Moving Faster: Organizational Design for a More Strategic HR Function

Human Resources (HR) departments are frequently tasked with doing more with less because they often struggle with showing a direct return on investment for their initiatives and general efforts. Therefore, businesses often view these departments as an auxiliary function.

In fact, some organizations end up focusing significant resources on administrative activities rather than strategic initiatives that help align the organization to its goals and objectives, thus perpetuating the cycle or belief that HR is an administrative function instead of a strategic partner. Luckily, HR organizations are not tied to this reality forever.

HR can absolutely serve as a strategic partner in driving organizational goals and objectives. The challenge is in creating time and space to operate in this capacity amid the more administrative actions that naturally flow through the function.

An appropriate organizational design approach can help to break down barriers, streamline processes, and create structures that help employees and leaders navigate the HR landscape while helping HR teams themselves move more quickly. This will naturally shift the perception of HR to a more strategic, value-add business function.

Patchwork Organizational Design

As organizations expand and their needs grow, they commonly take a patchwork approach to organizational design, leading to a haphazard structure and workflow. Due to the high demands and need to continually “prove” themselves, HR teams are often among the least coordinated functions within an organization. The old adage, “the cobblers’ children have no shoes,” rings true in the case of HR in relation to many organizational principles.

To mitigate the complexity of working with corporate HR teams, many functions and departments hire their own dedicated HR professionals to support their department’s specific needs. These business line-focused HR teams or individuals may sit as a matrixed organization, or they may not report into the larger HR function at all. Even when both types of HR teams sit together, they may still serve specific business units. In these cases, they receive their priorities and direction from the business line rather than corporate HR—this creates a disconnect and inability to operate efficiently.

A Case Study: An Overwhelmed and Siloed HR Department

The above situation was the case for a large federal contractor and manufacturing organization we partnered with. The HR function of this organization was tasked with streamlining its structure while simultaneously ramping up output. In other words, HR was tasked with doing more with less.

As our team began digging into the contractor’s internal customer and employee feedback, several concerning (yet common) issues emerged:

  1. COEs within HR were incredibly siloed.
    Serving as the face to the businesses they support, Centers of Expertise (COEs) were often tasked with answering questions about initiatives or processes that they knew nothing about. This significantly slowed down customer service and frustrated everyone involved.
  2. HR business partners supporting specific lines of business felt they reported to and were loyal to the needs of their specific business leader, not the organization.
    Despite what initiatives were presented at the HR level, individuals’ work was essentially prioritized by the needs of the business line. This created a breakdown in HR-driven initiatives.
  3. HR business partners reported spending 75% of their time on administrative activities and serving as a liaison between the business and HR.
    This severely limited their ability to focus on activities that drive business results within their business line or across the organization as a whole. This liaison approach created a severe bottleneck because information flow was primarily restricted at a specific point: the HR business partner.
  4. Individual functions or business units would often seek external support to complete significant initiatives.
    These tasks should have come from various HR COEs, including but not limited to organizational restructuring, leadership programs, development of competency models, and high-impact recruiting. Even this organization’s learning function was moved from HR and placed within the business to meet its needs more effectively.
  5. Within the HR department, various project teams were created to support critical initiatives.
    When HR employees were pulled from their roles to support initiatives, it left gaps on their teams. Many times, this resulted in interim leadership, significant efforts spent adjusting to new leadership, and building engagement within the new team—all very time-consuming responses.

In client- or service-based organizations, the organizational structure can undermine the workflow or processes in place to ensure work gets done efficiently, which this case study demonstrates. But organizational design is about more than creating an effective work structure. How a function is organized plays a role in how quickly information moves, how effectively teams communicate, and whether decisions are made at the right level.

The New Organizational Framework

As we learned more about this organization’s challenges, we identified that both the structure and the operating model were the primary challenges to moving quickly and best serving the customer.

To create the conditions for HR to serve as strategic business partners to the organization, major system changes were needed. Through working sessions with the full leadership team, we identified key areas where most of the questions and time-consuming activities originated, how to filter and service those requests expeditiously, and how to get the information employees and managers need in front of them before they even raise the question.

