The Main Challenge
We carry out internal Quantifly analysis every three to four months. In the March 2022 analysis, organizational dynamics was highlighted as one of the issues.
The analysis of the organizational dynamics helps determine how often the employees collaborate with each other and form functional teams, how their frequency of collaboration aligns with the formal structure of the company and how information flows between different teams.
The image featuring communication clusters and communication flow at Quantifly showed that the team of analysts effectively split into two separate groups. One of the two clusters was disengaged from communication, thus we had developed a silo (Analysts 2 on the graph below).
Goals
Employees cannot produce added value without an adequate supply of relevant information. Thus, ensuring the optimal flow of information between departments, teams, and individuals is of critical importance to the company's financial performance.
That’s why we decided to take action.
The solution
We took action and implemented a new way of collaboration between departments. We set up interdepartmental "task force teams" around projects, target customer segments and processes.
What is a task force?
A task force team (in this context) is a group of employees from various departments dedicating part of their time to collaborating on achieving a specific objective. In essence, it is a company within a company.
Why did we go with this solution?
We found this to be an effective organizational structure approach to break down silos and improve interdepartmental collaboration and domain knowledge transfer.
They also foster decentralized leadership and boost employee autonomy, especially when the task-force teams are run by employees who collectively take ownership of their operation.
The outcome
As a result, our flow of information changed completely.
Our communication structure now reflects a matrix-style organizational structure. All departments merged, and the outliers were included in the communication flows.
The impact
Improved communication flow and changed organizational structure affected other metrics positively.
In June, we performed a new Quantifly Analysis to see how strategic changes affected our metrics. Even though we have predicted positive changes in employee satisfaction, social cohesion, and organizational dynamics, we were surprised by the potency of these strategic changes.
The aforementioned metrics improved by 3 %, 6 % and even 10 % in three months since we implemented this new system of departmental collaboration.
*Is such an organizational structure appropriate for all organizations?
Though it worked well for us at this stage, implementing a task force team structure may not be the right approach for your organization, and in time, we may discover that it is not appropriate for ours either.
A structure that provides the optimal flow of information depends on the organization's size, company culture, business sector and multiple other factors.
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