Good Employees are Missing and Product Innovation is Slow – Help Us!

What can we do to get the right talents for the company and then keep them? Often the answer is to pay them more money. Is this really the universal way to keep good employees? Jens Thiemann explains how to design your organization to increase product innovation and keep your employees.

The lack of qualified professionals is omnipresent and with different generations in the company, there are also different requirements needed to be able to keep good professionals. To find a way to keep our specialists and know when we really need another expert, we need to take a look at the structure of companies and organizations. This shows that there are mostly three different types of company structures within an organization.

• Formal structure: This is the classic design with hierarchies, team assignment and who passes on information to whom in the hierarchy. Typically, it’s presented in a townhall meeting; you get your job title and based on that your salary range is fixed. The odds of that are the bureaucracy, protectionism and functional silos.
• Informal structure: This structure is more between people and how they really work together and find solutions outside of the formal structure. “Hey, let’s do it this way, but don’t tell our boss”. This structure is often characteristic with slow decision-making processes, political games and overruling.
• Value-creating structure: This is where the magic happens. You create a working space, where people get motivated and know their value for the team.
  That is the goal for the company to have- a value-creating structure.

In an organization, you need a formal structure. Of course, you also don’t get rid of all the points that go into the informal structure. However, in most organizations and big corporations you will typically see that if they want to change something in the structure, they only work on the formal one.

How to create a value-creating structure in your company

It’s important to start with micro-solution- for instance, small things that can be changed. For example, examine how it’s possible to delegate work, in which way, and determine how you can adapt that for different teams. Change the whole view on hierarchy by creating a flexible, network-like structure and modular system for the whole organization- while also keeping in mind that you need to be adaptive.

The three structures of an organization

This ultimately means that it’s a never-ending process to have a value-creating structure. As people change, markets evolve, and new innovations force us to rethink patterns of behavior and processes, its important to remember that within the organization the structure is not something that was fixed at some point, but rather something that must be constantly questioned. It must be adaptive and changeable when adjustments are needed. Nevertheless, a core focus should always be on the human being.

Question your company: Why do you exist? What do you deliver? What is your value? Set up your teams based on the answers in value streams. It is not based on functional silos, but rather more on determining what each team delivers. For example, one value stream may be “We deliver software”, while another is “We are the service department; we deliver successful projects to our customers”. Visualize who supports these value streams and the teams. Another example: The value stream of delivering the software may have support from the internal IT team, because they created the IT infrastructure that is needed to deliver the software. Marketing helps to promote the software so that you have customers for your software. Once you have found the teams who support you with a value, you’ve found your platform crews.

Sometimes companies only see the outcome of teams and ask why this outcome came so late. They often think about the correct way to set up the team, but what is the “correct” set up? With values and platform crews we have a starting point, but much of time you also hear that they have dependencies with another team or perhaps had to wait because of another task. Using the same approach as the beginning, you must find micro-solutions.

Determine which dependencies you have and how it could be rearranged. Perhaps someone else is able to help in specific situations or even evaluate if you really need that approval cycle. It’s important to check and reduce the dependencies in your processes.

Cognitive load, unclear product vision and fuzzy prioritizing processes

When we set up the platform crews, we must take a deeper look. Do we have too many value streams where the same platform crews are involved? Looking at many companies, it’s often a problem that some departments and teams have too high a workload. They are simply involved in too many processes; for each individual that can mean that their cognitive load is far too high. The question we must regularly ask here is: Does it really make sense for the team to be involved in the process? Do we have other options, or is it perhaps no longer necessary to continue with an existing process? The result can be just as multifaceted: Perhaps teams are split up into smaller teams so that not everyone is required to take on the full range of tasks. Another possibility could also be that tasks need to be clearly prioritized.

Speaking of prioritizing, it can be a challenge. Often in daily business, teams think to interact ad-hoc. For example, if the highest paying customer has a problem, solving this problem suddenly seems to be the most important thing on everyone’s mind. The true vision here is to take a step back and have some questions or simply follow a pattern that reflects our company’s values. Even if the highest paying customer has a problem, you must be able to rationalize that you often cannot drop everything immediately to remedy it. Instead, determine does it immediately help us as a team, as an organization, or are there other pressing tasks that are more likely to drive us forward and help the general development? These tasks are then prioritized higher, and the customer’s request is answered afterwards.

Everything is a question: What are your values, and which crews do you need?

Every company is unique with distinct values and requiring different crews. Maybe you are a B2B Software Vendor like priint Group and work with partners, where you need a partnership crew. Its imperative to always keep an eye on the capability of different crews. Do you have a satisfactory number of experts in the crews, or do you see an increasing number of connections with other teams and values? Streamline your crews and recognize early on when experts are missing, or if there’s a need to put together a new set of teams. These do not necessarily have to be new employees. Perhaps there are already experts within your company, just in different departments. When you’ve established your values and different crews, streamline the work and regularly question your structure; you have a good opportunity to keep your employees.