Redirecting most of this effort would significantly free up a large portion of the function to more proactively identify and address business needs, serving as a more strategic partner to the business instead of as an administrative one.

The New Operating Model

Armed with this new framework, we were able to design an operating model that physically realigned the more tactical side of the function with the more strategic COEs and business partners. We redesigned the organization’s operating model to allow for the administrative responsibilities to be addressed through a shared services team. This eliminated a significant amount of work from the Human Resources Business Partners (HRBPs), giving them time to be the strategic business partners they were designed to be.

A critical need was to address the random project teams that were created to solve specific problems (like a COVID task force, for instance). While emergency situations may result in the disruption of normal workflow, pulling key members of various teams to serve on projects with open timelines should not be normal practice for a well-functioning organization. The leadership team liked the project model for upskilling employees and having teams with diverse experiences but recognized that they needed a better process to move people around without creating so much disruption.

Part of the operational structure was a project team fed by the various COEs. While the COEs would own their own processes, the project teams would unite to support various initiatives by assisting the business or individual business units. These teams would be led by the HRBPs supporting that business unit. This allowed for benefits like rotating project teams for individual development and growth while maintaining stability inside HR.

Organizational Design Requires Full Commitment

Despite the effort and alignment around the need for change, this type of redesign will only be effective if everyone within the function follows the plan. Inquiries must be routed to the shared services function to be addressed and escalated. Initiatives must go through the project team. Business partners must align with the HR decisions and initiatives versus focusing solely on the business unit needs.

A heavy change management process is often needed when making a change to process or workflow. Leaders and employees must be fully aligned and assist with making the change stick. As with any change, resistance will come into play. It is easy to fall into old patterns of behavior, so the new behaviors must be constantly reinforced.

An effective change plan includes providing users with a clear understanding of why the change is important, what their specific roles are in the process, how they need to behave differently, a path to achieve the change through a clear set of resources, and a partner to support them along the way, which will help set the organization up for success.

Redesign Your Organization for Optimal Efficiency

A disorganized team can result in significant wasted time and resources by simply trying to find the right answers. That is what our clients faced and why they were spending significant time answering questions and completing administrative functions, many of which could have been addressed through self-service tools. By continuously “doing for” instead of teaching, this organization had created a system bogged down to the point of paralysis. Additionally, the lack of connection between the teams left them unable to adequately support each other.

Organizational design can be a powerful way to help organizations and functions move more quickly by streamlining the flow of information and providing critical workflows and processes for success.

This blog is part of our Moving Faster series in which we explore how certain business functions can transform into more strategic business partners. To learn about how using an agile framework can improve learning organizations, read Learning Fast: Lessons from an L&D Scrum Team.

About the Authors

Cheryl Jackson, PhD
Organization Design & Change Practice Lead
For over 15 years, Dr. Cheryl Jackson has been supporting transformational efforts in Fortune 500 organizations across a variety of industries including retail, manufacturing, healthcare, and food and beverage. With a doctorate in Industrial-organizational psychology, she combines her experience with scientific methodology and research techniques to create practical solutions that drive meaningful change in the workplace. Cheryl is driven to create effective solutions that help the organization as well as its employees thrive. Her focus is organizational effectiveness strategies supported by organization design, change management, assessment and development, employee engagement, leader development, and performance management. Cheryl is driving the development of the OD and Change Management practice within and across GP Strategies through the development of offerings and solutions, internal and external education, and supporting client initiatives. She remains actively engaged in the practice by contributing to whitepapers, blogs, articles, conferences, and podcasts on organizational design and change management and serving as a lecturer in the Master of I/O program at Texas A&M University.

Get in touch.

Learn more about our talent transformation solutions.

Transformation doesn’t happen overnight if you’re doing it right. We continuously deliver measurable outcomes and help you stay the course – choose the right partner for your journey.

Our suite of offerings include:

  • Consulting Services | Aligning vision and strategy to deliver integrated and systemic business results to drive growth and change through people.
  • Learning Services | Modern learning strategies, content, experiences, and delivery approaches that optimise workforce performance.
  • Technologies | An ecosystem of learning and talent tools, systems, platforms, and expertise that enable learning and talent transformation.

