Top 3 Best Practices to Draw Meaningful Organizational Charts

An organization chart is a graphical representation of relationships between an organization’s departments, functions and people. It can also indicate the flow of data, responsibility and reporting from bottom-up or top-down. Its usage across the globe is a testament to its effectiveness. Below are some organizational chart best practices to help you make your org charts more meaningful and useful.

1. Divide and Conquer
2. Make Sensible Grouping & Linking
3. Clear Reporting Path / Hierarchy

Divide and Conquer

Unless you’re a small company with a few employees, organizational charts are definitely going to be complex, with many inter-relationships among departments or functions. For example, a multinational company may have their subsidiaries in different countries/markets that will have a variety of organization structures (depending on market situation and work functions) and the company will have a huge and complex organization structure.

Try fitting an org chart like this to a website/document

When your organization chart becomes too large and complex like the one above, it can be split into smaller charts. You can split it by department, project, site, region etc., whatever it is that makes sense to others in your organization. This makes it easier for the viewer to understand the responsibilities or the expectations of each department.

Breaking down the org chart in to small charts makes it much easier to monitor progress or workload of employees. Thus, it can be easier to spread work among workers with less load. It also makes it easier to do comparative analysis of a situation, so that resource allocation can be streamlined to meet demands of different situations.

There are many diagramming tools, available both online and offline, that facilitate the creation of various types of organizational charts. When large organizations have multiple organizational charts covering their sub-units, it is likely to be difficult to study them together at a glance.

With a chart covering several pages it can also be confusing to work out the connections between each entity shown in the chart. With Creately as your organizational chart diagramming tool you can avoid this issue using the diagram linking feature. This allows viewers of the chart to see the connections between charts, navigate between the different charts and possibly link to individual employee profiles.

Make Sensible Groupings and Linking

When organization charts are being broken down in to sub-charts, sensible grouping and linking is a must since the connection of each chart and the flow should be easily understandable to the viewer. Sensible grouping is done based on how individuals, jobs, functions or activities are differentiated and aggregated. The information flow also requires optimizing within each group, but at the same time clearly differentiating it from the other groups.

Structural linking of the groups should be performed with an integration mechanism (eg: liaison roles, cross-unit groups, integrator roles or projects and dotted lines) to assist with coordinating and sharing of information across groups which will enable the organisation’s leadership to provide guidance and direction throughout the organization.

There are five grouping models that are generally accepted around the world.

Functional

The most common structure, organized according to functions or departments. For example finance, marketing, sales etc. Suitable for small or single programmatic organizations that do not need to manage across a large geographic area.

Benefits of this model are that it:

• Develops depth of skills in a particular function or department (most jobs are functional in nature)
• Promotes functional innovation, scale and lower costs
• Is simple to do and easy for each department to understand their core responsibilities, and to hold them accountable

Geographic

This structure is organized around major geographies. Suited to companies which are large with multiple programs that often differ across geographies where local differences are critical for success (e.g. regulation, fundraising, economics).

Benefits of this model are that it:

• Makes available the resources needed to succeed within a geography
• Allows greater customization of programs or services by region
• Enables clear focus with accountability for results by geography
• Enables focus on geographic funding sources

Program

This structure is organized around major projects. Suited for multi-service organizations and foundations, that has programs which are very different from one another (e.g. different customers, economics, etc.) and where the resources and skills needed to succeed by program are very different as well. However, the factors for each program are similar across geographies.

Benefits of this model are that it:

• Promotes a depth of understanding within a particular program area and can promote program innovation
• Makes available the resources needed to succeed within a program
• Enables clear focus with accountability for program results
• Enables focus on funding sources which are often program oriented

Customer/Market

This structure is organized around customers/clients served by the organization. It is suitable for companies which have very different customers who have different service requirements (resulting in different programs provided).

Benefits of this model are that it:

• Provides focus to be put on the customer, therefore enabling development of programs tailored to a population’s needs and able to get “results”
• Enables clear focus with accountability for results by customer group
• Enables clear focus on most important customers and/or markets

Matrix

This is a structure organized to manage multiple dimensions; e.g. program and geography. Due to the difficulty of managing, this model is NOT recommended to be used.

Benefits of this model are that it:

• Enables organizations to (at least theoretically) manage multiple organizational dimensions simultaneously

Some of these types can be found in our org chart examples.

Clear Reporting Path / Hierarchy

When drawing an organization chart that indicates the organizational hierarchy, clear reporting paths must be highlighted so that the viewer / employee gets a clear understanding of the reporting structure he/she should follow. One method to use would be using color coding or visual queues to indicate the reporting path.

When it comes to Matrix organization charts where the reporting relationships are set up as a grid or a matrix, rather than in the traditional hierarchy, indicating clear reporting path is critical for the success of the organization’s operation.

Below is a good example of a non-conventional org chart of a flat (team/functional based) organization.

What Are Your Organizational Chart Best Practices ?

Hope you found this article useful and that it helped you make much more effective org charts. These are some of the org chart best practices we follow at Cinergix. So what are yours? Be sure to let us know in the comments.

This article was originally published in the Creately blog and has been slightly modified to meet the guidelines of Medium. To view the original article, visit this link;

http://creately.com/blog/diagrams/organizational-chart-best-practices/