When a business lacks organisational planning, it may struggle to scale, feel disjointed internally, or experience constant aimless reinventions. If your business experiences these problems, the root cause often runs deeper than issues on the surface, like underperforming sales or lagging marketing.
Your issues could be in the foundation of your business structure. Your business’s organisational plan serves as the blueprint that links your structure, roles, culture, and strategy.
In this article, we’ll discuss the importance of organisational planning and how to best approach it for business success.
What Is Organisational Planning?
Organisational planning refers to the process of aligning your business structure with your strategic goals. It includes defining reporting lines, responsibilities, processes, and decision-making flows, all to make sure the business can operate smoothly and scale intelligently.
As a founder, you might be building your business as you go, which is typical with early-stage growth. But that approach isn’t sustainable in the long run. Without thorough planning, systems can cause bottlenecks, and individuals are burdened with too many responsibilities. This can lead to a lack of clarity regarding roles and ownership within the organisation.
1. Start With Your Business Plan, Then Build Your Structure
A business should always establish its short-term and long-term goals. Then, identify the essential functions and workflows to support these goals, noting where decision points occur.
Determine what roles are needed now and in the future. Your business plan should be the foundation that guides your organisational planning and helps you set objectives to meet your business goals. If you don’t have one yet, you should create one for your business.
Drafting a business plan is quite simple, especially with the availability of business plan templates online.
2. Establish Clear Roles
It sounds simple, but one of the most transformative shifts in business structure is clarifying roles. When employees know exactly what they’re responsible for and where their decision-making power ends, performance improves across the board.
This is not the same as micromanaging or having rigid job descriptions. In fact, good organisational planning builds role clarity while allowing room for autonomy.
You can use the RACI matrix framework to map out big projects or team functions. RACI stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. The framework ensures that everyone has a clear understanding of their roles to make the project a success.
3. Manage the Span of Control
One structural flaw that tends to creep in as a business scales is a bloated span of control, where one manager is overseeing too many direct reports. This leads to overwhelmed leaders, insufficient feedback loops, and employees who don’t get the support they need.
An ideal span of control will depend on your industry and leadership maturity, but you should strategically decide how many direct reports your managers have. The general number is:
- 1 manager for every 5 – 7 direct reports.
- Up to 10 in more standardised or operational teams.
Keep checking this ratio during growth phases. It’s one of the easiest ways to fix inefficiency in your organisation.
4. Organisational Planning Is Also About Culture
If your team is dysfunctional, culture plays a huge role in boosting team morale and improving the organisational planning of your business.
If your company values collaboration but your teams operate in silos, your work culture and organisational planning are misaligned. To fix this, you can use planning sessions to align structure and culture. This includes:
- Setting up communication flows that support transparency.
- Mapping out cross-functional collaboration opportunities.
- Formalising company values in ways that shape onboarding, promotions, and leadership, and boost team morale.
5. Use Technology to Map and Monitor Structure
Don’t underestimate the power of visualising your structure. Tools like ClickUp can help create dynamic charts that reflect your current structure and growth goals.
People are visual learners, and mapping tasks and goals in a chart can make things easier to digest. This can help people understand who they report to, how decisions get made, and where they fit in the bigger picture.
6. Have a Continuous Plan
A common oversight for businesses in their growth phase is to build for the present rather than the future. When hiring to fill immediate gaps without considering the business’s long-term trajectory, companies often set themselves up for a series of costly restructures.
Instead, it’s more effective to first design an ultimate organisational structure, even if it’s meant to be used in the future. From this long-term vision, businesses can then reverse-engineer the roles needed today to reach that future state.