 

 

 

 

 

Employee-Led Development: The Key to Engagement

GP research consistently shows the impact of employee engagement on productivity, turnover, and employee well-being. Because of this, organizations worldwide have adopted some form of employee engagement or opinion survey to assess and monitor critical aspects most linked to the positive results they’re after.

Despite the strong link between engagement and business results, the construct of engagement remains somewhat elusive as solution providers market differing models and definitions of success (we at GP Strategies have contributed our own model). Regardless of the approach, one constant across findings is that employee development and growth are key drivers of engagement.

Though related, development and growth are distinct from career advancement, which is also frequently correlated with employee engagement. While advancement is often a high driver of engagement, not everyone has a current desire to win promotions. There are seasons in life when the traditional career ladder doesn’t feel overly important; for a lot of people, that’s never been truer than it is now. Despite the ebbs and flows around advancement within an employee’s career, growth and development are constantly and strongly correlated with engagement. Even when a team member isn’t seeking formal advancement, they still have a strong desire—even a need—to grow in their role and as an individual.

As organizations strive to provide development opportunities, more leaders are encouraging employees to chart their own career path. Employee-led development allows people to take ownership of their careers: Seek the opportunities, reach out to others in those roles, identify gaps in their own skills, and pursue new opportunities to expand those skills.

This autonomy can significantly lift engagement—unless employees run into roadblocks. If they can’t perceive varied job roles, identify the skills required for those jobs, or even find out about open positions within their organization, they’ll struggle to plot their course of development.

Many organizations lack the job data, technology, or system integration to create the transparency employees need. A thorough organizational assessment can identify counterproductive policies and cultures associated with talent acquisition, hiring, and internal movement, and a strong organizational design practice can address the issues.

The smart use of technology is a critical component in creating a culture of employee-led development and engagement. Ultimately, a formal talent mobility system is about building a culture of skill development and allowing that to create a positive domino effect, aligning expertise with needs across the organization. Without the right tools in place to systematically create visibility and a path forward, managers and HR teams will remain the default go-to sources for development opportunities, resulting in an almost inevitable bottleneck in the pipeline. It’s simply too much to place on a single group of already busy individuals.

One tool designed for this purpose, Talent Mobility (from fellow LTG company PeopleFluent), manages current job, employee, and learning data. With everything in one place, employees share the development load with their managers as well as leaders and HR teams and have easier access to the data they need to perform effectively and remain highly engaged.

Many folks believe mobility tools are simply about moving employees to new internal roles a bit more quickly, but that’s not the full picture. Internal job matching, when not implemented as part of an intentional and well supported program, can actually increase turnover if there aren’t enough available openings. Employees don’t need another enhanced career site or a basic job board with a list of random job recommendations. Instead, they want a re-imagined, end-to-end experience that helps them plan and manage their personal journey within the organization.

Benefits of a Comprehensive Talent Mobility Strategy

Employees are looking to upskill or reskill, and in many industries new role-specific skills evolve on a yearly basis—or faster. For some, these realities are enough of a prompt on their own, but there are also strong upsides to a structured talent mobility practice:

Reduction in Turnover Costs

When experienced employees are forced to leave to find growth opportunities, organizations lose productivity, institutional knowledge, and client relationships. And that’s before the cost to replace outgoing team members is even tallied—not to mention the uncertainty of hiring externally. But a SmartRecruiters study found that “75% of employees who receive promotions will stay with the company for at least three years … as do 62% of workers who made lateral moves.”

Higher Employee Engagement

Companies that offer on-the-job development opportunities, like lateral moves or stretch assignments, can increase employee engagement. With so much work now being performed in hybrid and remote work environments, this can be a real boon for organizations looking to sustain employee satisfaction and contribution as well as foster equity in opportunity.

Tech-Based Advantages

Implementing a system that automates many of the administrative or repetitive tasks associated with employee development creates more space for HR and L&D professionals to focus on initiatives that advance the organization. With that space, talent professionals can be more thoughtful with pulse surveys and analysis, build stronger employee resource groups, and design more meaningful diversity and inclusion learning journeys, for example.

