Do you feel you are not getting the best out of your talent? Have your people costs increased out of proportion with turnover or profits? Are your people regularly frustrated when simply trying to do their jobs? Are they doing jobs that really add value for your business?
An organisation health check could be what you need.
In our work reviewing client organisations, we see a number of typical drivers of organisational inefficiency. Understanding whether any of these apply to your organisation will help you identify the right approach to improvement.
Depending on the driver, you may need to change your operating model, processes, structures, technology, governance, communication, behaviours, or a combination.
Do you recognise any of these issues in your organisation?
- Poor control – Lack of control over budgets, headcount planning or organisation design, often with no function clearly accountable
- Poor design – Departure from best practice organisation design, such as overly-narrow spans of control and unnecessary layers of hierarchy that don’t add value
- Poor prioritisation – Too much activity; new initiatives are started without assessing their potential benefits or reviewing activities that could be dropped to free up resources
- Duplication – Activities are repeated in different parts of the organisation because the teams are not joined up
- Fragmentation – Accountabilities being split across different teams, creating confusion and minimising opportunities for economies of scale
- Gold plating – Over-specified service levels and high levels of resources delivering gold-plated service in areas which are not valued by the customer
- Grade inflation – Poor alignment of reward relative to the activities being done – ‘forklift truck drivers paid as astronauts’
- Process inefficiency – Wasted activity caused by inefficient processes which create extra work to fix problems and require ‘human glue’
- Lack of clarity – Unclear or overlapping roles and accountabilities, often a symptom of new roles being created without adjusting for the impact on existing roles
- Legacy – Roles created to drive topical or pet agendas – such as innovation, agility, ESG – which lack clear accountability for processes or outcomes and leave legacy costs in the business.
If you’d like help identifying and solving any of these issues, we’d love to support you.
We analyse your current organisation design based on in-depth interviews with key stakeholders and a detailed assessment of structure, roles, processes and costs. We’ll make recommendations, design your new operating model and help with implementation.
Contact us to understand more about how we could help.
Image (c) Shutterstock | Jacob Lund
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