One item that tends to come prominently in many organization’s budgets nowadays is ‘landscape beautification.’ It is not altogether unheard of of organizations spending tens of thousands of dollars on this alone. There are some which are even committing hundreds of thousands of dollars into landscape beautification. For the most part, of course, the organizations doing this will tend to be the ones with ‘landscapes’ to talk about – like those whose head office grounds are laid on several acres of land. You come to appreciate how much money is going into landscape beautification when you get to learn that a full-fledged industry, with revenues running into millions of dollars (and employing thousands of people worldwide), has sprung up to serve this very need.
Now to some people coming across records of such expenditures, a feeling of resentment tends to rise -as they feel that too huge amounts of money are being spent on ‘frivolous’ things like landscape beautification. They simply can’t bring themselves to appreciate why a medium sized organization could decide to spend several tens of thousands of dollars per year on landscape beautification. It is seems like extravagance of the highest order, and where they happen to be people in positions of authority, they won’t hesitate to make their feelings about the same known.
What the people who consider it frivolous to put money into landscape beautification need to be informed on is the importance of an organization’s landscape, and how the huge investment in its beautification is justified.
You very well know that an organization’s physical appearance (that is, the appearance of the buildings that house it and their precincts) send many messages about the organization. In actual fact, these constitute an important element of the organization’s ‘body language.’ It is just the same way that how well (or poorly) groomed a person is sends numerous messages about that person, even without the person opening his or her mouth. Seen in this context, the importance of maintaining a good organizational head office landscape becomes all too clear. It is important to note that the people who happen to visit the organizations, who will always be stakeholders in the organization’s operations in one way or another, will try to look for clues on what type of an organization it is. One of the ways through which they obtain those clues is by checking out how well (or poorly) kempt the organization’s compound is. The stakeholders in question could be anyone – from prospective clients, to donors (in case it is a non-profit organization), to suppliers, to government agents and so on. These are people whose decisions affect the wellbeing of the organization in various ways. And those decisions are in turn affected by among other things, how they perceive the organization, through things like how well its landscape is managed.
Yet the need to keep an organization’s landscape looking good is not just to impress visiting stakeholders. A beautiful landscape is also beneficial to the people who work in the organization on a day to day basis. A beautiful landscape tends to create an aura of liveliness, a relaxed general feel -the type which is important for organizational creativity and productivity.
Source by Arthur H Anderson