After you've been doing your job for a long time, you get the feeling that it's simple and, in fact, belongs to "general knowledge". However, as soon as you start discussing it with someone, it turns out that the information is not so obvious.
We had a curious experience. At one of the rounds of changes in our business, we decided to get assistance. We turned to a large and well-known international consulting company.
As a matter of fact, everything went well and we got what we wanted. However, after that, they admitted that they added several tricks that we used in our business to their Playbooks.
For the benefit of the community, I will tell you about these hacks that affect the organization of the company's structure. Perhaps, they can also come in handy to you if this was a novelty for the consultants.
I don’t pretend to be a pioneer and I know for sure that many people do the same. It was evolution that led us to this format. I can’t recollect any specific source of information or inspiration, I'm sorry.
These ideas are simple and fairly universal — at least in the industry of technology and digital companies that employ from 30 to 3,000 staff members.
Let’s start with a couple of general assumptions, axioms, and limitations:
- Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Therefore, if your corporate culture is weak and toxic, you’ll fail to fix it by modifying or even completely rebuilding the organizational structure.
- Any changes are made by people. Even if you have a cool idea of how to improve the organizational structure but the wrong person is at the head of it, everything will go wrong. Don’t forget about the match between the function and the employee.
So, let’s go!
First, there will be a general recommendation for non-experts on how to work with a management tool called an organizational (chart) structure.
You should update your organizational structure as soon as you achieve your goals. Organizational structure is a responsibility map, a diagram of who is responsible for what in the company.
It all starts with the main task or goal of your business. It can change once per year, or maybe less or more frequently. However, as soon as the goal has changed, the next step is to modify or update the company's organizational structure.
It’s a sad spectacle when a company has changed its goal or strategy for achieving it — but its organizational structure has remained the same. Typically, you just create more problems and reduce your speed of movement.
As soon as your goal has changed, your way of achieving the goal is modified, and your organizational structure needs to be updated.
If necessary, you can do it every year.
It may sound alarming, but… If you set the rules of the game from the onset and say “This is how we will move on and evolve to meet new challenges,” it will be much easier to integrate the changes. The organizational structure should always correspond to the company you want to become, and not to what it is today.
Now, let's move on to the specific tidbits.
Hack 1: People Care Department to Take Care of Your Staff
I can’t stand classic HR departments. Usually, these are some kind of murky formations in companies, with weak digitization of processes and low performance benchmarks. It’s rare to get feedback like “Our HR specialists work very well and indeed help our company”.
In this situation, it’s not the HR themselves who are to blame. Rather, they are put in such conditions when their powers are severely limited and they can’t do anything effective for people.
First, if you can do without HR, keep doing it as long as possible. It’s strange to observe how the head of a company hires HR managers at the very beginning of their business life cycle. The head tends to believe that the HRs will fix all the problems for them — cool guys will be working for the company and the corporate culture will be healthy. No, it’s a mistake.
Second, it’s necessary to expand the functions and capabilities of the HR department if you still need it due to your company's size. The best formulation we have reached is to rename Human Resources to People Care and provide them with all the services that can indeed impact people's happiness. For instance, in addition to the standard functions of recruiting, HR records management, and general HR issues, People Care oversees office managers and supervises branches. It is responsible for event management, education, and training. It ensures technical support for software and hardware as well as organizes workplaces in the office and remotely. Plus, it is in charge of procurement for employees.
Everything that can contribute to organizing the care of employees should be gathered in one place and entrusted to an adequate manager. Their main task is to make sure that the team is not distracted by trifles and that nothing prevents them from doing their job.
As for corporate culture, it is primarily the responsibility of the company's chief executives. It should never be delegated as the responsibility of your HR department.
Hack 2: Project and Process Management in Each Department
A while ago, a formulation became popular. According to it, there are Run and Change processes and people. You should avoid confusing the former with the latter and it’s essential to set tasks accordingly.
I'll try to talk on behalf of the old school of management :). There are two main types of management — process and project.
The task of a project manager is to do something once. Typically, these are either tasks to change the existing order of things (that very Change), or custom (non-standard) tasks.
The mission of process management, in general, is to set up a pipe. It will facilitate doing similar operations day after day — better, faster, higher, and stronger…
In each department, appoint people responsible for project management and tasks within it — as well as those who are in charge of operational duties. Initially, one person can try to combine both. However, it’s crucial to differentiate from the onset one-off tasks from those that require regular execution. Each category needs its specific approaches and processes.
The above-mentioned recommendation is ideal for departments that are already quite large. There are X people in them who deal exclusively with operational duties and are not distracted by custom or non-standard tasks. Plus, there are Y people who take on only change tasks or unusual cases.
In our experience, this approach enables you to significantly increase the total efficiency, NPS, and the number of tasks that the department solves. Besides, the department’s autonomy improves. The staff enhance and develop themselves, without waiting for the managers to push them. If they wait, this can happen because of incompetence or overload that prevents people from finding time off their operational duties.
How 3: Divide Your Company's Backoffice into Hard and Soft Office
It’s a popular and convenient scheme for dividing a company into “business” and “business services". Some work according to metrics and plans, the North Star, OKR, and KPI. Others stick to SLA(service level agreement) — the level of service, which by any means can’t be lower than the agreed one.
You can call them front and back office or apply other terms. Nevertheless, the essence remains the same. The former consists of marketing, sales, and business development. The latter includes the necessary services for business maintenance, such as customer support, lawyers, planned development, administration, document management, customer success, accounting, and so on.
There may be a million variations here, depending on your business specifics. Let me try to convey the idea and the approach. There are types of activities in which you should strive to avoid mistakes by all means. Normally, it’s everything that has to do with your relations with the state — such as taxes, finance, registration of employees, document management, and legal aspects of all sorts. In all these functions, the main goal is to reduce risks — and ideally, to avoid them.
By contrast, there are many processes where errors are not exactly helpful but definitely not critical. This is where you are ready for a high level of tolerance for blunders. After all, people learn from their mistakes, by trying something new and developing.
Things work well when these two entirely different approaches and functions are divided into separate areas. We call them Hard and Soft Office. Accordingly, all functions where we don’t accept risks are moved to the part of the organizational structure called the Hard Office. The part where creativity and experimentation are required and present is moved to the Soft Office. We select the managers accordingly. In the first case, it should be a financial or law expert by their nature. In the second case, the person should be closer to the entrepreneur and art director.
It hurts when a department that needs experiments and trials because of the specifics of its activities turns out to be under a strict administrator. And vice versa, it’s bad when a “creative elf” (often the CEO themselves) is in charge of finances. In such circumstances, you can neither pass an audit nor trust the numbers in dashboards for decision-making.
Divide the two offices. Then, it should be very convenient for you to select frameworks and approaches to work, depending on what you need — more “movement and energy” or minimizing risks.
I hope some of the hacks are applicable to your case and will come in handy to you. If there are tips or approaches that you consider more or less universal, I will be glad if you share them in the comments.
