Organizational Design in the Hybrid Era: How to Measure and Boost Employee Productivity
Organizational charts are just one piece of organizational design, but most businesses stop the entire exercise there. While they help delineate roles and managerial relationships, most org charts don’t reflect how a company actually works. With evolving business models, hybrid work, and cross-functional teams, organizational design must go beyond the org chart to serve as a realistic, foundational model.
The Hidden Costs of Legacy Organizational Design on Employee Productivity
Organizational design is foundational to how your business works. Legacy organizational design would have you follow the lines on an org chart for approvals, complaints, and advice. The problem with that approach, according to Corporate Rebels, is that the rigid structure of an org chart invites a multitude of issues, including:
- No clear ownership of issues/projects/initiatives
- Approval feedback loops that cause delays
- Duplicate efforts on projects by various teams
- Employee disengagement due to role uncertainty
While you can’t throw out the concept of an org chart entirely, it’s essential to account for cross-functional teams, understanding who collaborates with whom more often (or should), and who is actually responsible for specific departments and files.
Let’s take Bill, a marketing manager, as an example. A decade ago, Bill had three direct reports and was responsible for all marketing initiatives at the firm. The org chart was clear, tasks got done, and everyone knew who reported to Bill and who he reported to. His direct reports were gradually let go over the past ten years. Today, Bill is on his own, spending most of his day fielding requests that his three direct reports would have handled.
Bill has a tough time prioritizing tasks because some come from people two tiers above him in the org chart, while most of the urgent ones come from the sales team. Additionally, Bill is asked to train junior staff in other departments on marketing tasks, so he laterally assumes some responsibility for them. All of this results in a lack of measurable employee productivity. Technically, Bill is still a Marketing Manager, but in reality, the org chart is being thrown out the window.
Today, the org chart is a guide rather than a rigid structure. So how can HR adapt and design a sound infrastructure that won’t leave people like Bill confused and unproductive?
Designing a Modern, Adaptive Structure: Leveraging Workforce Analytics
Brad Einstein of Harvard Business School has several great insights and tips for redesigning the modern business structure to adapt to changing needs. Instead of starting with the org chart as the foundational document, he suggests breaking down component tasks and their interdependences first.
The component tasks are a breakdown of what has to happen for your business to function, and the interdependencies of those tasks are broken down into the following categories:
- Pooled: these interdependencies are siloed tasks, such as independent store operations in a larger company
- Sequential: these interdependencies are when one task requires another to be completed for it to happen, such as an assembly line
- Reciprocal: these interdependencies are collaborative across people and departments, such as product development
Once this complex structure is mapped out, you can build departments to handle specific tasks and establish a chain of command, where you can take back ownership that the traditional org chart doesn’t allow. Once that is done, you can map the managerial span of control to properly outline job functions like Bill’s, and map the power centers of your company to account for the importance of other departments and roles.
While this task is substantial, most businesses have evolved past traditional work models and need their organizational structure stripped down to the studs and rebuilt. Human resources departments are the best owners of this task, and it will help properly delineate roles and internal pathways to promotion. The exercise will outline who is doing the heavy lifting and what processes are being ignored at the expense of others. In short, it will help you work the way you should to grow and adapt rather than being stuck in a legacy model.
The Missing Link: Data-Driven Organizational Design
The shift from a rigid org chart to a dynamic model based on task interdependencies requires one essential element: data. How can HR accurately map managerial span of control or identify who is doing the "heavy lifting" without a clear, objective view of daily work activity?
Modern organizational design is fundamentally about understanding the actual flow of work—not just the reported flow. This is where employee productivity monitoring and workforce analytics become critical tools.
By non-invasively capturing activity data across various applications and tasks, solutions like Prodoscore provide the objective insights needed to validate task interdependencies, identify and eliminate duplicate efforts across teams, and measure the actual impact of cross-functional collaboration. Before you strip your organizational structure down to the studs, use Prodoscore to gather the data blueprint. It’s the only way to ensure your new design works effectively for a modern, hybrid workforce.
