In part one of this article, we explored some of the major challenges that HR faces when it comes to major organizational change, including the inadequacies of software that was never really designed to meet those challenges. Today, we’ll look at software that addresses those exact needs: organizational design software.
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The Solution: Organizational Design Software
Fortunately, the newest generation of organizational design and change solutions is specifically built to provide business and HR leadership teams with the best and clearest view of every level and aspect of the organization, including advanced modeling, analytic, and collaboration capabilities to support an array of business and growth-critical projects.
Whether an organization is transferring staff from one country to another, developing communications protocols for its global HR executives, or simply wanting to give digital “pats on the back” to staff, HR visualization software has a role to play in streamlining processes and helping to ensure that communications are smooth, consistent, and trouble-free.
Organizational design software can also help spark increased collaboration throughout even the largest, globally dispersed organization and facilitate tremendous improvements in the application of workplace diversity and inclusion policies. By having controlled access to a visualized organization framework, employees throughout the organization are ostensibly able to search for and directly contact any individual who may have specific skills, expertise, or knowledge that can be efficiently shared across the organization, regardless of the traditional boundaries imposed by time and location.
The same principle holds true as HR teams attempt to tackle the difficult challenge of fairly balancing the diversity makeup of their organization’s workforce. A true visualization of an organization’s people and their place within the organizational structure is an extremely powerful tool to support—or refute—the notion that an articulated inclusion policy is being fairly and uniformly applied at every level.
Organizational design software, in fact, makes it possible for HR leaders to see not only the current reality of where things stand but also exactly how the organization could look under any variety of “what if” scenarios.
In fact, such software can provide highly detailed—and current—individualized views of employee performance assessments, personal interests, certifications, and many other key criteria that can greatly help HR departments assemble the most effective, cohesive, and productive teams for their organization’s most pressing strategic needs. For example, a pharmaceutical company may be able to use organizational visualization software to quickly put together a team of researchers with just the right mix of research expertise to develop an important drug formulation and get it patented and into market before the competition. The potential strategic advantage is huge.
Addressing Organizational Design Change Challenges
The first challenge in planning for any major organizational design change is to fully understand the current reality of the organization. From there, organizational models can be segmented across a wide range of variables to understand and support operational objectives and available resources. The ability to provide senior management with real-time, user-specific data from within the solution greatly improves the effectiveness and speed of overall project management, reporting, and decision-making.
Regardless of whether advanced organizational design software is being used, throughout the organizational change management process, it’s vital to comprehensively consider the interrelationships between technology, processes, structure, and—most importantly—people and the overall culture of the organization.
The key factors for success with any organizational transformation will include:
- Agility—to quickly embrace dynamic change factors such as M&A or market opportunities;
- Analytics—to understand and measure key metrics such as potential and performance data, employee engagement, spans of control, etc.;
- Talent Assessment—to catalog available skills or identify gaps or duplication;
- Modeling and Design—to flexibly “test-drive” various organizational design scenarios and evaluate alternatives;
- Communications—to foster engagement of stakeholders and decision-makers throughout the design and implementation phases; and
- Reporting—to provide a big-picture view and drill-down detail on organizational functions and results from any organizational transformation.
If these factors are adequately addressed over the course of the organizational design transformation and built into the adoption strategy, the chances are greatly improved that the humans who work in your organization will be the ones to benefit. What could be more human than this?
Sebastiaan Bos is the head of product management at Nakisa, a global leader in enterprise business solutions for organization transformation and organizational design. View Nakisa’s twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.