What do HR Managers actually do? Part One - Organisation Design

Organisation design is often seen as one of the sexier activities undertaken by HR Professionals, but it’s also one that is notoriously difficult to define or explain.

Fortunately, the CIPD’s new HR Profession Map offers a clear insight into what the HR Manager will be involved in when undertaking Organisation Design activities.

Organisation design, as defined by the CIPD, “ensures that the organisation is appropriately designed to deliver organisation objectives in the short and long term and that structural change is effectively managed.”

At the top level - in other words the type of OD activity that the HR Director will be involved in - projects may include:

• Leading the new organisation design in significant change scenarios such as merger, acquisition or divestment.
• Challenging senior managers to ensure they understand the likely impact of organisation strategy on the design of the organisation.
• Ensuring that when the organisation is restructured, other areas of HR influence are addressed. These would include behaviour, skills and processes.
• Leading activities to ensure that any restructuring addresses the size, levelling and grade of roles within the new organisation.
• A crucial decision that will be required in a large-scale restructure is that of which activities to retain in-house, and which to outsource.

What will a senior HR Professional need to know and understand in order to do these activities?

• He (or she, of course!) will need to have a deep understanding of the organisation’s strategy, performance goals and drivers, and understand the sector in which the organisation operates, and the market factors that impact performance including customers, competitors, globalisation, demographics etc.
• He will need to speak “the language of the business”
• He will need to have a good working knowledge of employment law.
• He will need to know how the design of an organisation is likely to affect its performance.

Although Organisation Design itself falls clearly into the Hard HR Strategy box, the softer, human element in organisation structure is crucial. As Lord Forte has remarked, “the human aspect in a business is vital: you can keep drawing squares and lines, but within these squares you must have people and they must be deeply involved in the business. If this does not happen, then the lines and squares and the diagrams mean nothing.”

The cost of getting organisation design wrong can sometimes be tragic, as this example quoted on HR Case Studies indicates.

Tragic cost of company restructuring at France Telecom