How modern organisation design works

“Satisfied employees are productive employees”: This simple principle has long been accepted in the corporate world – and has been backed up scientifically by studies. The traditional understanding of an organisation that relies solely on monetary incentives or pressure to perform has served its time.

Attention is now focusing increasingly on a more integrated approach, or rather the employee experience. This goes beyond traditional factors such as salary and working hours and includes all interactions, impressions and emotions that employees experience in connection with their work, the working environment, colleagues, corporate culture, management, development opportunities and working conditions.

Employees increasingly identify factors like recognition, engaging openly with superiors and a clear vision of the common goal as key aspects for improving their motivation at work. In short: They want to be noticed and heard.

Positive experience = greater loyalty + higher productivity

A positive employee experience ultimately leads to better staff retention and motivation. Employees not only feel valued, but also inspired to participate actively and take on responsibility. This stronger involvement has a direct impact on productivity.

Action is needed especially in industries like IT, where the ongoing shortage of skilled labour is particularly keenly felt. “In IT, nobody can afford to lose employees”, says Patrick Labud, Senior Consultant and Member of bbv’s CTO Board. “Employees therefore need to be involved to a greater extent in shaping their own organisation, both in terms of their technical and social skills.”

This is not a new finding. In the long established user-centred design, users are involved in product development from the outset to ensure the best possible user experience. Human-centred organisation design extends this principle to the entire organisation: The focus of the organisation, its culture and processes is not just on the requirements of stakeholders and customers, but also on the needs and skills of the company’s own employees.

In other words: In a time when there is a lack of skilled labour, companies have to find the balance between satisfying their customers and their employees – and offer their experts the best possible working environment.

Breaking down silos, promoting understanding

But just how do you create a human-centred organisation? How does a company ensure that its employees are adequately taken into account? A common understanding of the company’s intentions and goals is fundamental to this.

This includes breaking down silos and increasing mutual understanding of the areas of responsibility and activities within the company. To this end, companies conduct internal work placements that allow employees to work in other departments for a certain period of time. But this method is often complex and expensive – especially if a longer change of scenery is planned. Short stints in other areas of the company, on the other hand, are easily manageable.

Alternatively, stakeholder presentations offer a good opportunity to bring together colleagues from other departments and ask questions. This is especially the case for development teams. So even outsiders feel valued, take part in other areas of responsibility – and identify more strongly with their own work, the company and its products and solutions.

Change takes time

It takes time for organisations to achieve a lasting human-centred way of working. Breaking down silos, intermixing all teams and dissolving hierarchies overnight is not practical.

As a first step, it pays to put together an interdisciplinary pilot team and encourage mutual dialogue within the team. The knowledge gained from this can then be channelled into other areas of the company. Companies advance gradually in this way towards becoming a human-centred organisation with more committed employees who can contribute their own individual skills – regardless of roles and functions.

“The change to a human-centred organisation should not be revolutionary, rather evolutionary”, maintains Patrick Labud. “Just how quickly success is achieved depends to a large extent on the team constellation: for some teams, this takes longer than for others. At the end of the day we are not working with robots, but with people – with all of their strengths, weaknesses and individual characteristics. Taking these differences into account and using them beneficially for your own company – that’s precisely what human-centred organisation design is all about.”