About
What is Organizational Effectiveness?
Our Organizational Effectiveness (OE) training and technical assistance practice empowers human services at all levels- systems, organizations, departments, and individuals- toward their desired vision.
Since 2004, our team has collaborated with 40+ states, facilitating training and technical assistance resulting in strategic impact within human serving agencies and community partners.
Learn more about our Consulting Practice, including our approach, services, and expertise.
What Guides Us?
Our premise is straightforward: effective organizations are foundational to building healthier and stronger communities.
Purpose
- APHSA’s OE training and technical assistance practice provides the right-sized support for every locality committed to improving organizational effectiveness. Therefore, our approach is solution-focused and carefully planned. We use tools customized to the assets and needs of your organization and community. Anchored by our commitment to continuous learning, we leverage the resources and skills that leaders and their teams bring to solve problems and innovate programs.
- Together we apply our overarching framework– the Human Services Value Curve and other strategic tools. Based on the unique information gained, we co-develop a set of practical, impactful action steps that build momentum towards organizational and community ownership. The tangible next steps create momentum (activate, energy, strength, fuel) for change, empowering our members and partners at the forefront of state and local communities to strategically address their unique needs and build on existing strengths to reach their integrated goals.
Guiding Principles
- Open Systems
- Social systems, including agencies, are comprised of inputs, performance capacity (leverage of inputs), performance actions and outputs, client impacts, and relationships within their environment, all of which are dynamic and interrelated.
- Functional Capacity
- Building and sustaining organizational capacity requires a rational organizational structure with well-aligned departments, roles, functions and hierarchical levels.
- Effectiveness
- Results are best achieved through identifying and improving upon the processes and activities that lead to them vs. focusing primarily on the results themselves.
- Experiential Learning: “Learning by Doing”
- Learning is best accomplished by reflecting on one’s own concrete experiences, forming new ideas about them, making specific changes to one’s actions and behaviors, considering the impact of those changes, and making related adjustments. This process, when working effectively, constitutes an ongoing cycle.
- Readiness
- Readiness to learn, change and perform progresses through stages, with each stage enabling faster and more comprehensive change, requiring less support.
- Empowerment
- Energy and buy-in for change that is aligned to system goals is best accomplished through increasing participation in decisions, sharing information, and enabling discretion within clear and healthy boundaries.
- Relationship – Task Balance
- Proficiency in fostering relationships and accomplishing tasks are not either-or or zero-sum propositions. Both benefit from advances in the other or suffer from the lack of those advances.
- Facilitation
- Effective consulting and facilitation is based on techniques that rely on participant safety, energy, induction and context focus, leading over time to participant accountability, deduction and more systemic generalizations and connections.
- Evaluation
- Professional development interventions should not be evaluated with a presumed cause and effect that links participant satisfaction, retention of concepts and knowledge, performance, and impact on the overall agency and its clients. These interventions should be directly connected to their impact on performance in alignment with agency or system goals.
Meet Our Team
Consulting Practice
Our Approach
- APHSA’s Organizational Effectiveness (OE) team facilitates technical assistance efforts, provides leadership development and coaching, and develops and delivers learning and development opportunities focused on helping state and local human services organizations and their partners strengthen performance, capacity, and impact. What does this mean in practice? It means that our OE team collaborates with human services teams across the country as thought partners in facilitating change efforts. We provide on-site and virtual consultative services along with learning and development opportunities to assist agencies in making lasting organizational improvements, both immediate and long-term.
- Human services agencies are contending with increasingly complex challenges and unprecedented social changes while fulfilling their mission to improve outcomes for communities nationwide. While human services leaders are experts in administering, overseeing, and aligning programs that build resilience and bolster the well-being of people, they are often overextended while balancing competing priorities in an ever-changing ecosystem. OE is a crucial, yet often undervalued, component of an organization’s culture and success – when organizations are agile and adaptive to changing circumstances, they are more likely to be effective.
- Our Organizational Effectiveness Team provides direct, on-site, and virtual consultative services to help agencies make lasting organizational improvements that lead to improved client outcomes. Our consulting timeframe is both immediate and long-range, and our approach is most accurately described as “learning by doing,” which is the way that adults learn best and improve their performance.
What Makes Us Unique?
- As a team of former social workers, state and local human services leaders, and training and development professionals, we have experience working with a range of human services divisions and programs.
- For organizational and community transformation to occur, no person or organization can do it alone. We need to work together to identify and act on shared goals that move us toward the collective mission of advancing the well-being of everyone in our communities.
- To learn how to get beyond the symptoms we see in our communities and to understand what’s underneath, we need to learn methods for getting to the root causes of those symptoms. Our OE Team works together with your staff to do just that. (Picture of a root system)
- To get there, we may ask: why does this symptom exist and what will allow us to identify and address the root causes? How can we effectively eliminate problems so that they don’t resurface? What enables us to dig down and act on the root causes? What does it take for us to really work well together?
- Using our APHSA developed tools, we will co-create a tailored plan with you based on your organization’s specific needs and strengths.
- Developed by APHSA, Learning By Doing is an innovative approach to ongoing organizational development where participants become familiar with models, tools, templates, and methods to improve their organization continuously. Participants then learn and practice monitoring techniques to assess their progress and adjust their continuous improvement work as needed.
What We Offer
- Learning and Staff Development
- Training Design and Development- The Organizational Effectiveness Learning and Development Team designs and develops in-person trainings on topics in human services including organizational effectiveness tools, frameworks, and models, and improving workforce productivity for staff and agencies to thrive.
