Forget about Organizational Structures and Job Descriptions – They are nonsense

Unless the Organizational Structure is designed around a culture of performance, job descriptions are replaced by Performance Specifications and both (structure and performance specification) are dynamic and linked to remuneration and other incentives.

Traditional methods of organizational behaviour and organizational structures do not work anymore.

Traditionally, companies set-up a structure, define a strategy and a set of corporate objectives.  Management is constantly pushing for tasks, work, deadlines and creates lots of fear sources at the workplace. As the Company grows, positions and number of employees increases. All other HR processes become administrative nonsense.

Well, in Performance Management it has to be done the other way around.

First,  you define your strategy, strategic and corporate objectives. Then you deploy your strategy and strategic objectives down to process strategies (marketing, sales, procurement, production, finance, HR, e.t.c) and your corporate objectives down to process/functional, team and individual KPIS.

Then you design your Organizational Structure so that the structure and the positions are linked to the Strategy and are aligned with the functional strategies, the corporate and functional objectives and KPIS.

Then, all your other HR support systems such as remuneration, performance management, skills assessment, recruitment, training, fall into place around a performance oriented rather than admin, task and financial oriented culture.

Moreover this will enable the Company to streamline all other resources toward the same direction and enhance cooperation, engagement, responsibility, accountability and eventually a performance minded culture in which people are having fun getting the job done and delivering the results even when the job itself is not fun.

Now, It is always easier said than done. To do that, even more difficult, to change the current structure you will require a combination of sound engineering, business, communication and IT Skills.

This is Not a Job for HR alone by far!

You need the engineering pragmatic and critical skills of what works and what doesn’t. The math skills too!  The skills of business administration to set up strategic and business plans as well as budgets. Tthe communications skills to communicate the changes effectively to all. IT skills to design the data and information accumulation, data analysis, automation of processes, dashports, reporting, etc.

From my experience. Having all prerequisites in place, you will need 12-24 months to re-engineer the performance empowered culture and support systems.

If you succeed, you will wonder for the rest of your corporate lifetime, how could you operate in the past without this!

Good Luck!!!

Yiannakis Mouzouris
Strategy and Performance Management
Expert / Business Consultant / Trainer
B.Sc. Mechanical Engineering
M.Sc.Engineering Management, US