Organizational Structure
Problem
A multi-facility distribution company was struggling to allocate its workforce effectively as it grows and has new personnel needs.
Solution
We dived in and understood the skills gap and I designed a structure complete with job descriptions that served the company’s expanded goals.
The approach
What was the problem and how did we solve it?
A growing multi-facility grocery distributor was struggling to manage the changing needs of the business. The company needed new things as it grew, but didn’t necessarily want to lose the experience it gained with the current staff.
They needed a structure that allowed tenured employees to contribute in the right way while also allowing for new insights from new employees, without too much conflict between the two groups.
Success in this project would be measured more qualitatively. We knew we were successful when we got to a yes on this question - do we have all the right people in the right roles doing the right things?
Image has been purposefully obstructed for privacy of the client.
Together, we reviewed the different current roles and responsibilities to understand what was happening and where the gaps were occurring. Part of the problem was that tenured employees had taken on more tasks that did not necessarily align with their strengths and could be broken out for newer incoming employees. We also identified new areas of management that were necessary with the growth.
I then designed an updated organization structure that could work for their current volume and could also accommodate growth. We slotted tenured employees with the right skills in the right roles for their skillset (ie, employees with good people management skills led the largest departments) and created new roles. For the new roles, we included skills that were missing from the current team (for ex, data analysis and project management) as requirements for the role. I designed the structure, the daily responsibilities, and wrote the job descriptions for all roles in the structure.
At the end of the work, the new structure along with the outline of daily responsibilities and job descriptions led the distributor to feel as though all of the right people were assigned to the right roles and doing the right things.