In the dynamic landscape of the modern workplace, fostering effective teamwork is essential for organizational success, and OD-Tools can play an important role in team building by providing valuable insights. This article presents the rationale for using two tools in team development: the OD-Tools Teamwork Big Five Questionnaire and the Trait-Map Personality Assessment.

One of the latest buzzwords in HR tech is “Employee Listening Technology”. Not “employee listening technique”, as a communication skill, but technology, i.e. a computer program. Listening to presentations on what the computer systems will be able to do, I noticed the lack of human managers’ role in the vision of this technology, and that made me think... Will this technology, to some degree, replace managers in the future?

Are you a trainer or a coach looking to get more business from your current clients? You can read some real cases about how some trainers and coaches achieving this by...

Recent research on leadership can provide insights into the possible origin of our fascination with the fight between Good and Evil and can provide tips for the everyday battles of our working lives...

There is a lot of confusion about these topics. As a developer of both Employee Engagement and Employee Motivation tools, I would like to clarify these concepts, helping HR professionals and consultants benefit more from implementing surveys. I want to highlight the need for individualized motivation approaches besides the popular engagement programs based on anonymous engagement survey results.

While Employee Engagement programs are all on the rise, employee motivation (Work Motivation) gets less talked about in business and management articles, as if engagement would have replaced motivation, as a kind of Work Motivation 2.0. Employee Engagement is indeed more manager friendly, but I want to show here that the current practices leave out some important aspects of Work Motivation...

As the lead author of Trait-Map, a wide-band personality inventory, I am often asked to compare our product to other similar products on the market. This is not an easy task, because the considerations of model creation and questionnaire development are not easily understood by people who are not deeply in the topic. It also takes time to really understand a personality assessment tool beyond the marketing materials: some key information is hidden in the Technical Manuals, and only the initiated can understand it. I make an attempt now to compare these assessments in an objective manner and hopefully I can help readers in better understanding these mysterious products....

As a developer of psychometric tools, I have a unique opportunity to view things from the perspective of psychometric data. I work with anonymized responses to questionnaire items from thousands of people from all over the world. The data enables me to gain insights into topics such as gender and cultural differences, the structure of personality, the drivers of employee engagement. And now even some claims put forward by Eckhart Tolle in his famous book...

This paper examines a real case of a Team-Building Workshop for a Cross-Cultural Management Team. An old saying says “You can see the Universe in a single raindrop”, and I believe one can see a lot through this single case. The article examines the linkages between the business situation of the Company and the workshop, and also highlights the connections of this single intervention with a broader team development effort, providing arguments for a systematic long-term management team development process approach instead of the popular “shopping around for good training programs” piece-meal approach.

I was presented recently with a typical challenge related to change management: how would you structure a large-scale OD project, a multi-year innovation journey? It was part of a case-study exercise in a consultant selection process. You can be an internal OD/HR leader or an external consultant; you may face the same challenge: how to put such a multi-layered, dynamic process into one high-level overview slide?

With the days of China being a low-cost country long over, its manufacturing is at risk of being squeezed between innovation leaders on the one side and low-cost competitors on the other. There is much discussion about automation and digitalisation of production but this requires a foundation in terms of operational excellence, which in most industries is simply not there yet. This article introduces a back-to-basics approach and the lean enterprise as a solution, because a vast potential is still untapped by many manufacturing companies.

During the past ten years the Chinese business landscape has changed profoundly. Chances are high that in the coming ten years speed of change will increase even further with game-changing transformations being around the corner. What will this mean for European companies with subsidiaries in China?

This case study looks into a real company situation where change is needed: a manufacturing organization that has to “lose weight” and become agile in order to regain profitability. The analysis focuses on the human aspects and HRM considerations of the change, including suggestions to help the successful transition. The key message is reminding managers to address the human needs of employees by developing a comprehensive change management and communication plan...

Some challenges are common in most part of the world: increasing competition; customers that want products faster, with better customization and quality and so on. These challenges are intensified by challenges with local flavors: quickly upcoming domestic competitors, “copycat products”, administrative hurdles. From the OB perspective, compared to large MNCs, SMEs additional challenge is how to create an effective company culture in China...

In an organization with more than 3500 employees, the management badly felt the need for a new organizational structure to enable more effective and more flexible operations. This was not the first time the organization tried reorganizations. In the previous years there were several attempts, but the results were not satisfactory...

Read about what is OD, how it works, and why it is important. Learn about what kind of organizations it is suitable for, and get practical advice how to start it.

I have seen several multinational companies in China failing to implement well their Leadership Competency Models. Typical problems are that their “global” documents are out of cultural context: some of the behavior descriptions sound foreign here...

The Client is a Chinese software company developing cutting edge mobile apps and enterprise information systems for the traveling industry. The objective of the project was getting an accurate picture of the internal strengths and weaknesses of the organization, and improve employee engagement...

HRO Shanghai recently implemented a customized 360 solution, and the whole process was accomplished in just 10 days. What is the secret of such efficiency?