4 Tips on Developing Organizational Guidelines

It can take a lot of time and effort to transform an organization’s current organizational structure into the new one, as the changes could affect business productivity.

Following some simple guidelines will ensure an effective organizational structure that will help your company succeed.

1. Visually Represent your strategy.
Find some time to think about which groupings of people can help deliver your organization’s strategy more effectively. Ask yourself which functions are most critical in order to achieve strategic goals. Put those who you need to communicate with closest to you.
2. Reduce bureaucracy.
Every organization has processes, such as the hiring or purchase process. If you consider your organization’s key processes and design the structure around them, you can reduce bureaucracy and improve productivity.

Try to reduce the number of times that a process spans more than one department. Every position within an organizational chart should reports to one manager.

Giving two or more managers the power to direct the activities of one employee is an invitation to mis-communication and chaos.

Obviously, the fewer handovers there are between departments the faster processes take place and the more efficient an organization is.

3. Keep it simple.
Organizational structures should ultimately be simple to understand. Anyone looking at the organizational chart should be able to see how various departments contribute to the organization’s goals from first view.

This has many advantages:

• Everyone understands how they fit within the organization.
• Employees know where to go to get what they need.
• Clear career growth opportunities in the company keep employee motivation high.
• Stakeholders, such as clients and suppliers, are served better because they know what part of the organization to turn to.

4. Look into the Future.
Once you have a working organization chart, the next step is to figure out how that chart is going to serve the future of the business.

We refer to this as Double Vision: keeping in mind how the present is going to serve the future. As you build your business toward your Strategic Objective, think about how your organization chart needs to morph and evolve in order to serve that vision.

Get started developing your organizational structure with ConceptDraw Office.