What’s the Best Org Structure for My Team?

I’m frequently asked questions about org structure, and I understand why. A good org structure provides plenty of benefits: greater clarity for employees, improved accountability for management, and better overall decision-making in your business.?

But as business comes back online after the pandemic, business owners are feeling more pressure than ever to reexamine and retool their org charts.??

Why Owners Are Asking about Org Structure

Three reasons typically motivate my clients to revise or create an org structure for their business.?

1. The team says they need more people.
2. The team says they need different people.
3. The owner may have their own internal sense that they don’t have the right team in place.???

On the surface, these are all great reasons for any manager to look at their org chart. But these aren’t the real reasons clients are asking about org structure now.

The real reason owners are asking about org structure right now is because of fear.??

“All my people are gone. We’re about to get busy, and we don’t know how to be busy with the organization set up the way it is now.”??

What they’re really saying is, “How in the world are we going to handle the economy coming back online and running a full operation when we are nowhere near the size we were before everything went offline?”?

This is the core fear, and it isn’t going to be solved by creating or redesigning a new org chart.???

The Three Questions You Need to Ask Instead?

If asking about your org chart is the wrong question, what questions should you be asking instead? What can you focus on to address and move past this core fear of business coming back online and getting busy again??

Here are the three questions you need to be asking instead:

1. What are our processes??
2. What are the bottlenecks???
3. What can I change??

What Are Our Processes??

What are the underlying processes that allow us to work and be successful? Do you know your processes as well as you think???If not, you will throw resources at the wrong things in an attempt to fix the wrong problems.?

Follow an order through your system. Who touches it and when? Do they know what to do next? Is any single step more problematic than the others? Get clear on these things first. adding more people to a broken process won't make it better.

Understanding your processes and potential pitfalls is a major step towards alleviating your fear of coming back online.??

Where Are the Bottlenecks??

A common process failure is a constraint (aka bottleneck). This is where work slows down because of a lack of people or tools to perform efficiently. Bottlenecks will be major pain points once the business returns. They are at the core of your fear of how to handle new business, so it’s crucial to identify and alleviate them.

The simplest way to identify bottlenecks in your organization is to locate persons who are responsible for multiple things that need to happen at the same time.??

Start with your Project Manager.?They are involved in winning new business, site surveys, drawings, planning, and running shows. What could go wrong?

What Can I Change?

At this point, you have a clear idea of your processes. You’re locating the bottlenecks that will hold you back when the business returns. Now we can take all this accumulated data and make some real changes.?

You can alleviate bottlenecks in two ways once you’ve located them:??

1. Change your personnel?
2. Change your processes

Change Your Personnel

Sometimes the answer to your inefficiencies is in the personnel.?

Ask yourself, “Who else do I need to hire to relieve these bottlenecks? Do I have the right people in the right places to ensure that when the business comes back online we’re ready?”?

This is where the value of a healthy org chart comes back into play.??

Change Your Processes

More often than not, though, you can simply update or complete your processes to serve your existing team, enabling them to work more efficiently.??

You can throw a lot of money at a “personnel problem” when, in reality, the issue is a process problem.?

Usually it’s a combination of both. The goal is to relieve bottlenecks, and at times you will need to make adjustments to both personnel and processes to feel confident you can handle what’s coming.??

In all likelihood, you aren’t suffering from a problem with your org chart. You’re suffering from a problem with the fear around your potential bottlenecks when the business comes back online.?

Process improvement is a never-ending job, but the payoff is scalability and healthier growth.