The implementation of any new talent management strategy calls for a comprehensive change management initiative to support the adoption of the process. It’s important to incorporate stakeholder commitment with strategy and tools to address resistance, remove roadblocks, and support employee acceptance of the differences in culture and technology. The thoughtful integration of purposeful organizational design, well-applied technology, and real change-management support can transform the engagement of an organization through employee-led development.

About the Authors

Cheryl Jackson, PhD
Organization Design & Change Practice Lead
For over 15 years, Dr. Cheryl Jackson has been supporting transformational efforts in Fortune 500 organizations across a variety of industries including retail, manufacturing, healthcare, and food and beverage. With a doctorate in Industrial-organizational psychology, she combines her experience with scientific methodology and research techniques to create practical solutions that drive meaningful change in the workplace. Cheryl is driven to create effective solutions that help the organization as well as its employees thrive. Her focus is organizational effectiveness strategies supported by organization design, change management, assessment and development, employee engagement, leader development, and performance management. Cheryl is driving the development of the OD and Change Management practice within and across GP Strategies through the development of offerings and solutions, internal and external education, and supporting client initiatives. She remains actively engaged in the practice by contributing to whitepapers, blogs, articles, conferences, and podcasts on organizational design and change management and serving as a lecturer in the Master of I/O program at Texas A&M University.
Akash Savdharia
Vice President for Talent Solutions at our fellow Learning Technologies Group company PeopleFluent, Akash is an entrepreneurial technology executive with over 10 years of experience bringing SaaS products to market that solve real-world data-driven problems. He drives the business vision, growth, and strategy for their talent products portfolio. Akash started out as a management consultant, focusing on business strategy for multinational pharma and biotech organizations. Later, Akash was co-founder and CEO of Patheer, an AI-powered talent development and analytics platform that revolutionized the enterprise talent and career mobility space. When Patheer was acquired by LTG, he joined PeopleFluent and the platform became Talent Mobility. Akash has a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona with a triple major in Information Systems, Operations, and Management. Talent Management Software | Learning Solutions | PeopleFluent Talent management software and learning solutions to help you guide your organization’s people, culture, and outcomes.

Get in touch.

Learn more about our talent transformation solutions.

Transformation doesn’t happen overnight if you’re doing it right. We continuously deliver measurable outcomes and help you stay the course – choose the right partner for your journey.

Our suite of offerings include:

  • Consulting Services | Aligning vision and strategy to deliver integrated and systemic business results to drive growth and change through people.
  • Learning Services | Modern learning strategies, content, experiences, and delivery approaches that optimise workforce performance.
  • Technologies | An ecosystem of learning and talent tools, systems, platforms, and expertise that enable learning and talent transformation.

 

 

 

 

 

It’s Time to Gauge Your Organizational Resilience: Here Are the Top Five Indicators

In the midst of a pandemic, social unrest, and political challenges facing our world, many are turning their attention to organizations and their ability to bounce back from disruption, pivot to address changing workforce and consumer needs, and lead positive societal change. Some organizations have stepped up and met the challenges head-on. Others have either hunkered down or attempted too little, too late.

Why do some organizations succeed—effecting meaningful change—while others can’t seem to make the shift? There are many reasons, but perhaps the most powerful distinguishing factor is organizational resilience. Psychologists refer to resilience as the ability to adapt well in the face of challenges, struggles, and difficulty1. How quickly one bounces back after defeat or tries again after a setback is a measure of resilience. Like personal resilience, organizational resilience can be represented by this checklist:

