To meet the demands of the digital era, companies are looking to move faster, adapt more readily, facilitate rapid learning, and develop versatile, well-rounded professionals. To achieve such agility, businesses are beginning to shift from traditional hierarchical organization structures to more flexible, team-based models.
Many C-level executives, including CMOs, are actively considering the organization of the future—what it will look like, how it will operate, and what will make it most successful. In the past, when business models were predominantly based on familiar commercial patterns, many companies were organized along functional lines to produce predictable and repeatable results. Yet while these models promoted efficiency, they often created deep siloes that thwarted collaboration, responsiveness, and agility.
By contrast, today’s global business environment is anything but predictable, and complex organization structures are straining under the new demands being placed on them. In response, rather than striving for mere efficiency, today’s organizations are prioritizing structures that provide the speed, agility, and adaptability they need to compete.
According to Deloitte’s 2017 Global Human Capital Trends survey, 88 percent of respondents say building the organization of the future is an important or very important issue, yet only 11 percent believe they understand how to do it. Designing such an organization is likely to be a dynamic undertaking that involves plenty of trial and error. Yet for companies that rise to the challenge, the payoff can be immense in terms of financial performance, productivity, employee engagement, and a host of other benefits.
Digital, Agile, Networked Teams
Only 14 percent of survey respondents believe the traditional organizational model—with hierarchical job levels based on expertise in a specific area—makes their organization highly effective. Leading companies are instead moving to a more flexible, collaborative model of work engagement based on flatter networks of teams that can form and disband quickly. For example, a company may build a digital customer experience group, select individuals for the team, and ask them to design and build a new product or service. Afterward, the team disperses and members move on to new projects.
Designing for flexibility is about moving away from matrix management and functional silos toward outcome-based teams that have multidisciplinary skills sets and one singular goal. Rather than focusing on the efficient delivery of services, these teams seek to make customers happy. Empowering outcome-based teams often requires realigning power inside an organization to leaders who own specific elements of customer experience, for example mobile or in store.
Companies also are using new tools and work practices as they seek to adapt for the future. One promising approach is to apply network analysis to help organizations study who is talking to whom. Organization network analysis (ONA), which can use physical proximity, patterns in emails and instant messages, and other data, allows leaders to see quickly what networks are in place and identify the connectors and experts. Collaboration tools—including those that enable messaging, video and voice calls, project management, and document-sharing—also are helping to facilitate the transition. Nearly three-quarters of companies (73 percent) are now experimenting with such tools and benefiting in unique ways.¹
Last, companies are exploring a new approach to leadership—one that rewards innovation, experimentation, learning, and customer centric design thinking.² This approach requires leaders to foster an inclusive culture and to possess negotiation, resilience, and systems thinking skills. Executives ascend and lead by orchestration rather than direction, and they help their employees advance by providing development opportunities and varied experiences.
What CMOs Can Do
To help create the organization of the future, CMOs and other business leaders can:
Embrace the speed of change. Digital technologies continue to accelerate the pace of business. Consider carefully how this transformation affects strategy, customer relationships, and talent needs.
Adopt a more participative structure. Consolidate talent from marketing, analytics, customer experience, and sales functions into mission-oriented teams with the power to make front-line decisions that satisfy customers.
Make talent mobility a core value. Require executives to rotate through various functions so they understand the new, more agile career model. Build in processes to support team fluidity so employees can quickly return to their home base or move to a different team once a project is completed.
Form an organizational performance group. Ask the group to analyze how high-performing teams, projects, and programs work. By examining the company’s job titles, reward systems, and career paths, this group can help chart the way to a more agile, bottom-up model for business units.
Examine new communication tools. Consider technologies such as Workplace by Facebook, Slack, Basecamp, Asana, Trello, and Workboard. Support efforts to standardize and implement the tools as a complement to the organization’s core ERP and human resource management system infrastructure.
Employ ongoing, feedback-based performance management. Frequent conversations about priorities and performance can enable employees to adjust their efforts as needed and feel rewarded for their work. Employee survey tools can give managers immediate input on their own performance, boosting transparency.
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As digital technologies continue to change every facet of business, traditional operating models and practices may no longer suffice. To build the organization of the future, companies can explore a team-based approach, experiment with collaboration technologies, encourage a leadership mindset that embraces learning, and focus on talent mobility. By taking steps to become faster, more flexible, and more adaptable today, organizations can be better positioned to compete tomorrow.
–by Josh Bersin, founder and principal, Bersin by Deloitte, Deloitte Consulting LLP; Tiffany McDowell, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP; and Amir Rahnema, partner, Deloitte Canada
Source: Wall Street Journal
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