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How to make change management happen in the most effective way

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Future-ready part 2: Diversity – an essential ingredient for a future-ready organisation

In his seminal 1937 essay, “The nature of the firm,” the economist and eventual Nobel laureate Ronald Coase argued that corporations exist to avoid the transaction costs of the free market. Yet with transaction costs plummeting (spurred by rising connectivity)...

Future-ready part 1: What does a future-ready business look like in the new normal?

The pressure to change had been building for years. Well before the COVID-19 pandemic, senior executives routinely worried that their organisations were too slow, too siloed, too bogged down in complicated matrix structures, too bureaucratic. What many leaders feared,...

How to fill the gap between Strategy and Execution

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Culture PART 2: The role of leaders in a culture shift

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Culture PART 1: Did COVID-19 signal the end for hierarchical organisations?

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Meet MAC’s Executives: Karina Jardim, Senior Executive

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Thriving in the Age of Digital Adoption: Embracing the Workforce Ecosystem (part 2)

In the first part of this series, we looked at how the fears of technological innovation are resulting in an unproductive resistance toward modernisation, even as it gains extraordinary pace in 2021. We also delved into the importance of a growth mindset in allowing...

Thriving in the Age of Digital Adoption: Overcoming the Fear of AI (part 1)

“What if artificial intelligence takes over my job? What if I become redundant?” Every one of us has experienced technology encroaching on our lives, more and more so with each year that passes. It appears that technological innovation is a certainty that is only...



Mac Consulting

Organisation Design: Restructuring or Reshuffling to enable Strategy

Customer expectations are not just changing; they are exceeding the ability of a business to deliver on time. They are looking for alternatives, with more emphasis on experience and convenience. To keep up, companies are evolving their offering to meet the changing needs of the market. The ability to deliver cutting-edge services to market is largely determined by your operating model (discussed in the previous article in this series) and your organisation design. When your services evolve, corresponding changes need to be reflected in your organisation design.

Change is happening rapidly; 80 percent of CEOs in a recent study claim to have transformations in place in their businesses, while 87 percent expect to see a change in their operating models within three years.

So, what is organisation design? It is the way organisations are structured and run the architecture of the organisation. Where are you going as an organisation, how are your processes set out, what does your operating model say, and how do you design the structures that will support this new operating model? It is essentially a ‘map of operations.’ It typically describes the location and/or configuration of all resources and capabilities in a business.

There are various organisational structures you can look at, however, choosing the best structure for your company, division, or team will depend on your strategy, business model and operating model. It is a lot like picking out a new car. At the most basic level, you are always looking for something road-worthy and something that can take you (and your passengers) from point A to point B without a hitch. But beyond that, there are a lot of options to consider. Automatic or manual? Four-wheel drive or two? Built-in GPS? Leather interior?

An organisational structure is a visual diagram of a company that describes what employees do, whom they report to, and how decisions are made across the business. Yet it is not simply drawing boxes and lines and matching people to those boxes – you need to design it and test it. It will take a few attempts to identify the right structure and it will never be done in isolation; involving leaders and human capital is crucial to ensure understanding and buy-in of the design.

Selecting the right structure is just the start of the architecture process. It is here where we determine the shape and size of the organisation, value of the jobs, grading frameworks and methodologies, career pathing and workforce planning. With the architecture in place, it is time to focus on the people and matching them back into the jobs and structures based on their capabilities, competencies, and knowledge. During this exercise, we reshuffle the organisation and ensure the right people are in the right jobs at the right time, and where individuals don’t fit, we explore opportunities to upskill or reskill in line with the new capabilities for the organisation.

A number of organisations are looking at redesigning or reshuffling after COVID; everything has a ripple effect, so even for those who aren’t undertaking major redesigns, they will inevitably still need to tweak their structure as so much has changed since the start of 2020.

With great organisational change comes great responsibility. Therefore, in order to create sustainable growth, companies need to manage the risks in restructuring. Be transparent and communicate openly, share what you can but also tell employees what you can’t share and the reasons behind the decision to withhold information.

As with all change, it is the uncertainly and lack of knowledge that creates anxiety and stress. The best way to encourage sustainable change will be to involve your employees in establishing the new organisation.

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