The organizational climate is a basic element to obtain good results in the company, developing studies that allow locating which are the critical points that affect the personnel becomes a key element so that its employees have better achievements in their objectives and are corrected timely those factors that may affect their motivation or performance.
Its analysis allows to identify, organize and assess the appreciations and thoughts that the human team of a company has of its peculiarities as an organization.
Currently, challenges require quality of service in all business areas, which is why it is necessary to renew comprehensive management, promoting greater efficiency in line with the values of the company, which are necessary for the correct performance of motivated workers and aligned with the Mission and the Strategic Objectives.
Nowadays, well-designed organizational climate research, as well as surveys aimed at finding out more about people, have become a strategic management tool supported by information systems that will allow executives to intervene in the points that are considered critical for thus, establish timely improvement proposals that allow better achievements in the objectives and those factors that may affect their motivation or performance are corrected in time.
This type of research allows decisions to be made to attract talents, as well as motivate and retain them; and they also allow you to manage change more effectively and increase customer satisfaction, productivity and quality.
At present, organizations are increasingly complex, every day they incorporate new technologies into their way of working with what they manage to compete in the globalized market, which is why many companies offer their clients unmatched capabilities of organizational climate surveys, based on information systems with advanced diagnostic, processing and reporting tools, where the leaders of the organization can frequently monitor the variables that affect the organizational climate, giving them the possibility of detecting weaknesses and immediately establishing the intended actions to improve this deviation.
For this reason, it is important that computerized or systematized information systems are implemented in each company, thus allowing them to improve their way of working, making them more competitive.
Companies that have information systems supported by information technologies have the possibility of reducing the response time to an organizational climate problem or any other problem that affects the organization, otherwise it would be more difficult and more expensive to obtain quick results and periodic before this type of evaluations of intangible variables.
Introduction
The accelerated growth of organizations, the behavior of groups in the organization in the face of new demands and accelerated rates of change, force management to prepare to understand the individual and group behavior of human resources, aligning it towards the goals of the organization. establishing psychological bases in the search for organizational effectiveness.
It is not a secret for anyone that the environment affects behavior and predisposes in a positive or negative way, limiting or not productivity, creativity and identification at work, therefore the environment should not be considered as an exogenous variable, but as an asset intangible for organizations and an instrument to achieve harmony.
In organizations formed by people of different character, sometimes there are relationship problems that alter the coexistence between their members.
They are often small misunderstandings or misunderstandings, which are easy to overcome, to the extent that the objectives of the group take precedence over them. But when problems are not assumed or solved in time, they can cause participation in decisions, the implementation of agreements and the tasks that are set for the fulfillment of the group's objectives to fail.
Service providers must support their clients in the development of their strategy and complete organizational climate research methodology through surveys, from the design of the questionnaire to the implementation of changes, through data collection, processing and report for action planning.
As you can see, the time of change is living, the generation of executives who are leading companies must have a very open mind to support the advances in technology and apply them to their organization, thanks to the low costs of computerized systems and competition in them is easier to demand and implement means that facilitate us making correct decisions.
Every day you see new software, new equipment, new ways of doing things and the organization that is not prepared for these changes, that does not have information capacity or that it is very weak simply cannot compete against the rest of the organizations.
Information Systems have enormous importance in increasing organizational capacity in the face of changing environment.
The desire to achieve a useful information system, which allows obtaining a competitive advantage, implies the possibility of offering multiple, frequent, timely and relevant information, among which information on the organizational climate can be included that will allow locating which are the critical points that affect the development of its staff in order to establish proposals for timely improvements that allow better achievements in the objectives and correct in time those factors that may affect their motivation or performance. Every day it is more important that companies establish a favorable organizational climate for all the elements that are part of it, both internal and external elements, it is also necessary to mention that “if an organization does not have a favorable climate,it will be at a disadvantage with others that do have it, since they will provide a higher quality in their products or services ”. (Velásquez, 2003, p.96).
By establishing information systems supported by information technology, evaluations can be adapted to the organization under study and will allow obtaining rapid and periodic results necessary for decision-making by the leaders of the organization.
Any organization that advocates achieving high levels of efficiency and effectiveness in the management of its substantive functions should consider the development of initiatives directed in this regard, dedicating itself to the design, development and implementation of information systems which have to do directly with measurement. of intangible variables among which is the Organizational Climate.
