Applied Paper: Baldrige Criteria

Workplaces often strive to perform optimally by improving specific components and areas in the organization. The Baldrige criteria evaluate organizations based on seven categories of leadership, strategic planning, customer and market focus, measurement, analysis, knowledge management, human resource focus, process management, and business results (NIST, 2018). These seven organizational contexts assist the firm to identify areas where they need improvement, which subsequently directs the organizational initiatives to attain optimal performance. This paper applies the seven Baldrige criteria and the Baldridge – Are We Making Progress? questionnaire to evaluate my previous workplace and make recommendations based on the lessons learned within the course. My previous workplace was a sales and marketing organization that worked with a variety of organizations and sold several categories of items including medication, and insurance, and conducted marketing campaigns for other organizations. The organization was quite successful in terms of its revenues but also had some minor issues in relation to the Baldrige criteria categories as highlighted in the paper.

Leadership is the first category in the Baldrige criteria and evaluates how leaders conduct their leadership, support the organization, and how leaders undertake their moral, policy-making, and social duties. Leaders need to ensure the employees are aware of the organizational mission in order to unite the organization and its employees towards a common direction and objective (Craig, 2018). Mission-driven employees are aware of the roles they play toward organizational success and therefore have higher performance and productivity levels as compared to employees who are not well-informed about how their day-to-day tasks impact the organization’s performance (Craig, 2018). In my previous workplace, the managers made it a key objective to ensure that each employee was aware of the organization’s mission, vision, and objectives, and how their role contributed to the achievement of the mission. The leaders held organizational meetings as well as departmental meetings to ensure that employees were aware of the organization’s objectives and how to achieve them. I believe this set the sales and marketing approaches in the organization apart from its competitors since the employees were always coming up with innovative ways to achieve the set goals and objectives. Leaders used to guide the employees on the desired behavior and values while ensuring an open communication strategy which created a good work environment. The leaders encouraged employees to become creative and innovative while being confident enough to propose ideas that could advance the organization or the employees’ careers such as further education. The interaction between leaders and employees facilitated sharing of feedback between the leaders and employees, where leaders informed the employees on what was most important in the organization, while the employees informed the leaders about what they thought could be changed or retained in the organization for the fostering of a good work environment. In the context of the Baldrige leadership category, my former workplace seems to have been performing well in terms of its leadership, how the leaders support the organization, and how they support their employees.

The second category in the Baldrige criteria is strategic planning. Strategic planning involves how the organization sets its plans, selects the courses of action, and evaluates progress in its plans (NIST, 2018). Strategic planning refers to the continuous organization process of using available information to guide the business in the desired direction (Cote, 2020). Organizations use their strategic plans to prioritize actions, allocate resources more effectively, align employees with organizational goals, and make sure the goals are feasible and attainable (Cote, 2020). Strategic planning has the benefit of focusing each stakeholder and employee on the same vision, making flaws and biases more visible, and assisting in tracking the organization’s progress in relation to the strategic goals (Cote, 2020). According to the Baldrige strategic planning category, organizations should involve their employees while planning for the future, inform the employees about the company’s plans that may affect their work, and make employees aware of when they are making progress (NIST, 2018). In my previous workplace, the organization was keen to inform the employees on the way organizational changes would impact them and their work, but it rarely sought the employees’ input and ideas for the organizational future. Most of the decision-making was restricted to senior leadership, managers, and supervisors, but the organization rarely consulted regular employees on their ideas on the organizational plans. While the employees were motivated to perform through transformational leadership, I believe the organization would perform optimally if employees were involved in some of the plans. When it came to identifying whether the organization and individual employees were making progress, the organization conducted annual employee performance evaluations which provided both employees and the organization with where to improve to meet the strategic goals. In the Baldrige evaluation context, one would say that the organization performed averagely when it came to its strategic planning, and could use improvement in the involvement of employees in the process.

