Organizational Charts

Synopsis

To build a thriving company culture, you need everyone on the team to understand the organization's architecture and reporting relationships and chains of command within it. Our Organizational Charts presentation allows you to save hours of work, choose different ways that an organizational chart can be rendered to best fit your needs and insert team members' headshots to put a face to the name and showcase your team.

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Slide highlights

Use this slide to cover the general structure of your business. It allows you to break down the organizational architecture into teams, departments and divisions, which helps to add visibility and create stronger relationships between the teams.

Your venture's hierarchy must reflect your purpose, values and story, per Forbes Leadership. With this slide, explain which roles are near the top and bottom at your organization and how they help operations to accurately mirror your foundation.

Overview

Organizational charts, a.k.a "org charts" or "organograms," feature boxes, shapes or visuals that represent people and positions within a company. Sometimes, they include contact information, hyperlinks, icons and illustrations, Microsoft writes on its website.

Organizational charts serve the following purposes:

• Demonstrate the internal architecture and hierarchies
• Help employees see who to report to and contact if problems arise
• Assist in defining roles and responsibilities
• Keep employee contact info in one easily accessible place
• Allow management to see how many employees are in each department and how to allocate staff and other resources
• Provide staff with insight into promotion opportunities

Application

Microsoft's Manasa Reddigari says: "Organograms can quickly become a blur of shapes and words. But with a little design work, they can capture people's attention the proper way." She offers the following tips for building a solid organizational chart:

1. Right size it – ensure that your chart isn't too large and overwhelming. "If you need to create three charts rather than one, do it. This way, your audience can get an overview of the organizational structure, then take a deeper dive into departments or divisions when they're ready," Reddigari recommends.
2. Use shapes and colors consistently – use the same shape for supervisors, another shape for mid-level employees and a different one for junior employees. Also, choose one color for each division in your company and use it consistently.
3. Add pertinent information – add details about your staff, such as contact information, location, clients or specialties so it's clear who does what and where, if someone's looking for help.
4. Show assistants with a sidebar below the manager – Reddigari says this helps denote the assistant role while still clearly showing the manager's direct reports.
5. Pay attention to spacing – make your chart easier on the eyes by keeping boxes equidistant from each other.

Case study

Apple

Apple is certainly a leader when it comes to innovations in hardware, software and services. Over the years, it grew from 8,000 employees and $7 billion in revenue in 1997 to 137,000 employees and $260 billion in revenue in 2019. However, "much less well known are the organizational design and the associated leadership model that has played a crucial role in the company's innovation success," Harvard Business Review (HBR) reports. According to HBR, Apple uses functional organization, which groups employees by specialty, skill or related roles. This makes sense, as the company's main purpose is to create products that enrich people's daily lives, which requires continually innovating its processes.

Apple bases this practice on two views. HBR reports: "First, Apple competes in markets where the rates of technological change and disruption are high, so it must rely on the judgment and intuition of people with deep knowledge of the technologies responsible for the disruption." And continues: "Second, Apple's commitment to offering the best possible products would be undercut if short-term profit and cost targets were the overriding criteria for judging investments and leaders. The bonuses of senior Research and Development (R&D) executives are based on company-wide performance numbers rather than the costs of or revenue from particular products. The finance team is not involved in the product road map meetings of engineering teams, and engineering teams are not involved in pricing decisions."