Development
Organizational Climate Assessment:
The evaluation of the organizational climate is a procedure developed to measure and evaluate the organizational environment through various instruments, of psychological and sociological origin, scientifically designed and applied in a methodological and systematic way, thus ensuring the validity and reliability of its results. (Martínez, 2002).
Carrying out the evaluation of the organizational climate, studies of job satisfaction and diagnosis of organizational culture allow to avoid or anticipate conflicts and develop a healthy management, highly profitable for the company and satisfactory for all its members.
Knowledge of the Organizational Climate provides information about the processes that determine organizational behaviors, also allowing to introduce planned changes both in the attitudes and behaviors of the members, as well as in the organizational structure or in one or more of the subsystems that compose it.
The main objective of an evaluation of the organizational climate is to detect the level of impact that the internal variables of the company have on the behavior of individuals since they configure what is understood as Organizational Climate.
Other objectives of the evaluation of the organizational climate are: to know the perception of the personnel about the current Organizational Climate, to identify those organizational factors with the greatest positive or negative impact on the current climate, to propose suggestions to improve the levels of motivation of the personnel, to have information relevant for the development of strategic plans.
The diagnosis of the organizational climate allows the articulation of the dimension of people and the dimension of the systems, to understand the organizational dynamics within a specific time frame.
Competitive companies must take care, among other things, of studying their own Organizational Climate; analyze how leadership styles, communication and motivation processes, personnel policies, among others, influence the workforce and its integration process with the organizational culture; taking into account that job satisfaction constitutes one of the pillars to ensure higher quality, productivity and therefore the success of organizations.
Labor relations in the organization can determine the levels of productivity and competition of the company in the market, because if these relations are not optimal, teamwork is limited and employee performance problems are generated by reducing their level of work, for example. This "maintaining a healthy Organizational Climate is a priority variable when looking for new production strategies or promoting organizational changes." (Davis, 1997, p.175).
Information systems:
Information systems are the set of human and material resources responsible for the treatment of business information, through data entry, its processing and storage and its subsequent output, presentation and distribution to support decision-making and control of a company. organization, as well as helping managers and staff analyze problems, visualize complex issues, and create new products in an information-intensive environment. Information management is aimed at the control, preservation and retention of information (Bouthillier and Shearer, 2002)
During the last decades we have witnessed a technological revolution due to the integration of computers and information systems in business strategy, a basic factor of new competitive advantages in the hands of managers and a very powerful weapon to obtain new business opportunities.
In short, information systems are an integrated set of people and teams whose objective is to provide an organization with the information necessary to support operations, administration and decision-making.
When speaking of integrated, it implies the association and interrelation within the system of a series of subsystems, parts and elements, so it is not a monolithic structure.
Thanks to this fact, it is possible to consider the growth of the system, a process by which its capabilities are expanded by incorporating new constituent elements.
The growth of the system can incorporate not only new equipment, but also people and information.
An information system requires a support that can be a computer, but it needs more things: it requires programs, data, communications and the necessary elements to interact with the user, integrating the latter into the broad concept of the system.
So it is difficult to integrate teams or applications into business strategy if it is not done in a coordinated way with users and the information itself.
In fact, almost all the problems that have arisen and the failures in the development of IT projects and strategies have occurred precisely because of not considering Information Systems as a global concept and thinking that, only through more or less sophisticated technical resources, they can be solved. the problems that today's changing market poses.
It must be taken into account that on many occasions Information Systems do not fail fundamentally due to technological failures in the information and communication system, but rather due to the political and cultural dimension (Piattini and Del Peso, 1999, Jensen and Sage, 2000). Among the success criteria of an information system are the level of use of the same, the satisfaction of the users, the favorable attitudes of the users and the objectives achieved, and among the most common causes of failure, the incapacity of the top management to link the purposes of these systems with the strategic plans of the institution (Claudon and Laudon, 1996). An Information System implies changes in positions, skills, administration and organization.Institutions must understand why IS development is a form of organizational change that involves many different people in the institution, therefore it is important to identify which groups are involved in systems development and formalize their responsibilities (Espinosa and Medina, 2003).