  • Flexibility. As organizations, they recognize the way they have always done things may not work now, in the face of new challenges. They’re able to adapt to the current circumstances, even when those circumstances turn on a dime.
  • Vision for the future. Organizations with a strong vision for the future tend to focus more on the goal than the path to get there. As bumps occur, they maneuver around them to continue moving forward. They can quickly bounce back because they recognize that the path is not as critical as moving toward the goal.
  • Optimism. Resilient organizations treat setbacks as temporary, specific challenges that can be overcome. They don’t expend unnecessary energy questioning everything they’re doing and throw their hands up. Rather, they break down the problem to tackle it bit by bit, holding on to the confidence in their teams and capabilities.
  • Openness and inclusion. Inclusive cultures that welcome diverse opinions and a willingness to try new ideas are better positioned for resilience. Isolation is limiting and makes challenges feel bigger. By cultivating diversity and inviting a wider range of perspectives, enterprises can tackle challenges from multiple perspectives, allowing them to test many ideas quickly, learn from the results and iterate, and bounce back.
  • Forward-thinking. Resilient organizations don’t spend too much time rehashing past efforts, clinging to “the way we’ve always done it,” or fixating on what could go wrong. A balanced view of risk is important, and resilient organizations focus forward by asking, “Why not try it?” rather than saying, “We tried something before, and it didn’t work.”

How do you know whether your organization possesses these qualities? Simply surviving and even thriving in adversity doesn’t mean an organization has what it takes to do it again. Given the right circumstances, some organizations still manage to succeed for a time, despite their greatest weaknesses. An organizational assessment is necessary to truly know whether the enterprise is resilient and prepared for the next big challenge.

Five Indicators for Evaluating Organizational Resilience

It’s critical to evaluate these indicators:

1. Workforce Resilience

If you read the checklist above and thought those characteristics look a lot like individual competencies or soft skills, you’re right. As much as we talk about organizations as living, breathing entities, it’s the individuals within who define their capabilities, personality, and culture. So, for an organization to be resilient, it must start with a resilient workforce—particularly at the leadership levels. Teams pick up cues from their leaders to know how to respond in crisis and uncertainty. Resilient leaders provide the guidance and encouragement to their teams to keep them focused and moving forward.

Leaders can make or break an organization in times of uncertainty.

A formal leadership assessment, diving into these characteristics, can uncover a great deal about the resilience and overall health of an organization. But even when leaders are skilled and willing, systems must be in place to support their actions.

2. Processes and Decision-Making Authority

Well-defined processes are often the hallmarks of an efficient, mature organization. They create consistency and help ensure the machine runs smoothly. But in times of crisis, these processes can become a hinderance to acting quickly, especially when the prescribed procedures are cumbersome. Process-dependent organizations can strangle themselves with red tape. The more steps, layers, and approvals required to make a change or request, the longer it takes to make progress. When every day counts, overly complex processes can be detrimental.

At the onset of the pandemic, some organizations were able to quickly make decisions about equipping employees to work from home, and many had full setups within days or weeks. Others had to run requests up an endless chain of command, complete (virtual) piles of paperwork, and secure multiple approvals before taking critical action to sustain their business. The flexibility leaders have to make vital decisions for their businesses and teams can significantly impact an organization’s success and ability to recover from challenges.

3. Organizational Structure

In conjunction with processes and decision-making, an important part of any organizational assessment is a review of the structure. Structure can have a significant impact on how quickly an organization can pivot to address external challenges or changing priorities by influencing how quickly information moves through the organization and how easily ideas are shared.

Excessive layers of hierarchy can create separation between leaders and the rest of the organization—information takes time to flow through those layers. This includes sharing updates down through the organization, but also getting information back up: ideas, concerns, and feedback. Divisions or groups operating as independent lines of business can face similar challenges, while siloed structures create issues through duplication of effort. When change needs to happen quickly, miscommunication or information bottlenecks can significantly hamper an organization’s ability to act.

Moreover, structure can hinder speedy identification of experts or project teams to address challenges. Not all of these issues require changing the structure itself, but recognizing potential challenges early can allow for organizations to put practices in place to move quickly when necessary.

4. Role Clarity and Prioritization

Change of any kind usually creates some stress. When people experience stress, they tend to revert to the fight-or-flight response. At work, a fight response can look like fixation on the issue, trying to influence uncontrollable circumstances, or turning to self-preservation like brushing up the résumé. Flight can take the form of water-cooler sessions gossiping about what’s going on or withdrawing to “wait it out.” It’s not surprising, then, that the collective may exhibit the same patterns—throwing out a bunch of random ideas to see what sticks or totally hunkering down, waiting for the storm to pass.

