What is Organisational Design?

Organizational design focuses on the structures people work within, the principles guiding their organization, and how these elements connect to maintain a focus on delivering value. It aims to realize the benefits of all the talented individuals in the organization. Establishing agile foundations for teams is crucial to ensuring that these structures and principles are effective and value-driven.

Listen to the podcast

Apple: https://apple.co/3rBFBW8
Google: https://bit.ly/3gypUsv
Amazon: https://amzn.to/34w25iz
Stitcher: https://bit.ly/3oEVrNU
iHeartRadio: https://ihr.fm/3HFqJvj

Why do Organisational Design?

Enabling the most efficient work

In recent years, we’ve seen many people feeling overburdened, overworked, and spending excessive time in meetings, especially online. It’s challenging to see how this time positively contributes to delivering organizational outcomes.

The structure of an organization influences individuals’ decisions about where to invest their time. Everyone wants to know that their choices drive towards something valuable.

With effective Organizational Design and agile foundations for teams, you can achieve purposeful outcomes at the individual, team, portfolio, and organizational levels. This intentional approach ensures that time and efforts are directed towards valuable goals.

Inject Autonomy

Another significant shift could be injecting more autonomy within your teams to solve complex problems. Hierarchically led individuals often struggle to align their skills to valuable outcomes or solve problems effectively. In contrast, a top-down flow of work into teams empowered to make decisions allows for leveraging their collective strengths. However, achieving the desired outcomes requires intentional design.

In our recent podcast on Organizational Design, Roy Stapleton provides a great example of this approach. Building agile foundations for teams is essential to fostering this autonomy and ensuring successful outcomes.

“I have been working with a client for the last couple of years. That client had a very clear goal around how they affected society and invested in sustainable outcomes for their society.”

“Really beautiful goal. It was a vision that I’m sure many people in that organization felt very strongly about. In fact, in their engagement surveys, it is one of the key reasons people work for that organization. However, when we started to do the organizational design, we realized that, ultimately, there weren’t that many people committed to their actual job doing that work. It was pretty much primarily voluntary. It was beyond the capacity plan of other work. They were committed to the rest of the time; it was certainly aspirational.”

“However, in terms of the effort linked to those outcomes, there wasn’t a lot going on in reality. So doing an Organization Design, you’re able to highlight that need to invest proper time, real capacity, and thought in how we create the opportunity within the organization to go after this very important visionary goal.”

Creating an environment for agility

One crucial aspect of interactions and connections in a large organization is understanding how we create dependencies and handoffs. Once identified, we need to minimize friction in these systems. Our goal is to encourage people to actively connect, solve problems, and create value.

Many organizations were historically designed for a steady-state environment and haven’t reviewed their structures in a while. In today’s fast-evolving, continuous change environment, we need to ensure our organizations are purposely designed for agility.

To achieve true agility across the organization, we need to establish agile foundations for teams. Even with optimal Agile teams, if the environment constrains them, the value they aim to deliver will not be realized.

The Organizational Design process will ensure teams are set up to thrive, creating a structure where Agile can operate effectively.

When is the best time to do it?

Can you rewrite the content add the keyword ” agile foundations for teams “. Make it readable, in active voice and professional. Don’t use the words Comprehensive, Discover :

Roy – “There is no best or worst time because regardless of what moment your organisation is in, why wouldn’t you want to ensure that alignment exists?”

Impact on teams and leaders

Taking a participatory approach to how you go about forming new structures will improve the acceptance of change and the rate of that change. 

You want to get decisions as close to the teams trying to solve those problems, so bringing them into the conversation of restructuring as early as possible is a positive trend in Organisational Design.

Roy recalls successful transformations worldwide like Dutch organisation Buurtzorg, a home nursing company.

“They’ve done transformative things that have immediately impacted their teams from the beginning, specifically by design. Halving the size of the teams, they realised how empowering it was to give them absolute autonomy, resulting in delivering the patient’s outcomes they needed. So they now have a principle that says don’t let them get too big once they get to a specific size, dividing like a cell.”

“An organisation today making that decision, consciously made to do, would have a transformative effect on those structures and the entire culture.”

How to implement

Begin with empathy and consider the people’s perspective going through that organisational change because it can be quite confronting.

The initial approach might be to lock yourself away in a room because it feels more comfortable presenting the correct and most apparent answers. Organisations that have made successful shifts into vastly different designs have achieved that by involving more people and making it an inclusive process.

Your people will support a change when they understand why it is necessary and their role in that change.

Participation of a cross-section of people involved in the process has proved time and time again that involving people in solving the problem will not only endorse it, but they will also often come up with a better solution.

Need help?

EPiC specializes in transformation, with experienced enterprise coaches ready to assist your organization on this journey. Contact us to discuss the problems you’re facing, and we’ll explore how our agile transformation services can help.