The third Baldridge category is customer and market focus. This category evaluates how the organization identifies and defines a customer’s or the market’s needs, wants, and norms (NIST, 2018). A customer or market focus is where a company prioritizes the customer’s needs such that they seek to enhance customer relationships and customer satisfaction through personalized experiences, customer feedback, and good customer service (Gupta, 2020). A customer focus requires an organization to be aware of who their most important customers are, keep in touch with them, build relationships with them, and make it easy for the customers to inform the organization of what they want and need (NIST, 2018). A customer or market focus approach also seeks to get customer feedback on their satisfaction levels, while also making decisions and plans that solve customers’ problems (NIST, 2018). My previous workplace was a sales and marketing organization and therefore had to focus on the customer and what they wanted as the primary concerns. The organization focused mostly on pharmaceutical and insurance companies as the main customers and ensured that these two groups were highly prioritized and their satisfaction levels constantly evaluated to ensure the organization adequately met their needs and solved any potential problems. Therefore, the company can be said to have had excellent customer and market focus.

The fourth category in the Baldrige evaluation criteria is the measurement, analysis, and knowledge management within an organization. This category evaluates the organization’s assessment, review, and management skills in terms of organizational data, how the organization uses the facts in decision-making, and how it evaluates its results (NIST, 2018). This category assesses whether employees know how to measure the quality of their work, review the quality of their work and necessary changes, use the analyses for decision-making, and are aware of how the measures used in their roles align with the organizational improvement measures (NIST, 2018). In my previous workplace, the employees were hardly aware of how the quality of their work was measured other than the number of sales and marketing targets. Other employees were not very well acquainted with the evaluation process or what it entailed, which often resulted in tension in the organization during evaluation periods (Evans, 2017). The organization provided its employees with information about how it was performing and the necessary information for the employees to perform their duties but failed to provide enough information on measurement, analysis, and reviews at the individual level.

The fifth category is human resource focus, where the organization performed relatively well. The organization provided employees with feedback from evaluations with the intention to assist them in improving their work while encouraging and recognizing employees when they performed well, hence suggesting a human resource focus (Evans, 2017). The organization provided a safe workplace where employees collaborated, but failed in terms of providing adequate information about evaluations to assist employees in making role-related decisions that improve their performance.

The sixth category is process management, where the organization also performed well although it could use some improvements. The organization provided employees with adequate resources to perform their tasks while establishing good processes for carrying out duties. Additionally, the organization provided employees with empowerment over their work processes, hence improving process management. However, employees were limited in the collection of information about the quality of their work, hence limiting process management.

The final category is business results, where the organization seems to also be performing well. Customers are often satisfied with the organization and employees’ work, while products meet the client’s needs adequately. The business results are reflected in the good financial performance of the organization, as well as the high standards it holds itself. Additionally, most employees were satisfied with their jobs, hence suggesting good business results.

My former workplace seems to be performing quite well in the Baldrige criteria context. The organization scored excellently in most of the categories but had a challenge in human resource focus and measurement and knowledge management where it did not provide its employees with adequate information about evaluations to assist in making role-related decisions. Therefore, the organization should focus on making performance and quality evaluations more transparent so that employees can better understand how to improve their performance and quality of work.

References

Cote, C. (2020). Why is strategic planning important? Harvard Business School Online. https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/why-is-strategic-planning-important

Craig, W. (2018). The importance of having a mission-driven company. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamcraig/2018/05/15/the-importance-of-having-a-mission-driven-company/?sh=7e1034733a9c

Evans, J. R. (2017). Quality and Performance Excellence. (8th  edition). Mason, OH: South-Western/Cengage Learning. ISBN-13: 978-1-305662223 (Textbook) or 13:978-1-337250016 (e-Book).

Gupta, C. (2020). Ultimate guide to building a customer-focused culture. Zendesk. https://www.zendesk.com/blog/what-is-customer-focus/

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). (2018). Baldridge self-assessment: Seven steps for a full examination. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwis4J7Ahcb6AhUE_KQKHQYGBKUQFnoECAUQAw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nist.gov%2Fblogs%2Fblogrige%2Fbaldrige-self-assessment-seven-steps-full-examination&usg=AOvVaw1MaEptWZ4PIo-WLmbCxjHX