Information Systems and Organizational Climate Assessment:
Starting from this approach to the evaluation of the organizational climate and defining information systems as those that allow automating the work of obtaining the most important data of an organization, summarizing them and presenting them in the most understandable way possible, to have easy access to internal information and external to the business in order to monitor the critical success factors, then the application and importance that these have for the evaluation of the climate is visualized.
In a typical information systems environment, the system consolidates and manages many of the daily information functions in relation to the office, administrative, financial and any other areas that the executive requires, for example the perception that employees have of Her organization.
The importance of this information is based on the verification that the Organizational Climate influences the behavior of the members, through consolidated ideas that go beyond reality and condition the levels of work motivation and professional performance, among others.
A diagnosis of this nature must be applied by means of surveys, which nowadays, supported by information technology, can obtain fast, frequent and in-depth results defined by the organization itself.
The information system to support the evaluation of the organizational climate must offer reports and analysis of the information in real time to the entire organization, it must include easy-to-read charts, graphs and reports, especially intuitive information that allows administrators to monitor of critical indicators.
The information systems in the evaluation of the organizational climate fulfill a triple dimension:
- They should facilitate, simplify or automatically carry out the processes for diagnosing the organizational climate. For example, application of surveys, tabulation of data, presentation of results and final reports, etc.
- Secondly, they must provide information and data that facilitate decision-making when analyzing the results and intervening in the climate, leaving the leaders free to present proposals for improvement.
In this way, the quality of the management function is increased by supporting each decision on a solid base of information duly presented and processed.
- Lastly, they must interact with the user on a deeper level than mere support for the decision-making process, guaranteeing security and confidentiality of the information handled, as well as anonymity when answering the organizational climate surveys, In this way, valid and reliable results will be obtained and close to the reality to be studied.
Organizational Climate Diagnosis System:
To evaluate the organizational climate supported by an Information System, a methodology must be developed that allows having a computerized instrument that is applied in the organization, which allows analyzing and improving efficiency and productivity, both at the group and individual level, this it can be defined as the name of Organizational Climate Diagnosis System.
The System allows designing, answering, analyzing and generating statistics from one or more Organizational Climate surveys, applicable to different areas; supports multiple companies, with multiple surveys and multiple users on each one.
They can be answered anonymously or with a user registration.
You can have multiple users in the role of survey designers.
It works through the Internet or an intranet, with an appropriate security control.
In this way, any user with access to the system, either from their place, through appropriate rooms, using any type of computer, can access the system.
The objective of this instrument is to automate all the processing for the evaluation of the organizational climate from the application of the survey to the presentation of results, making it more efficient and less expensive to carry out.
The aspects in which the general discomfort or well-being of the Organization or an area is evaluated and the perception of each and every one of its members are various and can be used, modified or substituted as deemed appropriate and according to the nature of the organization.
This system is a means through which internal customers will respond from their offices or from any place where they have access to the company's system for surveys and will present in a constructive way their perceptions of the different dimensions of the climate to be evaluated. It can include information on the organization's needs, and at the same time they will communicate their suggestions and concerns completely anonymously.
This helps to ensure greater objectivity and honesty in the responses, which significantly validates the instrument.
The leaders of the organization will be able to count on this tool to capture the climate and to be permanently monitoring the change in it in order to take corrective actions in areas that present weaknesses or barriers that are restricting their well-being or job satisfaction and reducing their Thus, productivity will be able to anticipate deviations and propose short and long-term goals aimed at continuous improvement.
Once the results have been obtained, the leaders of the organization will be able to have an accurate and complete report of the following information:
- Analysis of Positive and Negative aspects. Organization Resources Diagram. Detail of Disagreements by importance. Individual Analysis of Factors. Statistical reports. General Conclusions.
Its results allow the construction of action plans to minimize weaknesses and threats and enhance opportunities and strengths of the company.
When implementing this methodology, one of the most important aspects is communication with employees to generate credibility throughout the entire process.
It is essential to clearly convey what the objective is and give a general idea about the project. Once the data has been collected and analyzed, the results must be presented to the employees together with the action plans to be implemented.