- eLearning Course Design and Development- The Organizational Effectiveness Learning and Development Team creates interactive and captivating eLearning courses that allow our users to learn at their own pace about relevant topics in human services. APHSA’s eLearning content targets core objectives and includes a satisfaction survey to capture the user’s experience and overall success of the course. All eLearning courses are housed in APHSA’s THRIVE Learning Management System (LMS).
- Technical Assistance
- Our team of highly skilled Organizational Effectiveness Consultants provides targeted support in assessing, planning, implementing, evaluating for human services organizations/divisions. Using our DAPIM model We assist in guiding your team and community through the phases of development to promote strong, connected, and effective HS organizations nationwide.
- Can include a bulleted list of some components of TA here if desired (ex. Strategic planning, org. assessment, etc.)
- Where have we worked?
- Since 2005, our OE team has delivered over 140 custom projects within 38 states using tools and processes from the field of Organizational Effectiveness to human services agencies and community partners.
Focus Areas
- Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Belonging (EDIB)
- Embedding CQI
- Mission/Vision/Values Development
- Organizational Culture
- Leadership Development
- Emotional Intelligence
- Community Engagement
- Strategic Planning
Expertise
- Continuous Improvement:
- Organizational Effectiveness (OE) is both a “big picture and step-by-step approach to continuously improving an organization’s performance, performance capacity and client outcomes”. DAPIM™ is APHSA’s approach to systematic continuous improvement. APHSA has found that to close the gap between where organizations are and the results and visiWhaton they desire, they must follow a step-by-step process of Defining, Assessing, Planning, Implementing, and Monitoring.
- DAPIM Model Graphic
- Step One: Define priority improvements in operational terms.
- Step Two: Assess observable, measurable strengths and gaps. Identify root causes and general remedies for priority gaps.
- Step Three: Plan quick wins, mid-term, and longer-term improvements.
- Step Four: Implement action plans while managing communication and capacity.
- Step Five: Monitor progress, impact, and lessons learned for accountability and on-going adjustments.
- Organizations experienced in the DAPIM™ approach use it to continuously improve everything they do, no matter how big or small. At any given time, they may be engaged in a multi-year “big DAPIM™” improvement effort to make fundamental improvements to practice while running multiple “little DAPIM™’s” to eliminate inefficient processes, respond to unexpected shifts in the environment, overcome obstacles, etc. In this way, an organization can be doing work associated with all steps of the DAPIM™ approach at any given time.
- Organizational Culture
- The staff of the OE Team encompasses multiple decades of experience collaborating/partnering with federal, state, and local human services professionals to establish shared values, vision, and inspired goals which influence team engagement, belonging, and overall performance.
- Leadership Development
- The OE Team empowers human services leaders at all levels through building partnerships and collaborative efforts. We foster relationships to address unique human services challenges and needs with community voice/experiences at the forefront, leveraging resources, tools, and expertise in the human service sector. We facilitate solution focused discussions through learning communities, training, and other opportunities to expand collective capacity.
- Change Management
- APHSA assists members with moving from their current state to their desired future state using a coordinated and structured approach that is both systematic and systemic.
- Talent Acquisition and Development
- We provide support related to staff recruitment, retention, and development. Our subject matter experts on staff hold multiple certifications in staff and leadership development as well as diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging to support your organization in building and strengthening a strong culture of safety, accountability, and motivation
- Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging
- APHSA’s Organizational Effectiveness (OE) Team helps agencies develop goals and objectives for advancing racial equity. Using disaggregated data, diagnostic tools, and facilitation, we help leaders examine root cause factors that perpetuate race-based biases hindering equitable progression of community members. As a practice, OE works to develop a healthy internal culture within organizations in addition to exploring system-level strategies that generate real results.
- Value Curve
- The Human Services Value Curve (HSVC) is a lens or a way of looking at the services that organizations provide from the point of view of the consumer.
- The HSVC charts four progressive levels of the HSVC each building off the previous level. Each of these levels—regulative, collaborative, integrative, and generative—represents a progressive level of outcomes, impact, and social value. Using the HSVC as a guide, the OE team can help your agency assess its strengths and opportunities to co-design family-centered programs and operations that are driven by the community members they serve.
- Introduction to the Human Services Value Curve
- Organizational and Community Value Curve Assessment
- Application of Value Curve within Organizational Practice
- Planning and Implementation for How to Progress Along the Value Curve on an Organizational, Programmatic or Staff Level
- Data Systems Integration
- Modern IT systems leverage technology and data sharing to break down the barriers families experience to accessing services. The OE team can perform a cross-system data analysis to better understand where programs are serving the same families or not effectively reaching eligible families, which can include stakeholder engagement, service gap analysis and outcome evaluation.
- Community Partnerships and Ecosystem Development
- APHSA assists members with the identification and development of community partnerships to support healthy and thriving connections within the identified Ecosystem.
- Capacity Building
- APHSA assists members with making changes in the areas of supporting the development and strengthening of staff skills and abilities, internal organizational processes, and identification and access of resources which in turn support their organizations and systems in their efforts to reach desired outcomes for families and communities.
- Coaching
- The OE Team uses coaching skills to co-create space with our members to turn goals into action. Coaching equips leaders and teams with the tools necessary to clarify their goals, explore new ways of being, and discover untapped motivation for personal changes to fuel professional transformation.
- Facilitation:
- Driving continuous improvement projects and initiatives depends on well-organized efforts that are guided and supported by an effective facilitator. Our facilitation process ensures all participants are involved in meaningful discussion and decision-making for the groups’ objectives to be met.
