By Scott Jenkins, Director, HumanConcepts
When it comes to the tools HR has at its disposal, org charts are often overlooked. But with an increased focus on corporate governance and the dynamic and global nature of today's workforce, employers increasingly require an up-to-date view of their organisations to meet planning and workforce management objectives.
From humble beginnings as simple line and box drawings, today's charts remain easy to create and understand, but have evolved to become a highly effective and powerful tool for workforce modelling, scenario planning and budgeting.
Changing User, Changing Times
While the format of org charts has not changed - illustrating the hierarchical structure of an organisation and who reported to whom - how they are created and used, has. They are still used as an ideal planning platform for employee orientation, team collaboration and customer service, but managers have been quick to seize upon the fact that it's easy to get an understanding of cost structures by using charts as a foundation for further workforce and financial analysis.
While distributing hard copies was the primary means of sharing charts for years, version control became an issue. It seemed that no sooner were charts created and distributed that they became out of date. This problem was eventually solved by publishing charts online, making them available to everyone in the organisation.
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
No other document carries such important information in a concise and easy to understand format as an org chart. In addition to providing a road-map to the organisation, it's an ideal means of sharing a strategic vision.
Through their work with org charts and other company data, companies began to realise that providing managers with specific departmental information could be used as a foundation for planning, budgeting and workforce modelling.
Companies then began linking charts directly to spreadsheets or budgeting tools for interactive scenario analysis, planning and decision-making to provide scenarios back to executives, finance and HR for evaluation, discussion and approval. In addition, managers began using charts to communicate and solicit feedback from their employees to build future plans.
HRM System Integration
One of the largest leaps in org chart development was the ability to seamlessly integrate org charts with HRMS systems, such as those provided by NorthgateArinso, providing a direct pipeline to the data for the most current organisational picture and enabling even greater database-driven analysis. Until charts were integrated with HRMS systems, reporting relationships had not been regularly captured or maintained in HR databases. Today's advanced charts solve the problem because they have capabilities for collecting reporting relationships at the lowest organisational levels.
With the ability to populate org charts directly from HR data came technological advances and functionality. Where users once incorporated five to seven fields of employee data to create employee directories, today's companies are looking to capture more than 100 fields, from measuring employee productivity to monitoring employee supervision and regulatory compliance, data security is solved by secure, authorised-only access of the type typically adhered to in the HR system environment.
The Future for Org Charts
These data rich charts are now used extensively for budgeting, career planning, productivity measurement as well as reorganisations, and mergers and acquisition planning. Simply put, managing change is much easier when you can visualise the organisation - before and after.
From relatively humble beginnings, today's org charts have enabled companies to visualise their business like never before.
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