The Importance of Organisational Structure
The structure of your organisation can make the difference between a business succeeding and a business failing. We have all heard about the businesses that had “too much success” and was not able to scale up to meet the demand of their product. We also know about businesses that were too slow to respond to change, to identify new innovations, or even just to listen to new ideas by their employees. In order to prevent this happening to your business, below are 6 recommendations.
6 Top Tips on How to Structure an Organisation
- Make your mission. What is your business mission? Is it something you passionately talk about each day? If someone asked other employees in your business would they too know and share the business mission, or is it something you wrote on a business plan that now hides in some drawer? If you want your business to go in a clear direction, everyone must understand where that direction is, they must share that mission, so that each day as they work they are able to consider whether what they are doing is taking them a step closer to realising it.
- The missions of the masses. Agree individual missions of employees that help lead the business towards its core mission as well as towards their personal goals. After hiring staff, identify what their mission will be within the organisation and how that will help to meet the overall mission of the organisation. This can be broken down into a number of objectives over a number of timescales e.g. over the year, each month, each week etc. Performance reviews can later take this into account as a means of evaluating if the person has been on track with reaching their mission.
- Value your values. Just like your mission, it is important to consider what are your business values. These will give your business character, a personality, and will help to distinguish your business from others. Any future decision should then be consistent with these values.
- Have a flat business structure. With a flat business structure there is less hierarchy and bureaucracy. It speeds it communication and it ignites innovation. When members of the organisation feel they are on a more level playing field and feel valued for their input, they are more likely to contribute both in terms of their expected contribution I.e. what was agreed in their contract, as well as unexpected contributions, such as proposing new ideas and introducing friends and contacts to the business. Which can be just as valuable, if not more when looking at the impact on the bottom-line.
- Be see-through. With complete transparency there is nothing to hide, everyone knows all there is to know and now they can proceed to get the job done. Sometimes people fear releasing certain information to the public, but if you want to create a culture based on trust and innovation, essentially a culture that will survive, then these values must permeate through all levels of the organisation. By revealing all financial and statistical information it also makes it easy for teams to track their development, compare how they are performing against other teams and create reasonable goals to aim towards.
- Self-organised. Structure the organisation using self-organised teams. This type of team is known to be extremely potent in terms of resourcefulness, creativity and its ability to achieve. So create a team of people who each are skilled in a particular area that would be beneficial for the project. Inform the team of the project aim and its outline. Ensure there is a leader who can provide authority to remove any roadblocks should the team come across any. As long as they get support when needed and are free to investigate ideas, teams will often find innovative ideas, new processes and have a fundamental impact upon organisations.