Org Chart

An organizational structure will benefit your company no matter what size it is. It help managers to effectively manage their teams, and also, it increases visibility for the entire company. A visible structure definitely encourages a culture of transparency within your company. Go ahead and create your organizational chart today!

Charts may contain:

Pictures (with employee permission)
Contact info - phone, email etc
Name, Title
Number reports
Direct and Indirect reports
Can be designed to collapse or expand

An organizational chart, often abbreviated "org chart," shows a visual map of all of the employees in a particular business. It is arranged hierarchically in a pyramid shape, with the head of the organization at the top and lines connecting each employee to the employees below him who he directly supervises. Creating a company organizational chart can have several advantages.

Identify Roles

Especially with companies that have grown, promoted from within and changed the roles of various employees over the year, creating an organizational chart is an ideal way to identify and define each of the roles that already exist in the company. It can also help identify gaps in the hierarchical structure or departments that are understaffed. These help direct future decisions to create positions in the company.

Clarify Chain of Command

An organizational chart clearly shows employees' relationships to one another in the company's chain of command. The visual aspect of the chart makes it much easier to understand than a list of names would be. By looking at the lines between employees, you can see who the superiors are at each level of the human resources structure. This both clarifies who to go to if you need to talk to someone's supervisor and clarifies the realm of responsibility for upper-level employees.

Provide Contact Information

If you include the names, phone numbers and email addresses of the employees on the organizational chart, you suddenly have a convenient work directory to distribute to employees. This helps them look up who is in a particular position if they need to get in touch with someone about a problem. It is especially helpful for finding out who a person's direct superior is to file complaints or positive reports about that person.

Orient New Employees

Upon entering a company, new employees need to quickly understand who their superiors, peers and subordinates are. If you create an organizational chart with the names of people filled in along with their positions, you can distribute this to new employees and have them learn it as part of their orientation. That way they can understand who is in charge of different departments, who to go to with problems and what other employees are on their same level in different departments.

There are 3 main types of organizational structure

1.Functional Structure:

The example given above on an organization having different teams such as marketing and design is a functional structure. In this type of organization, you group each portion of your organization according to their purposes. Many small businesses take this approach as each team can self-support itself with their employees’ strengths and competencies. One main disadvantage is ensuring that you are coordinating the communication between departments. Since you are grouping your organization by function, there is a natural organizational barrier that you may encounter. However, you can encourage a cross-functional meeting once a month to gather the leaders from each functional team and share how they are contributing to the objectives and re-align the objectives if needed.

2.Divisional Structure:

This type of organizational structure is mainly used in bigger companies which have different geographical branches or smaller organizations within the umbrella group. For example, if you operate in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, you would have a team responsible for each location. The leaders in each of the team will then report to the VPs of the headquarter branch. Divisional structure is beneficial to ensure that the needs of the companies are being met. It also allows you to identify each employee and their reporting relationships easily especially if you are based in only one of the branches.

3.Matrix:

Matrix is a hybrid of functional and divisional structure. For this type of organization, you use teams of employees to accomplish the work. The biggest advantage is that you are able to form teams according to the employees’ strengths and competencies. Usually, you will have a functional supervisor and a project supervisor working together to lead the new team. For example, you want to create a new product. Your functional supervisor will coordinate your current human resources to create your new design team or hire externally to fill the positions. At the same time, your project supervisor will oversee the operations of the project. There are newer forms of this structure such as adaptive organizational structure that the Yammer engineering team uses.

Various advantages come along with the organizational structure you decide to choose that best fits your company. The main benefit is that an organizational structure streamlines your operations. You can plainly identify the different teams you have, and streamline them by adding two smaller teams into one to increase efficiency. Organizational structure can also work the other way around i.e. help you during time of growth and expansion. You may find that as you are growing, your teams are getting too big and harder to manage. Therefore, you can look at your organizational structure and implement new teams.