How to Identify if Your Organisational Chart is Outdated

Though the Internet has made big advancements since the 90s, the organisational chart hasn’t changed much in most companies. It’s outdated and overlooked, usually seen as a static documents deep in the company’s intranet. This is a problem for many HR professionals. If you can relate to these 3 issues, it might be time to update your organisational chart and its entire process.
 

Sharing organisational chart via email or the company intranet

The Problem

HR pros set aside an entire day to update the organisational chart and send it to the entire organisation through email or the intranet. The issue is that they are constantly working with a document that needs constant updating, and the document immediately becomes outdated the moment a new update arrives.

The Solution

Static documents are a thing of the past. The company is changing almost every day. HR pros need an organisational chart that is updated the moment personnel changes happen. Everyone in the company should have easy access to this information. An example of this is the Google Docs, where you can give access to relevant employees and update it whenever you need to.

In today’s dynamic business environment, HR pros should have live organisational charts that are always updated and can be accessed easily.

Using a mixture of meetings, whiteboard sessions, and spreadsheets to do the people planning

The Problem

HR pros are busy with budget planning, people planning, and hiring planning. They set up meetings and whiteboard sessions with decision makers, and document everything in a spreadsheet that they send back and forth between multiple people.

Keep your office clutter free with updated org chart.

This can be very tiring, inefficient and full of errors. HR pros start with a limited view of the company because all of the work is being done outside the organisational chart. Even if they are able to commit to a single plan, the will need to repeat the whole process in a few months.

The Solution

HR managers should use some sort of project management tool when developing a hiring plan. Google Docs will allow everyone to collaborate on changes in real time. It’s essential to use a collaborative software to gather everyone’s insights into how the organisation should grow, what resources are needed, and what type of budget makes sense.

This system allows you to plan continuously. An updated and collaborative process can help HR pros to be more efficient, more agile, and make better decisions as a team.

Organisational structure that looks like a hierarchy even though employees from the top down work in cross-functional teams

The Problem

In today’s world, employees have multiple responsibilities. Roles change, and sometimes they change frequently as new project teams start and other projects end. While standard organisational charts used to represent responsibility and decision-making authority, this is no longer the case.

HR teams don’t have an appropriate way to depict cross-functional teams, so they settle with the outdated basic pyramid charts.

Difference between traditional org chart and multi-dimensional org charts.

The Solution With the way businesses operate today, there is a great need for multi-dimensional organisational charts. They need a way to represent cross-functional relationships more accurately and show how things are actually done in the company.

Depicting a hierarchy is necessary to understand functions of managements, but it does not necessarily map how work gets done.

If all of these problems sound familiar to you, then it is high time for you to update your organisational chart. You will find that modernising this tool will have a positive and tangible effect on employee visibility, organisational structure and planning efficiency.

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This article is based on Is Your Org Chart Stuck in The 90s? by Bill Boebel.