The Importance Culture and Organisation Design Plays in Delivering Strategy

Mainsheet has helped a number of organisations recently across a range of industries, including several government agencies, to design their organisational structure and develop their organisational cultures.

As part of our recent work with various government enterprises and departments, we have identified a number of key areas that are critical to the success of organisational change. Common across these focus areas is a commitment to work on the development of an appropriate culture that will underpin the successful implementation of these changes and enhance the ability to achieve a longer term strategy.

To ensure any changes are made expediently and implemented with discipline, we focus on a number of key factors of success relating to culture and organisational design, such as:

Ways of Working

The future of work is here now and being rapidly accelerated by impacts of the global pandemic.

Organisations must be agile and adaptable to sustain performance during transformation, including adopting virtual and flexible ways of working to build trust and enable contribution.

Consistent rhythms, routines and communication channels are important along with clarity on decision making authorities and accountabilities.

Leadership

Leaders play a critical role in enabling and sustaining transformational change by:

• Creating a compelling vision aligned with organisational values, purpose and strategy
• Providing role clarity and role modelling desired behaviours and ways of working
• Connecting, integrating and inspiring contribution, collaboration and innovation across the value chain

Mindsets and Capability

To realise the full potential of your organisational capability, focus must be given to making sense of the ‘why’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ of work across the organisation.

Employee engagement, performance and commercial value will be optimised when individual and collective strengths are leveraged and investment is made in developing cross-functional capability.

Technology

The impact of digital transformation, automation and innovation on ways of working and productivity continues to gather momentum.

It is vital for organisations to leverage existing data and adopt emerging technologies to draw insights and translate into actions that enable sustainable performance improvement.

Productivity

Future proofing productivity is heavily dependent on an organisation’s ability to unify its value chain in service of organisational purpose and strategy.

An unrelenting commitment to eliminating organisational ‘siloes’, engaging people through a productive culture and identifying and actively managing change risks are hallmarks of organisations that harness the opportunity in change.

Commercial Sustainability

Organisational design and culture must be effectively integrated to realise the value of people capabilities and deliver on long term strategy.

To enable ongoing commercial viability and responsiveness to internal and external forces, design must be right-sized and scalable.

Culture must be people and customer-centric and performance needs to be measured through the lens of commercial outcomes and value.

Culture is the Critical Enabler

Culture is a critical enabler of any organisation’s strategy. Strategy itself is underpinned by the organisational values and supported or influenced by the way the business is organised to deliver its objectives.

While strategy is the ‘what’, culture is the ‘how’. Strategy provides clarity and focus, while culture is the organisational context through which strategy is executed, and therefore has a high degree of impact on whether it will succeed or fail.

Mainsheet has previously published an article summarising our lessons from transformation projects that we have undertaken.

If you would like to talk with us about culture and organisation design, please contact us here.