Without the Right Organizational Design
Your Strategy Is Just a Wish List
Organization design helps to define clear roles and processes: empowering your people to do their best work with more accountability and buy-in, and less wasted effort. It helps build an inclusive workplace where your teams pull together. And most of all, it makes you more agile—ready to change should the market and your customers demand it.
Today’s business world is too unpredictable to rely on lines and boxes. You need a blueprint that’s built on your organization’s health as it stands: your purpose, culture, and operating model. But you should also focus on the future: what skills will you need to get ahead for tomorrow?
At Korn Ferry, we understand and appreciate all these critical aspects of organization design. We know how to get your teams bought into your strategy and structure, and we know how to turn this buy-in into action—transforming the way you work for the better.
How We Can Help
As part of our organizational design consulting, we address common issues such as misaligned structures, inefficient workflows, and a lack of agility by designing operating models and structures that align with business goals, optimize workforce capacity, and drive performance. Our approach helps your business to overcome organizational silos, streamline decision-making, and improve collaboration, ultimately enabling faster, smarter decisions and sustainable growth.
Aligning Your Leadership Team
We ensure your executive team is on the same page regarding your strategic direction, priorities, and purpose. Then, we help to build and develop your leadership team as we go, empowering them to adapt as new challenges and opportunities emerge.
Analyzing Your Organization Today
We combine your data with our industry benchmarks to pinpoint where your organization is now, and where it needs to be. We analyze your organizational structure—spans, layers, job architecture, reporting lines, and people costs—and apply our mapping tools and network analysis to determine where work is getting done. Then, we assess your engagement methods to understand how you’re communicating with your people.
Building an Organization for Tomorrow
What do you want and need your organization to be in the future? We help you build an organization for tomorrow by turning your strategic priorities into an operating model, organizational structure, and set of governance processes. This builds a structure that empowers your people to shift their approach as the organization changes.
Putting Ideas Into Action
By leaning on our deep experience in behavior change, we help you put ideas into action with a practical action plan that details all upcoming organizational changes.
Finally, we help to win your people’s hearts and minds to ensure that transformation sticks for the long term.
Organization Strategy
Aligning people, leaders, organization, and culture to implement an effective business strategy.
Our Experts
Speak to an ORGANIZATION DESIGN EXPERT
FAQ About Organizational Design
What is organizational design?
Organizational design structures an organization’s resources, processes and systems, enabling the organization to achieve its goals. It involves designing a company’s organizational hierarchy, governance principles, roles and responsibilities, processes and culture to align with its mission, vision, values and overall strategy.
Organizational design’s purpose is to create a coherent, integrated system that ensures the right people are in the right roles and that the company follows effective decision-making processes. Its goal is to ensure that an organization’s structure facilitates communication and collaboration.
The activities involved in organizational design vary. They may include assessing an organization’s current structure and identifying areas for improvement, defining roles and responsibilities, developing governance mechanisms, designing processes and systems and creating a culture that supports the organization’s objectives.
In the long run, an effective organizational design can allow a business to adapt to changing circumstances, respond to new opportunities and achieve its goals.
What are the key components of organizational design?
Organizational design touches a number of areas of an organization to ensure they work together to attain the organization’s purpose. Key organizational design principles include the following:
- Strategy: Organizational design considers a company’s vision, mission and goals. It also explores the strategies and tactics the company uses to achieve its goals.
- Structure: Organizational design consulting examines a company’s formal arrangement of roles, responsibilities and reporting relationships. Specifically, org design looks at how many levels exist in an organizational hierarchy, how large the span of control is for company leaders and what functional areas or departments exist in the company.
- Processes: Part of organizational design evaluates the formal and informal procedures and workflows that people use to accomplish organizational goals. For example, consultants may review the company’s decision-making, communication, collaboration and performance management processes.
- Culture: Organizational design includes a review of what makes up a company’s culture, including its shared values, beliefs, assumptions and norms. Consultants assess what elements shape how individuals in the organization behave, interact and make decisions.
- People: People are at the heart of organizational design. Organizational design principles suggest the review of an organization’s human resources, including the skills, knowledge, experience and diversity of its employees. Org design also considers talent-related practices, including recruitment, retention, and development.
- Technology: Consultants also look at what tools, systems and infrastructure support the organizational structure and design. They consider access to tools and resources, including information technology, manufacturing equipment and more.
- Environment: Finally, organizational design consulting assesses the external factors that impact an organization, such as market conditions, regulations, competitors and social trends.
What are the steps involved in organizational design consulting?
The steps involved in organizational design consulting vary from project to project and from organization to organization. The proper steps may depend on why the organization is rethinking its design, whether in response to changes in the market, the launch of a new business strategy or the fact that the current organizational design is no longer fit for purpose.
Common steps involved in organizational design consulting are as follows:
- Diagnosis: Organizational design consultants begin by understanding the organization’s current structure, culture, processes and performance. They also consider any external factors shaping a company’s environment. They gather data through methods such as employee interviews, surveys and focus groups.
- Analysis: After diagnosing any issues, org design consultants analyze the data to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats related to the organizational design. This process may include tools such as SWOT analysis, stakeholder mapping and process mapping, among others.
- Design: Organizational design consultants work with an organization’s leaders to develop a new organizational design that resolves any issues and aligns with the organization's goals and strategy. This step may involve creating a new organizational chart, defining roles and responsibilities, designing processes and workflows and developing a new culture.
- Implementation: Org design consultants with the organization to implement the design. Implementing the change likely involves drafting a change management plan, building and executing a strategy to communicate the change to employees, training employees on new processes and roles and monitoring the progress of the transformation.
- Evaluation: Organizational design consultants assess the effectiveness of the new design. Using key performance metrics and feedback from stakeholders, consultants identify and prioritize opportunities for improvement and refine the organizational design.
Why are organizational structure and design important?
Organizational structure and design are critical elements in ensuring an organization is set up to thrive. A poor organizational structure can cause a host of problems, including low employee morale, high staff turnover, poor work quality, lack of coordination between business units, wasted time and ineffective problem-solving. In turn, these problems can lead to missed business targets and overall lackluster performance.
But when organizations get their structure and design right, they can improve their efficiency, streamline decision-making and strengthen their culture.
A sound organizational structure aligns a company’s resources, roles and processes with the business strategy. It clarifies employees’ roles and responsibilities, so they’re more likely to perform better. And it encourages organizations to respond better to shifting market conditions and emerging threats. In turn, the organization can become more adaptable and innovative. As a result, the organization is more likely to earn higher profits and improve the quality of its goods and services. It’s also likely to have a more motivated workforce and be better prepared to weather disruption.
