Is Your Org Chart Stuck In The 90s?

Three questions you should answer to find out

The 1990s. Decade of Sony Walkmans, mood rings, and an unhealthy amount of denim. I’m sure we can all agree some things were meant to live and die in the 90s. At the top of the list for me? Dial-up internet and outdated org charts.

 

 
While the internet has made great advancements in the past 30 years, the org chart hasn’t been so fortunate. It’s often outdated and overlooked, left as a static document somewhere in the bowels of the company intranet. Unfortunately, for many HR professionals, this topic hits close to home. If you can answer “yes” to any of the questions below, it’s not only time to update your org chart, but also time to update your entire process.

Do you share your org chart over email or post it to the intranet?

The 90s Way: You set aside an entire day each month to painstakingly update your company’s org chart, manually adding in each new hire, individually removing employees who’ve left, and filling in open positions. Once you update the document, you save it as a PDF and upload it to the intranet or email it to the entire organization. Rinse and repeat the process all over again in 30 days.
 
The Problem: The issue with the scenario described above is that it prohibits your company from competing in an agile way. You’re constantly working with a document (I could end the sentence here) that needs to be updated. As the days, and sometimes hours, elapse after you’ve made updates, the document becomes outdated. It’s a snapshot of a single moment in time, and as soon as an employee is hired, promoted, given a new title, or leaves the company, the document is no longer accurate. Most HR people have to deal with at least one of the aforementioned situations every few days.
 
Another problem with using documents to house your org chart is the lack of accessibility. Employees are left to click through the intranet, or even worse, sift through old emails. Even when employees finally locate the org chart, they question its accuracy because it’s a fixed document.
 
The Solution: You can’t live in a world of static documents. Your company is changing almost every day. You need an org chart that is updated the moment personnel changes occur. Everyone in the company should have frictionless access to this information. In today’s dynamic business environment, HR managers should have live org charts that are always up to date and can be exchanged easily.

Do you use a mixture of meetings, whiteboard sessions, and spreadsheets to do your people planning?

The 90s Way: It’s Q3, and you’re in the throes of budget planning, people planning, and hiring planning. You start to put together an invitation for the initial planning meeting, but you can’t possibly include all of the stakeholders involved in scaling your 200-person product team. You cherry-pick a dozen or so decision makers—hopefully half of them show up. You go through multiple rounds of these meetings and whiteboard sessions, after which you document everything in a handy spreadsheet that you send back and forth between multiple people, each of whom have edits (that they didn’t track, by the way).
 
The Problem: Besides the obvious issue of losing your sanity, this scenario is extremely tedious, inefficient, and likely riddled with errors. Foundationally, you’re starting with a limited view of the company because all of this work is being done outside of the org chart. It’s also extremely difficult to include all of the appropriate stakeholders in a meeting room.
 
Even if you are able to commit to a single plan after all of this, you’ll have to repeat the entire process in a few months. The business world moves too fast to commit to 12-month planning any more.  
 
The Solution: Think about it—when the marketing team is collaborating on a new project, they likely use some sort of project management tool that helps them allocate tasks and move them through a workflow. HR managers should use this same type of process when developing a hiring plan. And it’s useful to build all of this on top of a live org chart that depicts current view.
 
Stakeholders need a way, like Google Docs, to collaborate on changes in real time. Sending a spreadsheet back and forth gets extremely complicated if more than two people are involved. It’s essential to use collaborative software to gather all stakeholder insights into how the organization should grow, what resources are needed, and what type of budget makes sense. This system allows you to plan continuously, rather than once each year in a marathon of meetings. An updated, collaborative process can help you be more efficient, more agile, and make better decisions as a team.

Does your org structure look like a hierarchy even though employees from the top down work in cross-functional teams?

The 90s Way: Your org chart looks like a cookie-cutter pyramid. Everyone fits into one department and functions in one role. There are, of course, a few employees who handle multiple jobs, but how could you possibly depict that in a standard org chart? This is tribal knowledge—those who have been with your company for a while know who works on certain projects and where to go to get things done.
 
The Problem: In today’s world, people wear multiple hats. Responsibilities and roles change, and sometimes they change frequently as new project teams spin up and other projects end. While standard org charts used to get the job done in representing responsibility and decision-making authority, that’s no longer the case. HR teams don’t have an appropriate way to depict cross-functional teams, so they resort to the basic pyramid charts of yesteryear or hacking together a plan in Excel.
 
The Solution: With the way businesses operate today, there is a great need for multi-dimensional org charts—a way to represent cross-functional relationships more accurately and show how things really get done in the company. Depicting a hierarchy is necessary to understand functions of management (i.e., promotions, career paths, performance reviews), but it doesn’t necessarily map how work gets done.
 
So, how did you do? If any of the 90s scenarios described above sound familiar, it’s probably time to update your org chart. You’ll find that modernizing this tool will have a positive and tangible impact on employee visibility, planning efficiency and organizational structure.

Author Bio

Bill Boebel is a serial entrepreneur and is the CEO of Pingboard. He previously was CTO of Rackspace Email and co-founded Webmail, the largest business-grade email hosting company at the time. Bill also co-founded Capital Factory, which helps entrepreneurs in Austin, TX build great companies.  Connect Bill Boebel Follow @billboebel Visit https://pingboard.com