DESIGNING YOUR STRUCTURE EXACTLY HOW IT NEEDS TO BE

The structure of organisations, and the details of the jobs within those organisations, are often as they are as the result of historical factors. For your organisation to operate at its optimum level, however, it’s necessary to do away with what is merely accidental, and align your structure with what it needs to be to achieve current and future goals.

At Chandler Macleod, we have considerable experience in analysing this disconnect between the form and function of a business, and working in partnership with our clients to put it right.

OUR APPROACH

Chandler Macleod’s unique approach to Organisation and Job Design is to apply robust psychological principles to achieve the client outcome. An understanding of organisational principles, combined with an understanding of human behaviour, allows us to advise our clients as to the capacity of an organisation or job design to achieve the desired outcome.

Rather than focusing only on process or structure, we also address the need for change management, engagement, consultation and communication within the organisation.

FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION

Organisational Design is essentially about defining an organisation or departmental structure, in order to ensure that the organisation is best placed to meet their strategic objectives. This can be applied to the whole of an organisation, a department, a team, or even an individual role level.

This kind of investigation may be initiated for a number of reasons, like a restructure resulting from a merger or acquisition, a change in the economy resulting in the need to downsize, or the need to increase production at some future date.

What the investigation can achieve is greater clarity of purpose and intent of the organisation, along with increased efficiency and productivity.

In conjunction with our clients, we look at an organisation at the highest levels, and essentially ask the question, what do you want to achieve? We then design the optimal structure to facilitate this. At Chandler Macleod, we believe that form follows function, and that once we understand the function of an organisation, then we can design the best form that the organisation should adopt.

Once you have established what the ideal structure is for your organisation, it’s then necessary to embark on a period of change management – communicating what you are doing to staff, and maintaining productivity through the process. Our expertise in assisting clients with this process has been harnessed over decades.

FIRST THE ORGANISATION, THEN THE JOBS

After any organisational redesign, any new or changed jobs that arise out of the process will themselves require analysing and redefining.

Job Analysis is essentially a process for analysing a job and its various constituent components. The resulting analysis or description is referred to as a competency or success profile.

For each job, we need to ask the questions – what is it, and importantly, what are the competencies that are required to do the job? At Chandler Macleod, we are experts in building competency frameworks, and mapping out the unique and overlapping competencies of related jobs.

Once you know the specifics of your job design, you can: