15. Organisation Design

‌‌‌What is it?

The purpose of this process is to answer the question: how do we need to be organised for the changes to work?  

Every change effort has some implication – whether large or small – for the organisation structure, people and processes.  This process focuses on organising ‘people’ to deliver new ways of working – a new service or function or a new way of delivering an existing function. It ensures that the new structure takes account of levels of responsibility and effort required, by grade and number of roles.

The process then seeks to facilitate the smooth transition from current to future job, team and organisation structures.  This process is owned by the change leadership but your HRBP is a critical partner in defining the specific needs of your change initiative and carrying out the organisation design steps. 

Why do it?

Complete this process in order to:

Ensure that the new organisation structure supports the change initiative objectives
Create roles, jobs and teams that will enable the operational change
Develop an implementation plan to facilitate smooth transition of people and organisation elements from the old to the new ways of working

When to do it?

Prepare the organisation design in the Develop phase of the initiative and implement during the Deliver phase

Inputs

Future State Definition
Change Impact Assessment
Change Strategy
Target Operating Model

Outputs

Organisation Design (including Job descriptions; People impact assessment & Consultation Pack where appropriate). This will be specific for each change initiative and will involve working with your HRBP who can provide guidance to help.

How to do it?

15.1 Develop organisation design

This process is required if there are likely to be changes to the number of staff, roles, grades or jobs in order to deliver new ways of working and realise the business benefits of the change initiative.

The process is led by the business area change leadership who will have developed the Future State Definition and the Target Operating Model.

Your HR Business Partner is a critical resource in this process and they will help ensure the appropriate steps are followed to provide an effective outcome for everyone.

Building on the work to create the Target Operating Model, this step looks at:

The processes that are currently in place to deliver the work
The volume and complexity of what teams currently do and how much of their time they spend doing it

Once this is understood, you can start to make informed decisions about how things could be done differently and better.

This then allows you to develop the thinking about the roles needed to deliver the Future State and, using the information about the volume and complexity HR can support you in deciding how many people need to undertake the work.

You can then create job descriptions for every new role in the proposed design and these can be evaluated to confirm grading

Once these steps are complete, you can think about how the proposed new structure will affect the current workforce.

It may be necessary to run a few iterations of this process to consider different options for delivering the new ways of working and different mixes of roles and grades before confirming the optimal solution balancing impact, benefits, cost and risk.

15.2 Implement organisation design - people impact

People impact is the process of defining how our current staff ‘map’ onto the proposed new structure

The first step is to establish who should be considered in the scope of the restructure – who does the work that we are proposing is undertaken in a different way?

Identify all permanently employed staff within the area of service
Employees are mapped on the basis of the work they undertake and their grade in their substantive role (secondments and acting up arrangements are not taken into account)
Only those people employed on fixed-term contracts who are covering established, planned vacancies are considered in scope

People impact is initially undertaken as a paper-based exercise within HR and then validated by the local change leadership members in the relevant business area. The impact assessment is undertaken on the basis of the work that is actually currently done (rather than what any current job descriptions say)

Consultation then provides staff with an opportunity to validate the thinking around their personal situation as well as provide feedback on the overall proposals.

It is important to note that the proposal put to staff for consultation will be the conclusion of all of this thinking, however, external drivers and other factors could change the situation. If any changes do happen, this will then be communicated to staff.

15.3 Personal situation

Employees will map into positions in the proposed new structure at varying degrees of similarity:

Someone is a match if their position in the current structure is materially the same as a role in the proposed structure
Someone is a slot if their position in the current structure is similar by a minimum of 50% to a position in the proposed structure
Someone is considered to be in a pool if they have been matched or slotted into a position where there are more people mapped than positions available in the proposed structure
Someone is displaced if there is no obvious role to map them into in the proposed structure

15.4 The process

There is a sequential process to implement the new design and fill positions. The key factor will be to remove uncertainty for staff as early in the process as possible.

An employee is considered displaced if, having gone through each of these stages, they have not been placed into a role in the structure. They are then considered at risk of redundancy and are afforded formal redeployee status which means we can broaden the search for alternative roles to across the whole University

Once the process of trying to map all in-scope staff is complete, any remaining vacancies will be opened up for recruitment