General Guidelines to Resume Management Efficiency

Any organization will be unfortunate enough to experience a drop in efficiency. Weathering these crises will entail knowing how to resume management efficiency once they have passed.

Slumps or periods of poor performance are practically unavoidable for any company or organization. Keeping an organization up and running at optimal efficiency is a tricky business, to say the very least. Sometimes, factors that are out of the management’s control cause periods of decline or stagnancy, and once these periods pass, it becomes necessary to resume management efficiency.

This is not as impossible an endeavor as it may first appear. In crisis cases like this, what becomes important is keeping a firm grasp on the fundamentals. It is all too easy to become overwhelmed by the problems and crises of the present, and thus lose sight of the organization’s goals. It falls on the management to take control of the situation and begin the process of rebuilding and regaining efficiency.

Although it may seem an unnecessary detour, it would pay off to revisit the organization’s mission and objectives. This will serve to refocus the organization and make it better able to realign itself towards the achievement of its purposes. In management terms, managers will be able to make better decisions when they once again ground themselves in the organization’s mission and vision.

The next crucial step in regaining lost efficiency is to reestablish channels of communication. A large part of effective management is effective communication, not only between superior and subordinate, but also among peers. Peer-to-peer communication is necessary for fruitful discussions, and many decisions within the organization depend on this kind of communication. Once made (in the upper levels of management for example), these decisions must be able to be spread quickly and without distortion throughout the relevant departments of the organization. This, on the other hand, is where superior-to-subordinate communication becomes important.

Using these channels of communication, management must then quickly reassign roles and responsibilities. These would, of course, stem from the larger strategic plan that has been worked out, starting from the organization’s bigger goals. Throughout the organization, it must be clear who is responsible for doing or supervising each particular aspect of the organization’s performance. Management efficiency is much improved when tasks can be readily assigned to people and when these tasks are well-supervised. To put it in another way, the harmonious working of an organization depends on its various components knowing – and doing – their assigned responsibilities.

And finally, to ensure that the organization stays on track this time, management must also be able to provide or inspire motivation in every member. Simply knowing one’s responsibilities is not enough to ensure that one would actually fulfill these responsibilities. A sense of obligation, or better yet, much motivation is required. Motivating an organization to perform efficiently can be done in many ways, such as providing various performance incentives, holding pep meetings, and so on.

To sum up, to resume management efficiency, an organization must revisit its fundamental goals, reestablish good communication, reassign responsibilities, and motivate its members. These are, of course, general guidelines, and the specific implementation will depend on the specific nature and circumstances surrounding the organization.