by You should seek to promote flexibility in your organization. You can do this by encouraging your employees to find new ways of doing business that are better. You should also be brave enough to do away with policies that do not work, because there are advantages that come with promoting flexibility in your organization.
Enhanced Competitiveness
One of the problems with an organization that is rigid and mechanistic is that it cannot adapt. Whatever challenges that come along will strain the organization. Eventually, a challenge will come along that’s so massive that the organization may falter.
One of the factors that seriously alters the playing field is technology. When technology comes along that is disruptive, companies that initially had an advantage find themselves at a disadvantage. They need to figure out ways in which they can use the old technology, which will refine their former business practices so that they can then regain their competitive edge.
An organization that is flexible will respond to changes by evolving. The most flexible organization does not fight change; a flexible organization accepts change as an inevitable part of the business environment, so it learns to maximize its opportunities whenever change comes along.
Improved Efficiency
A flexible company will be willing to try new methods and processes, even when the old processes seem to work just fine. Flexibility in business means that you don’t live by the maxim, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Instead, a flexible company will look for ways to find something that works more efficiently than what you already have.
Let’s start with your company policy. As a flexible company, you should be willing to review and refine your corporate policies so that you will encourage innovation, so that you can then find more-efficient and more-effective methods. This is a key factor in how important it is to have flexibility in operations management.
As time progresses, this culture of constantly experimenting and improving your processes will mean that your company becomes more efficient, so that it can enjoy higher revenues and reduced costs.
Your Scheduling Becomes More Flexible
The most flexible organizations offer their employees a more diverse range of options. These organizations make it easier for their employees to lead personal lives that are more fulfilling, while also enabling the employees to meet their work commitments.
One factor that can help is to allow your employees to telecommute – or at least, to offer them a flexible work schedule. This would be a boon to your employees, since it would benefit those who have families or other responsibilities.
Another example of a flexible organization is that you could consider allowing job sharing, so that you could split one job among two employees, who each work part-time, rather than having one employee who works full-time. You will be allowing the two job-sharing employees to have more flexibility in their scheduling, thereby enabling them to become more productive.
When you accommodate your employees’ needs like this, you enable your employees to become more loyal to your company, so that it becomes easier for you to retain your best employees who might otherwise have left the company, had your company offered only a rigid schedule.
Better Team Building
When your management structure is flexible, you will get the most out of your workforce, depending on their individual talents. No two people are the same, so no two employees have exactly the same skill sets. A good manager knows how to bring people together who have differing talents and then to unite them under a single cause.
When you unite your team so that their skills complement each other, you have a flexible unit that can handle a diverse range of issues. They become able to take on any challenge that comes their way, and in so doing, they enable the organization to become more effective.
A manager who is too rigid won’t do this. He will try to force square pegs through round holes. putting his employees into roles where their abilities are not effective and their weaknesses are magnified. The result is that they will become less productive, thereby making the organization less productive as a result.
Better Continuity During Uncertainty
One of the characteristics of a flexible organization is that it is prepared for uncertainty. By having its workforce distributed among different places and working using different media, the organization is better able to handle uncertain conditions that would make it difficult for a centrally located organization to cope. Such things as storms, tornadoes, and other natural disasters make it difficult for rigid organizations to adapt and maintain continuity.
A flexible organization will also be able to deal with uncertainty in economic and technological environments. Such a company should have measures in place, in the event of changes in technology, regulation, or even the economy.
Your Environmental Impact Is Reduced
When you install flexible work schedules and you leverage the power of the internet to enable your employees to work remotely, you have fewer buildings to maintain. Your employees also have to do a lot less commuting to and from work, which means your organization’s carbon footprint will also be reduced.
Another thing about flexible organizations is that they use technology, which is electronic, so that they do not have much paperwork. They also reduce the amount of office supplies they use. This also reduces the carbon footprint of the organization, thereby making it more environmentally friendly.
Hiring Costs and Turnover Costs Are Reduced
Of course, when your organization is flexible, it will accommodate your employees’ needs and schedules, which means that they will have a healthier work-life balance, and they will be more satisfied with their jobs. Such satisfied employees will be more likely to stay with your company.
