Over the past year, many leaders re-envisioned their organizations to overcome the downturn, serve their customers differently, and sometimes launch into new markets entirely. As organizations view a more optimistic future, what framework can they use to plan and solidify their “new normal.” Where to start?
I recommend a practical five-part framework.
1. Revisit or re-envision your organization’s purpose.
A re-tuned organizational purpose can make your organization more resilient and more competitive in serving customers, winning prospects, and attracting and retaining employees. For more information on updating your organizational purpose and why, please see my recent blog on this topic.
2. Evaluate changes made over the past year and keep the good ones.
a. Leaders saw the advantage of strengthening the empowerment of employees. (Remote workers are tough, if not impossible, to micromanage.)
b. Because of disruption, supply chains were re-designed.
c. Some organizations relied more on remote, cross-functional teams to get things done.
d. Some re-defined their strategy or services, and now is the time to determine which of these changes can be sustainable for the long term.
e. Some re-defined roles and responsibilities of all employees.
f. Many organizations cross-trained employees throughout the process to allow for more flexibility if employees became ill.
Driven by necessity early in 2020, one e-commerce client redesigned its business from 80% B2C in early 2020 to 80% B2B, since so many of their business customers had shut down or had scaled back due to the pandemic. Once that was done, leadership discovered that the company was working harder than ever for every dollar. Although the change allowed the company to survive, leaders determined that in planning for their new normal, they had to make some tough decisions about evolving back to B2B, revising pricing models, deciding which B2C customers to keep and which less-profitable ones to let go.
3. Reset and trim priorities.
Based on your new re-vamped purpose, analysis, and recent organizational or strategic changes, the next step is to re-focus the organizations’ priorities and focus on fewer of them. Perhaps the focus will include strategies to pursue a particular market or two? Re-aligning supply chain? Improving key, profitable processes or products? Other key organizational strengths?
4. Align structure to priorities.
Is your current organizational structure optimal when compared to your priorities? I am amazed at how many organizations are still top heavy and structured into functional silos. Most processes flow horizontally through the vertical organizational silos or functions–resulting in voids, overlaps, and redundancies. Now is the perfect time to overcome these past challenges.
a. As an example: in response to market changes over the past 14 months, one manufacturing client site determined the need to quadruple its output. Yet, the organization also saw the need to be as streamlined and cost-conscious as possible. We worked together to create a structure that made sense. Even though the production facility doubled their number of production employees, leadership did not add to the management complement at all. We re-designed roles throughout the hierarchy and formed cross-functional alignments throughout the plant—from work teams to project teams. There was even a cross functional team of production employees who met briefly at the beginning/end of each shift to determine if the process would require any teams to “borrow” members from another team for the day—a task formerly done by managers at the site.
For a start, let your imagination go with this question: if we were to take our processes/business/plant and plop it down into an open field and plan it the way it should be, what would it look like? And how can we get there?
b. Just as fine-tuning your organizational purpose supports employee intrinsic motivation and pride in their organization, so structure can support extrinsic motivation. For the sake of employee recruiting and retention, innovative thinking about structural changes can support extrinsic motivation. Is your organizational aligned as cross-functionally as possible? Cross functional teams provide more interesting and challenging work while establishing more efficient process flow and information sharing.
5. Determine new competencies, skills, and behaviors that are needed to support your “new normal.”
In the manufacturing site example provided above, the organization is focusing on one overarching result: Increasing production, efficiency, and quality. To accomplish this, employees are participating in more cross-functional teams–both permanent work teams and temporary project teams.
Any change around structure and behaviors demands different leadership behaviors and a new set of behaviors and skills for production employees. Working with key leaders, we created a roadmap and a skills matrix for how these behaviors and expectations will evolve over time. For each group, the plan/matrices communicated what skills, responsibilities, empowerment, and decision-making changes would evolve in the next 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, 12 months, 18 months, and 2 years so that everyone could see clearly how their roles would evolve and what training and feedback would support that development.
This 5-step framework allows you to make your future organization more focused, sustainable, profitable–all while making it a better place to work.
For a complimentary 60-minute strategy session please contact me at [email protected]. Contact us in LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/transformingorganizations/.
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