Companies differ from one another; their size, culture, and hierarchical structures have their own managerial particularities.
Depending on the organizational structure of your company, you will notice certain characteristics:
How long (or short) is the chain of command?
How strictly regulated is the work method?
Is it organized by product/service or according to departmental specialties?
Is decision-making centralized or decentralized?
In this chapter, we will aim to identify how your company operates so you can adapt your management approach accordingly.
Understand Your Work Environment
To understand your company's organizational structure, you should identify four key elements that characterize how the company operates.
As your team grows, it will be helpful to share your understanding of this organizational structure with new employees, as it will help them fit in more quickly.
You can place an organizational structure in a flowchart to illustrate how a company operates and organizes the different roles.
The Four Key Elements
Centralization is the degree to which decision-making is concentrated at the higher levels of the organization. The more centralized a business, the more decisions are made at the top of the hierarchy. More decentralized companies offer greater autonomy, trusting employees with more freedom to decide how they meet their objectives.
Formalization measures how policies, processes, and rules are written and explicitly articulated. More formalized businesses reduce ambiguity and help ensure predictability; less formalized ones are more optimized toward innovation and higher employee engagement and satisfaction.
Hierarchy indicates how many levels there are in the organization. Tall structures have many levels of seniority, separating the frontline employees from the senior leadership team; flat structures consist of fewer layers - often leading to larger team sizes.
Departmentalization is the functional structures, such as marketing, human resources, finance, manufacturing, information technology, etc. These specializations are an organizing principle. However, others use divisional structures instead, so each unique product or service within the organization has its own department. Be aware that many (especially larger) organizations have a mixture of functional and divisional structures built into their organizational design.
Types of Governance
In terms of decision-making, there are currently three main types of governance structures: pyramid, star, and holocracy.
Pyramid Structures
In a pyramid structure, a person or board of directors makes decisions and communicates them downwards (top-down) to the teams.
It is essential to respect the hierarchy levels, especially when making strategic decisions.
This type of structure is the most common, regardless of company size.
Star Structures
Everything is organized around a single person, the leader, who has a 360-degree view of the company in the star-shaped structure. All members report back to them equally. There is no "middle management."
This type of management structure is mostly found in small businesses because they become difficult to manage as the team gets bigger. It then typically gets transformed into a pyramid structure.
Holocracy
In holocracy (also known as a cellular, horizontal, or unit-based governance structure), decision-making powers are decentralized, and the company's results come from all employees.
In theory, there are no managers, and no one is managed. As a manager in such a structure, you may be in charge of a joint project but not a team.
This governance structure is very fashionable in start-ups, social enterprises, and businesses in the solidarity economy. But it is also increasingly used by larger companies seeking agility.
Manage in New Governance Structures
COVID-19 (and its associated restrictions) has accelerated new ways of working and changed the way we approach the very concept of an office.
As lockdowns became an increasing fact of life, employees stopped going into the office and working in the same location every day. This change created the need for a different management style, often referred to as the future of work.
Flex Office Working
In a flex office, there are no dedicated workstations. Instead, you set up each morning wherever there is space.
This type of organizational format is good for teams that need more opportunities to draw inspiration from chance encounters with different colleagues at the neighboring desk. Flex office working can often lead to more collaboration, discussion, autonomy, and less routine.
This system requires careful planning and a clear vision of the number of days each person will be in the office. That will help to avoid the open-plan office getting overcrowded. It can also lead to a more deliberate, intentional approach to setting up in-person interactions (face-to-face appointments, meetings, etc.).
Moving to a flex office model requires:
Understanding employees’ preferences for how often they come into the office, what equipment they might need, and who they will want to interact with when there.
Planning time for working together and organizing team-building activities and social events that are open to all.
Regularly assessing co-workers' well-being and state of mind to avoid people isolating and losing their bearings.
Hybrid Working
Hybrid working entails dividing time between remote working (from home or another place) and being physically in the office. The number of days spent outside the office may be:
Decided on an ad hoc basis and can vary according to projects and needs.
Regular and unchanging.
Undefined.
In terms of management, hybrid working will require you to pay particular attention to:
Establishing effective modes of communication with all team members by conveying clear goals and available resources so they can use them efficiently.
Finding fair compensation for those members whose role does not allow for this kind of flexibility.
Devising ways of creating a sense of belonging and a company culture, even for those not at the office all week.
Ensuring that all team members have access to the same information, whether on-site or working remotely.
Creating the necessary processes to guarantee IT security for the company.
Pay close attention to running hybrid meetings to avoid the remote attendees being ignored or feeling left out!
Remote Working
The future of work will largely happen outside the company's walls. Flex office and hybrid working are two consequences of an increasingly strong trend towards off-site working, commonly known as working from home or remote working.
The Office Is Dead; Long Live the Office!
With the development of new IT tools and communications networks, many business areas no longer require staff to be physically present. As a result, many employees are calling for more autonomy in their work, whether from home, co-working and shared office spaces, or on the beach in Bali.
Managing these teams at a distance presents new challenges.
A few tips for effective management from a distance:
Trust your co-workers. Set up clearly defined monitoring and performance checks towards goals in advance. Ensure they are attainable and measurable over a given period. Let people know you are available if necessary. Then, let them get on with it.
Set rules for disconnecting and respecting privacy. It is more difficult to detect if an employee struggles with mental health when working remotely. Be especially alert to early warning signs associated with mental distress (aggressive attitudes, lethargy, lack of motivation, etc.).
Ensure that off-site working environments are of decent quality. A quiet workspace and suitable furniture are essential for quality output.
Make sure your co-workers have the right tools for remote working. Review the situation with each of them and find solutions as needs arise.
Reserve time dedicated to group work, whether collaborative discussions on a project or informal, friendly sessions.
Multicultural Teams
Scattered workplaces have enabled companies to be more flexible on where they source their employees, opening the door to greater multiculturalism. All of this brings its own set of challenges for managers.
Language is the first of these. You must master the most used language inside the company. It is also helpful to grasp the company culture, codes governing communication and etiquette, and their practical implications.
The MBI model (map, bridge, integrate) suggests three steps towards increasing creativity, performance, and value on a multicultural team:
Map: map out and seek to understand internal differences.
Bridge: adapt your communication style to avoid misunderstandings (in other words, build bridges across the gaps).
Integrate: use the differences to your advantage to generate ideas that match the team's specificities.
Let's Recap!
Identify the constituent parts of your company's organizational structure: centralization, formalization, hierarchical levels, and departmentalization.
Ascertain which governance model best describes it: pyramid, star, or holocracy.
Incorporate the future of work by adapting your communication and management to more flexible ways of working (physical location).
Integrate your multicultural teams by mapping their diversity, adapting your communication style, and making the most of their differences.
Let's now consider how to develop your co-workers’ sense of responsibility by delegating certain tasks.