Like a strong organizational vision, role clarity helps teams and individuals stay focused on their contributions to the larger effort. Engagement surveys often reveal that leaders have a clear understanding of the mission and vision of the organization, but people in other levels of the organization often have different views. When employees don’t have a clear idea of their role in alignment with the greater vision, it’s hard for them to prioritize their work at the individual or team level. This is magnified in crisis situations: Lack of clarity can manifest in misspending time and resources, bogging down the entire system.

In an organizational assessment, role clarity and alignment to the mission can be evaluated through interviews, surveys, and focus groups. It doesn’t usually take long to uncover misalignment of work, but the good news is that minor tweaks or visioning sessions can often quickly reset the team or organization onto the right path.

5. Technology and Adoption

As we’ve seen across the world, from social movements to the corporate environment, technology can be a powerful change enabler. Regardless of the number of software licenses an organization holds, though, the inability of employees to use technology effectively will always present a major roadblock. When knowledge workers the world over shifted from in-office to at-home environments in 2020, many organizations belatedly realized they didn’t have the right digital tools in place to support them—or that their employees didn’t have the skills necessary to make use of the tools available. Similarly, restaurants and retail businesses without online ordering platforms struggled to survive.

Companies that hadn’t implemented the right technology or the tech adoption programs to upskill their employees before the big pivot immediately struggled with continuity of critical business operations. A thorough technology assessment must be part of any evaluation of organizational resilience.

Internal and External Evaluation of Organizational Resilience

If everyone can agree assessment is the way to gauge organizational resilience, one element still open for discussion is whether internal consultants can effectively conduct that assessment. Although they have the most extensive understanding of the organization, internal consultants sometimes run into interpersonal politics and pockets of resistance when conducting an enterprise-wide review. Over time, they can also develop an insider’s perspective that may inadvertently affect their analysis. External consultants, on the other hand, bring fresh perspective, often employing novel angles of inquiry to reveal the organization’s strengths and weaknesses.

Where possible, it’s a good idea for internal and external consultants to partner in the assessment. But one thing is essential: executive sponsorship and commitment. Leadership’s buy-in and support are crucial to the success of any organizational assessment—and the change that results from it.

Few organizations are fully prepared on all levels for disruptive change, and there’s no shame in having room to grow. Becoming aware of potential roadblocks is the first step to establishing strong organizational resilience.

Reference:

1. https://www.apa.org/topics/resilience

For More on Organizational Resilience and Change Management:

Blog | Five Organizational Change Management Trends for 2022

Blog | Organizational Change: Working Through Ambiguity

Article | Developing a Holistic Approach to Enable the Hybrid Workforce

About the Authors

Cheryl Jackson, PhD
Organization Design & Change Practice Lead
For over 15 years, Dr. Cheryl Jackson has been supporting transformational efforts in Fortune 500 organizations across a variety of industries including retail, manufacturing, healthcare, and food and beverage. With a doctorate in Industrial-organizational psychology, she combines her experience with scientific methodology and research techniques to create practical solutions that drive meaningful change in the workplace. Cheryl is driven to create effective solutions that help the organization as well as its employees thrive. Her focus is organizational effectiveness strategies supported by organization design, change management, assessment and development, employee engagement, leader development, and performance management. Cheryl is driving the development of the OD and Change Management practice within and across GP Strategies through the development of offerings and solutions, internal and external education, and supporting client initiatives. She remains actively engaged in the practice by contributing to whitepapers, blogs, articles, conferences, and podcasts on organizational design and change management and serving as a lecturer in the Master of I/O program at Texas A&M University.

Get in touch.

Learn more about our talent transformation solutions.

Transformation doesn’t happen overnight if you’re doing it right. We continuously deliver measurable outcomes and help you stay the course – choose the right partner for your journey.

Our suite of offerings include:

  • Consulting Services | Aligning vision and strategy to deliver integrated and systemic business results to drive growth and change through people.
  • Learning Services | Modern learning strategies, content, experiences, and delivery approaches that optimise workforce performance.
  • Technologies | An ecosystem of learning and talent tools, systems, platforms, and expertise that enable learning and talent transformation.