Benefits of the Application of Information Systems in the Evaluation of the Organizational Climate:
Among the benefits that can be obtained with the evaluation of the organizational climate by applying information systems are:
- Faster access and in less time, more accurate, relevant and concise information on the perceptions that employees currently have in relation to different relevant characteristics of the work environment, from conception to presentation of results, regardless of the size of the organization. Communication improvements. Better presentation of the data that support the general management of the administration and that will allow planning of intervention strategies in the field of organizational development and Human Resources. Increased control radius, improved planning, better decision making, better understanding of problems, better development of alternatives based on an analysis of strengths and weaknesses in relation to the dimensions considered for the study. Cost savings, less paperwork,frequent repetition of the study already established and based on the variables determined for the evaluation of the climate of the organization under study.
Conclusions
When evaluating the organizational climate of a company, information systems are playing a fundamental role, becoming an important tool as it provides key information for decision-making in the company under study.
All these initiatives undoubtedly point to different efforts to develop information technology platforms, which support measurements of intangible variables, among which is the organizational climate.
When applying an information system for the evaluation of the organizational climate, it should be borne in mind that a measurement of unstructured problems is being carried out, marked by the imprecisions and ambiguities implicit in the nature of what is intended to be measured, therefore, the Measurement models, techniques and / or methodologies have to be as appropriate as possible to be able to measure this type of problem, each one adapted to the organization to be studied since each one has its own personality.
The trends in the evaluation of the organizational climate through the application of information systems are on the way to developing measurement models of intangible capital that contribute to enriching this aspect at the level of all those people, groups and organizations that are aware of the role that this has. variables in organizations.
Innovating can sometimes be as dangerous as not reacting on time and correctly in the new environmental conditions, it is up to managers to choose one option or another, for which they will need to acquire a global and business vision of information systems.
To achieve a strategic objective, three requirements are necessary: have a vision of what you want, know approximately the tools and resources necessary to obtain it, and take the first steps.
Bibliographic references
Ø Álvarez E. and Ortiz. (2002). Consultancy for the Diagnosis and Intervention of the Organizational Climate. Degree Work, Master in Social Sciences, Universidad Javeriana. Colombia.
Ø Anderson, L. (2000). The Organizational Climate and Job Satisfaction. Degree work. Mexico.
Ø Bouthillier F. and Shearer K., 2002. Understanding knowledge management and information management: the need for an empirical perspective.
Ø Castañeda, A. (2001). The new information and communication technologies as a cultural process and the bases for its impact on educational activity. Technical University of Ambato. Peru.
Ø Claudon K. and Laudon JP 1996. Information Systems Administration. 3rd Edition. Prentice Hall HispanoAmericana, Mexico
Ø Davis, K. (1997). Human behavior at work. Mexico McGraw Hill.
Ø Durán, P. (2003). The Importance of the Organizational Climate in the Success of the Companies. Chile.
Ø Jensen, AJ and AP Sage (2000). A Systems Management Approach for Improvement of Organizational Performance Measurement Systems. Information Knowledge Systems Management.
Ø Martínez, R. (2002). Success belongs to those who can change the weather. HayGroup. Austria.
Ø Piattini, M. and Del Peso, E. (1999). Techno-Legal Challenges of Data Warehouses (Datawarehouses) and their exploitation (Datamining). Editorial ABZ, Mexico.
Ø Velásquez, R. (2003). Organizational Climate at the University Level. Editorial Pretince Hall. Mexico.
Ø Villán, B. (2000). Implementation of instruments for information management. Editorial ABZ, Mexico.
Electronic Sources
Ø Espinosa M. and Medina C., 2003. Organizational Change: Information Systems and Emotions. Management and Strategy. No. 15.
Ø Organizational Diagnostic Studies Consultores, CA (2000). Organizational Climate Assessment. Mexico: EDOC.
Ø Fernández, A (1999). Organizational Climate Concept,.
Ø Furham M. and Goodstein F. (2002). Great Experts in Organizational Change..
Ø Goncalves, A. (1997). Organizational Climate Dimensions,.
Ø Gudiño P., Sánchez A. and Hernández E., 2002. The use of information technology in search of competitive advantages. Management and Strategy. Nº11-12.
Ø López Galindo M., 2001. Change and organizational culture in the design of a management information system and its reflection in the balanced scorecard. Management and Strategy. No. 15.
Ø Robbins, S. (2000). Organizational behavior,.