You will get to hold on to your best employees and enjoy increased productivity from them. Also, you won’t have to deal with a high turnover, which happens when employees aren’t satisfied with an organization, so you will not need to fill vacant positions as frequently, so you will save on hiring costs.
Your Organization Will Grow Faster
A more-flexible organization will grow more quickly than a rigid organization, because it is always seeking processes and methods that work better than those it currently has. Such an organization will also utilize technology, which will enable its employees to work remotely and to collaborate virtually. Such teamwork tends to be more productive than other work structures, while also costing much less to maintain.
A flexible organization will also identify more opportunities in the environment and will take advantage of these opportunities, thereby enabling itself to profit in environments in which more-rigid companies wouldn’t be able to prosper.
There are too many benefits of a flexible organization to list, but these are most of them. When you enable your company to become adaptable, it is able to evolve with the times, and it will survive longer, becoming continually more prosperous.
Purity of Mind
Purity of Mind. That’s the goal many aim for when they set out on the path of practicing mindfulness and meditation.
But the one mistake they often make, and which they continue to make, while pursuing this goal is that they continue to remain attached to their existing desires, and worse, they continue to form another types of desires all the time.
As long as your mind is filled with any kind of desire no matter how big or small that desire may be how can you say that you have a pure mind?
A pure mind, by its very definition, means a mind that is free of all impurities, and these impurities are nothing but all those desires that you hold up in your mind.
If your mind is pure then it won’t have any desires, and if there are desires then your mind isn’t pure. It’s as simple as that.
However, we won’t be wrong to think that our mind can have different levels of purity. A person with fewer desires should have a purer mind than one with many desires. Right?
So, even if you think that you can’t give up all your desires in life, and I do understand that we all need at least a few basic desires in order to survive and live in this world, what you can do is try to give up as many of these desires as you possibly can from your life.
Besides the number of desires that you have in you, another factor that decides how much purity of mind you have is how intense is the nature of your desires.
You may have only a few desires, or even just a single desire, but if those desires are so intense within you that you keep thinking about them all the time, then that may actually be worse than having several little desires.
So, if you seek purity of mind, the two things you need to work upon are, first, to reduce the number of desires you have and, second, to reduce the intensity of the desires that you have.
Practice these two things in your daily life, and it will be enough to take you closer towards achieving a pure mind some day.
Now, talking about desires, it’s easy for me to tell you to give up your desires, and it’s easy for you to read and understand this. But what’s difficult for both of us is to actually practice this in our daily lives.
Once a desire gets attached to your mind, it becomes hard to detach it and let it go.
So, in reality, before we even begin to work upon removing our existing desires, we should first try not to form any new desires in our mind.
Otherwise, what’s the use of taking so much effort to remove one desire, if you are only going to replace it with another one. If you continue to form one desire after another throughout your life, you will never become free from them, and that also means that you will never become free of suffering.
By not allowing yourself to form any new desires, you at least make sure that you don’t further fall back in your path to achieve purity of mind.
As far as your existing desires are concerned, there is no other way except to try to live your life without indulging in them. I know how hard it can become to live so, but for better or for worse, that’s the only way there is.
When you try to give up your desires, you will find that some desires are easier to give up than others. The ones that are the toughest to give up are those that are deeply ingrained within us, and those that we have let ourself indulge in for the longest period of time.
There are a few basic desires present in all of us because of the nature of our very own body and mind: the desire for food, power, wealth, lust, fame and praise.
More often, it’s some form of these basic desires that are the toughest to give up.
This is because these desires, over a period of time, have formed such a tight grip on our mind that we can’t imagine living our life without them.
For those who only believe in seeking some form of pleasure in their life all the time, even the idea of living their life without any desire seems scary and impossible to them. They may even think that their life has no meaning without their desires.
But what they don’t realize now, and, unfortunately, what they’ll only realize when it’s already too late, is that the only thing these desires lead them to is suffering.
Even when you don’t see this suffering, even as you feel immensely happy in chasing your desires, what you fail to see is that this suffering always exists behind every desire that you chase.
The reason you don’t see, or become aware of, your suffering is that your desires make you think only of the joy that you can have now, and not of the pain that you’ll face tomorrow because of them; they make you think only of the temporary and not of the permanent; they make you think only of yourself and not of the world around you.
To overcome your suffering, you must uproot the very seeds of all these desires so that they are never born again.
