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Align organisational design with business strategy

4 minutes read
By Bronwyn Wainwright, Global Brand and Content Manager
The world’s leading organisations in people practices are constantly reinventing themselves. The current period of internal transformation in response to external market disruption is anything but over. The very best know they need to review organisational structures and working practices relentlessly. This article explores how HR can pave the way forward as a strategic leader in organisational design.


Organisational design is ongoing

Re-designing organisational structures and working practices is a challenge all organisations face as they evolve. Yet the desired destination of large-scale transformation will never be reached. This means that the mentality around any journey of change must also evolve.

How we think about organisation and work design is central to business success. Leaders look to reviewing work flows, processes, structures, systems, and workforce planning. They need to align all these aspects (and then realign them) to business realities and goals and, hopefully, make them as “future-proof” to shocks and disruptions as possible.

Insights from Top Employers Institute’s global survey of more than 1 691 organisations indicate a shift to placing HR front and centre of the drive for organisational change.

Change is driven by people, not tech

Restrictive hierarchical structures have become less important, with the new enabling infrastructure provided by new HR technologies, artificial intellegince, and automation more so. Why? Because new technologies liberate businesses to solve their organisation design challenges, which in turn pull hards on the powerful human levers driving change.

What are these levers? Our data shows a clear and deepening of commitment to, among other things:

  • communicating values, ethics, and integrity within the organisation,
  • ensuring the resilience and wellbeing of employees, and
  • promoting the positive role organisations play within society. 

Values in action

For example, Top Employers Institute research shows that nearly all leading organisations (98%) define and communicate organisation-wide values. The very best have done this for years, but what has changed now is the way values are being brought to life and the people that make up the organisation are being guided in translating values into behaviours.

Values are no longer the “tablets of stone” bestowed by leaders to a grateful workforce and then forgotten: instead, 90% of Top Employers now consistently train their employees on how to live these values in practice. This is a marked increase up from three quarters (78%) back in 2016. Similarly, 93% now train their staff on how to handle ethical issues in practice, rather than on paper.

Employee well-being

Organisation design cannot happen without a willing workforce, resilient in both mind and body. Employee well-being also needs to be to the fore for people to be healthy and motivated to meet the challenges they face. A strong majority of Top Employers globally (70%) have an organisation-wide well-being strategy, while as many (71%) have senior managers actively involved in well-being programmes. To ensure rhetoric becomes reality, 53% have a dedicated and trained well-being champion or ambassador as a catalyst for change. This is a notable best practice that can facilitate the success of organisational redesign across leading organisations. 

For the betterment of society

Finally, the will to make a positive impact on society has become a key business driver for organisational design. Top Employers recognise that they have a responsibility as 2020 begins that extends far beyond providing products and services.

While nine out of 10 global leaders have an organisation-wide CSR strategy, slightly fewer (83%) include social and environmental impact into decision making to ensure success and profitability, and over half (58%) take account of the views and preferences of their employees when making decisions around CSR. Top Employers are embracing this grass-roots revolution – they know the impact on organisational design helps rather than hinders profitability and customer satisfactions. 

Challenges

There are clear challenges ahead for organisational design. Trends emerging from Top Employers Institute survey data indicate that while technology is catalytic, many businesses are finding serious shortages in the skills needed to use new technology are causing a drag on growth and the rate of change.

According to research from Ernst & Young, in Europe, almost half of organisations admit they lack skills in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and robotics. And in the United States, the story is similar, as there will be an estimated one million unfilled positions in the technology domain over the year ahead.

Organisations also need to act faster on the insights they gain from dialogue with employees. To engage talent across the entire employee lifecycle, leading organisations know that employees must feel their opinions matter. This requires a culture of continuous listening – taking the temperature of the organisation in real-time. And it also means honesty and openness with their people about the fact that everybody’s job could look different in five years’ time.

Clearly, organisational (re)design will never be finalised. Transformation in response to disruption will be ongoing. But HR professionals who strive for innovation and agility can prosper in taking the lead to continuously align organisational change with business strategy.

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Align organisational design with business strategy
    

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