Updating Your Org Chart

For any growing business, deciding on the best direction and course of action is the key to success. While there are many variables between different businesses, most have one thing in common: a robust organizational structure that’s expressed and communicated in the form of an organizational chart, or org chart.

An org chart is a diagram that displays a reporting or relationship hierarchy. While they can be used for other things (i.e., project planning), their most common use case is plotting the details of an organization’s overall structure. Org charts’ clear reporting structures also map out who is responsible for what and who, where information is shared throughout a company, and to whom.

When an org chart is well planned and put together, it serves as a clear communication tool for a variety of functions, including solving human resources issues and new employee onboarding.

5 Reasons Your Org Chart Needs a Redesign

As time goes by, however, things inevitably change. Businesses grow, new people enter while some people leave, new roles and teams are made, and the overall strategy changes to accommodate for this.

This naturally leads to the formation of gaps in an organization’s structure as new objectives are defined, requiring new talent to meet them. This can lead to the older structure being inefficient and unfit for purpose, necessitating an update or redesign to put it right again.

Here are five reasons why your once-perfect org chart might need a revamp:

1. You’re Using an Outdated System

While confining org charts to Word documents (or worse, paper!) used to be the only option for companies to create an org chart, this is no longer the case.

What would take hours or perhaps even days for HR staff to create by carefully entering names and lining up boxes now takes only a matter of minutes using today’s powerful org chart builders and tools.

And while org charts created in Word documents or neatly illustrated on paper would quickly become outdated after a few new hires, modern org chart technology integrates with other digital workplace and HR tools. This means that org charts are now easier than ever to keep updated in real time, meaning that efforts made building your charts are never wasted.

So, if you’re still using an outdated method for building your org charts, this is definitely a reason to revamp and redesign with a modern, flexible tool that can keep up!

2. You’ve Had Staff Turnover

People come and go. That’s the nature of doing business. While you’ll have some staff members who stay for a long time, others may not. You’ve also got to factor in temporary positions, contractors, and interns.

The truth is that there’ll come a point where your org chart will suffer inconsistencies due to the dynamic nature of your workforce. Best practice is to update your org chart each time someone comes, goes, or changes their role within the organization. Doing so ensures that all reporting relationships are kept up-to-date and that everyone’s role is accurately reflected within the chart, helping prevent breakdowns in communication and general confusion among the workforce.

3. You’ve Recently Undergone an Organizational Redesign

If you’ve recently undergone an organizational redesign, then it’s likely that your old org chart doesn’t match up to your current structure. This may be because the type of organizational structure adopted has changed (i.e., classic hierarchical to matrix) or because new departments and divisions have been added, etcetera.

If designing a new org chart wasn’t part of your redesign process, then it’s important that you get a new one drawn up and distributed as soon as possible. This will ensure that the launch of the redesign gets off to the best possible start, giving everyone a clear point of reference for finding out who’s who and what their roles are.

4. You’ve Gone Through a Period of Growth

This is very similar to the above point about organizational redesign; if you’ve gone through a period of growth and have hired a bunch of new people, it’s probably a good idea to take a look at your org chart and not only add your new hires to it but also assess whether it’s still fit for use.

While it may be the case that all you need to do is add your new hires in their respective positions, the extent of your growth may mean that you need to tweak reporting relationships or consider a whole new approach to your organizational design.

5. It Only Shows Reporting Relationships

Although the core purpose of an org chart is to illustrate your organizational structure and the reporting relationships that exist within it, modern org charts can show so much more than this, especially if you’re using a powerful org chart building tool like Organimi.

With the right tool, you can use an org chart to show things like:

Individual employee skills and qualifications,
Birthdays and upcoming events,
Whether someone is full- or part-time,
Whether someone is office-based, remote, or a contractor,
Email addresses and contact details, and
People with key roles like first aiders and fire coordinators.

In fact, with custom fields, you can customize your org chart to show absolutely anything.

What Are Examples of Organizational Change?

As you may have worked out by now, it’s mostly organizational change that necessitates the changing or revamping of an org chart. The three most common types of organizational change are:

Developmental: Any organizational change that develops the organization by improving or optimizing a previous process, strategy, or procedure.
Transitional: Any change that moves an organization towards a new state to solve a problem, i.e., a change of organizational design or a merger/acquisition.
Transformational: Any change that radically and fundamentally alters an organization’s core culture, values, and nature of operations.

This is not an exhaustive list and you don’t necessarily have to undergo a large organizational change for your org chart to start crying out for a revamp—this will inevitably happen over time as lots of small changes begin to snowball and catch up with the organization.