Is your organisation entrepreneurially healthy?

One of indicators of the concept of a health organisation is the ability to explore new capabilities through innovation as well as exploiting existing knowledge to the fullest. Being proactive is one of the characteristics of a healthy organisation; proactive means that the organisation is not reactive, but always ahead the curve in terms of everything its systems, its practices its products.

The concept of entrepreneurial health is triggered by the corporate culture of the organisation. By merely looking at the culture you will see whether your organisation is healthy or not. Culture is a complex issue in all organisations, which essentially includes: shared values, attitudes, beliefs, assumptions and behaviours that the organisation shares. What distinguishes the culture being entrepreneurially or traditionally managed is how the organisation is being run. A firm with an entrepreneurial culture encourages its employees to generate ideas, experiment so as to boost creativity and innovativeness.

Entrepreneurial health audit

It is good for organisations that do not know where they stand to take an entrepreneurial health audit. There are many ways of doing the audit, but the main and simplest one is by merely looking at the behaviour of top management, as they are the ones who turn idea generation into something more important. It is worthy of note that entrepreneurship begins with the top management and cascades down to lower level employees. The reason why some organisations do not grow is because they have a pool of managers who resist any change brought to them by employees. Furthermore, no organisation can be entrepreneurially health without its HR being compliant to legal statutes.

Audit of managerial compliance is also important and covers compliance of personnel policies, procedures, and legal and welfare provisions. Compliance with legal provisions is of paramount important, as any violation makes management guilty of an offence and brings unintended costs in the long run. Human resources managers, as custodians of culture in organisations, are supposed to continue thinking anew of different practices and strategies that should be put in place to improve the entrepreneurial health of the organisation. If organisations relax in improving their entrepreneurial health it will fade away; this is the right time to create and sustain your entrepreneurially health status, bearing in mind that having entrepreneurial health today does not guarantee having it tomorrow.