In this section, we'll look at your contribution to the company's success. Let's begin with optimizing how your team is organized.
Your goal is to regularly re-think how you approach the team's ways of working and how it is organized to guarantee service quality and continuity.
Define Your Target Organization
Once you have your bearings within your company and know your assignment, you will want to make an impact. And that's only normal!
Begin by studying your current organization, its strong points, and the paths for progress towards achieving your goals.
There are two approaches when crafting organizational changes:
Descending (top-down)
Ascending (bottom-up)
The Top-down Method
The top-down method is the fastest because it starts with the goals you want to achieve. You define it with the support and approval of your superiors and perhaps a few key co-workers (if you manage a large team).
The Bottom-up Method
The bottom-up method is a more operational and participative approach. It includes and engages all or some of your team in the process (my preferred method).
The main success factors are:
Transparency: be up-front and honest with your team about the current situation and the challenges you expect to face. This will also reassure and encourage them to be agents of change!
The support of senior management for this participative approach.
The five necessary stages for the bottom-up approach:
Introduce the reasons behind this organizational structure change and the expected outcomes.
Organize working groups with your co-workers.
Ask them to suggest organizational ideas.
Analyze and prioritize the ideas they come up with.
Define your proposed organizational structure based on suggestions from your inner circle and direct reports. Identify the following:
o SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) of the target structure.
o An implementation action plan.
o Resources necessary to support this change.
Don't forget to include your line manager:
Before you get started, work with them to define the approach you plan to use by weighing the pros and cons of each method in the context of your department and company.
Before communicating your changes, make sure you have their full approval for the new organizational structure and your deployment plan. You must have the support of your manager.
Deploy Your Organizational Structure
The fact that you include your team in the bottom-up method is a real plus, provided that each person understands why you opted for a particular path or idea rather than another.
You must communicate the new organizational structure clearly and straightforwardly. You are at the heart of this change and must lead with enthusiasm and conviction.
This team meeting could be outlined as follows:
A reminder of the company strategy (defined in the strategic plans) and the axes relating to your department.
A presentation of the department's goals.
A summary of discussions with the working groups and ideas selected for constructing the new organizational structure.
A detailed presentation of the new organization and the associated deployment schedule (effective dates depending on the impact on other company departments).
A question and answer session that you will have prepared in advance.
If you foresee major changes in the assignments of certain co-workers, invite them to a face-to-face chat to explain your expectations and the rationale behind what you're offering them. It’s not good to spring a major role change in a group meeting without briefing them first!
Finally, use other internal communication channels and processes to inform the whole company about your organizational changes.
Foster Continuous Improvement Using the PDSA (or Deming) Cycle
This cycle identifies the stages to follow for improving the quality of a product, department, or organizational structure.
The PDSA method has four stages, each leading to another and creating a circle.
Plan or Prepare
This stage involves planning the organizational structure you want to establish. It is where you define the aims of the organizational change. This section covers the chapter "Define your target organization."
Do or Develop
This stage involves testing, developing, realizing, and implementing the approved organizational structure and action plan. This section covers the previous paragraph, "Deploying your organizational structure."
Study
This stage involves checking and verifying that your organizational structure has been deployed properly and aligns with your expectations in terms of efficacy. To do this, you can:
Regularly monitor and track how your performance indicators are evolving to be sure they are improving.
Ask for your co-workers' opinions and find out what they think about the new structure and the changes.
Act or Adjust
This stage involves adjusting or reacting to team feedback. The goal is to continue improving and preparing a new project as soon as it becomes necessary.
Five Tools to Better Organize the Your Team's Work
Asana is an online organizational tool for managing group work. The free version offers features (task management interfaces, pages for project creation, agenda, attachments, and interactions on the platform) for up to 15 people.
Basecamp is a reliable and highly-effective management solution that automatically performs all of the tasks linked to organizing a project: setting up the calendar, organizer, and task planner chronologically through to the tiniest detail. It also performs tracking and alerts employees via email when a deadline is approaching.
Gryzzly is a platform that puts time at the heart of work management and makes it possible to automate data collection via simple integration with Slack. This will give you precise insights for decision support towards steering your projects and their daily profitability.
Jira was initially designed for developers to help them organize their work better. However, the general architecture can adapt to all business areas. The operating principle is largely based on the Agile frameworks method. Users can list their tasks and monitor their execution more easily.
Zoho is a complete project management application: planner charts, calendars, Gantt diagrams, and automatic activity reports. The main advantage is that it is possible to work collaboratively directly within the tool by exchanging comments on the shared documents.
Let's Recap!
Prioritize the more participative bottom-up method when devising your proposals for change.
Inform co-workers who are most directly affected first, then your team, and finally, the whole company, of the organizational changes.
Apply the PDSA method (Plan-Do-Study-Act) to test and implement your plan.
Now that we have optimized your organization, let's dive into improving how you manage your activities. How can you improve performance, efficiency, and responsiveness without being overwhelmed by the many professional demands on our time? Find out in the next chapter!
