

Resilience

In the current world scenario, which is marked by high volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA), threats are increasingly unforeseen. As organizations, we are striving for this concept of Resilience.

Resilience is one of those hot words, and like many hot business terms it can mean a few different things depending on who is using it, and that can lead to confusion. I tend to see the following uses, which are similar in theme.

Where used	Meaning
Physics	The property of a material to absorb energy when deformed and not fracture nor break; in other words, the material’s elasticity.
Ecology	The capacity of an ecosystem to absorb and respond to disturbances without permanent damage to the relationships between species.
Psychology	An individual’s coping mechanisms and strategies.
Organizational and Management studies	The ability to maintain an acceptable level of service in the face of periodic or catastrophic systemic and singular faults and disruptions (e.g. natural disasters, cyber or terrorist attacks, supply chain disturbances).

For our purposes, resilience can be viewed as the ability of an organization to maintain quality over time, in the face of faults and disruptions. Given we live in a time of disruption, resilience is obviously of great interest to us.

In my post “Principles behind a good system” I lay out eight principles for good system development. Resilience is not a principle, it is an outcome. It is through applying our principles we gain resilience. However, like any outcome we need to design for it deliberately.

Principles behind a good system

We gain resilience in the organization through levers that can be lumped together as operational and organizational.

The attributes that give resilience are the same that we build as part of our quality culture:

The ability to anticipate problems before they build-up (includes risk management)
Diversified structural flexibility to respond to both adverse and beneficial changes
Broken down silos and glass ceilings to allow risk information to flow freely and prevent ‘risk blindness’
Rapid response capabilities to avoid incidents escalating into crises
Learn from previous mistakes from themselves and others making the necessary changes

On the operational side, we have processes to drive risk management, business continuity, and issue management. A set of activities that we engage in.

Like many activities they key is to think of these as holistic endeavors proactively building resiliency into the organizaiton.

Pay Transparency

Let’s be honest, there are not enough quality professionals in the biotech field with the experience we need. Training and developing quality professionals is a lot of hard work that takes years.

There can be some substantial gaps in salary in an organization. Unfortunately, it is easier to get pay raises from leaving the organization than from staying (a huge issue), even when being promoted from within. Any quality organization soon has people all over the place in salary, doing similar things and similar levels.

People talk about salaries, it is a legally protected activity, and frankly this transparency can be out friend if we let it.

As we build our quality organizations, make sure we are building pay equity, and then live it. Fight for it.

Lots of good thoughts in this article at Bio Space “How Salary Transparency Can Help Employers Find and Keep Top Talent“

Is There Equity in Out of Office?

I think many of us are considering what work looks like, grappling with a return to offices, hybrid situations, and being fully remote. I think the media focuses rather extensively on companies like Apple, where a good chunk of the workforce seems to be up-in-arms about a mandatory return to the office.

In the pharma world, things are a little more complicated, especially as it applies to the quality profession.

At the heart sits the question, what sort of labs and manufacturing facilities do you have on site? This physical presence requires that certain employees be on-site. Which in most pharmas makes a bundle of those who must be on-site, and those who do not need to be on-site.

I understand the desire for those who can work remotely to want to work remotely. There are a lot of good reasons for working remotely, and I personally chose a company that was purely remote for a chunk of those.

But, and this is a big but, what does equity look like?

Take for example an average quality department. It is broken down into those who support labs, manufacturing, clinical trials and post-marketing surveillance (for simplicity). You thus have in the same department individuals who must be always on-site; who need to show up a few days a week; and those who can do their job perfectly well remotely. To complicate matters you might even have a big chunk of your partners (all those clinical trial, medical affairs, pharmacovigilance folks) that have no attention of coming back to the office.

So, what does equity look like? How do you treat these three camps? How to you compensate those who come into the office, that have commutes on top of their days that co-workers do not? How do you ensure everyone has equal opportunity to be seen, heard and participate? What does this organization look like?

I thnk this is one of the major challenges for quality organizations moving forward. I do not think there is one size fits all, and there is no easy answer.

Burnout Needs a Systematic fix

It is more like being involved in a complicated love affair. One minute it’s thrilling, passionate, engaging. The next, it’s exhausting and overwhelming, and I feel like I need a break.
— Read on hbr.org/2019/07/when-passion-leads-to-burnout
Jennifer Moss, When Passion Leads to Burnout. HBR

It is the responsibility of leaders “to keep an eye on the well-being of their staff.” Organizations whose staff feel unmotivated due to stress and burnout cannot aspire to achieve a culture of excellence. Our systems need to be designed to eliminate the root cause for stress and burnout.

Five mechanisms can be leveraged to improve organizational system design: 1) Eliminate organizational issues related to roles, responsibilities and authorities of employees, 2) establish a policy of transparency and effective “bottom-up” internal communication channel to permit employee contribution and recognition, 3) establish criteria for resource distribution, 4) establish a commitment to identify needed training and provide resources for the purpose and 5) establish a systemic feedback loop for analysis and improvement of employee motivation based on periodic measurement of employee motivational levels.

If employees know exactly what their tasks are, without sustained overload, with necessary resources and competence, and recognition for the task well performed, there will be no major system-induced reason for demotivation.

This gets to the heart of Deming’s use of psychology in his System of Profound Knowledge. Lean calls it Respect-for-People. This is all about ensuring our organizations are healthy places to work and thrive.