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One thing I’ve always found odd about HR professionals is that they consider organizational development to be a completely independent subset of human resources. “Tom does recruiting. Sally specializes in OD. John in our compensation guy…”

I’m going to be blunt: If your recruiters, compensation specialists, trainers and so on aren’t “OD people,” they’re not doing their jobs.

Defining Organizational Development

There are a lot of definitions for OD floating around. Here’s the one I’m using:

OD is a long range effort to improve an organization’s ability to satisfy its business needs, often with the assistance of a change agent or catalyst and the use of the theory and technology of applied behavioral science.

Human resources is about influencing behaviors and enabling a workforce to drive business strategies. Recruiters should care about how their hires impact the culture of the organization and whether or not their skills drive business results. Training should always impact behaviors. Compensation should motivate people to do the types of things that make your business successful.

Even something like benefits administration should care about OD. Are their systems and processes efficient? Do they make it easy for employees to find out about their benefits plans, enroll, make updates? Time spent hunting for information and filling out paper is time not spent working. It’s frustrating, demotivating, uninspiring. It decreases the quality of work, at least in the short-term, that your employees produce.

If you and your HR colleagues don’t care about OD, you’re not doing your jobs.