Restructuring Your Company? Keep It Simple

Originally published on Born2Invest.

When you’re planning a major restructuring of your company things start to look like a tangled web, especially if downsizing is involved. Whether you’re scaling up or scaling back, all the moving pieces often turn into a giant swirling tornado. Confusions surrounding leadership structure and reporting processes can make simple tasks a complicated mess that feels like your swirling in circles and nothing is actually moving.

Simplify. For most it’s easier said than done, but Change Management Expert and Author of Why Simplicity Wins Lisa Bodell created tools for simplifying processes within a company. During your restructure use her acronym, MURA, when shaping new policies and reorganizing the current ways of work.

Minimal

This is a mindset shift. With the recent years of hyper-growth and scaling up, we have been conditioned to believe that more is more, bigger is better, and growth is in our DNA. Well, growth doesn’t necessarily mean things need to be more complicated. Simplifying processes means readjusting how we classify success.

Having 4 different vice presidents in the company may give the outward appearance of a busy and built-out staff, but unless the title holds weight, giving superfluous titles will complicate things internally.

Keeping things minimal will allow your company to be nimble and more adaptable. It requires a subtractive process that may feel uncomfortable, but in the long run, a minimalist mindset will help you adapt in the future.

Understandable

Forget the long acronyms (yes, I see the irony here), the industry jargon, and the overly-sophisticated ramblings of someone trying to sound more impressive than they really are. When you’re restructuring your company, you want everything to be understood across departments and cultural differences. Keep it straight-forward, saying exactly what you mean in the least amount of words as possible. Everyone should be able to understand your new policies, from rookie to seasoned veteran.

Repeatable

Templatizing is the name of the game. You want to have consistency throughout your company to make things easier and to create cohesion. Wherever you are able to, turn your projects or tasks into a formula or template that can be easily repeated by anyone. Bodell says everyone tries to reinvent the wheel every time a change is made.

You’re changing the structure of your company—that’s a big deal. Leave as many old and familiar processes in place and turn new processes into easy repeatable steps to create comfort.

Accessible

Oftentimes in business, we like to keep our secrets. We think it gives us a competitive edge. It might, for a short time, but in the long run, open sharing is what leads to innovation…which we all know is really the competitive edge we need. This applies to the company on an internal level as well. When restructuring your company keep everyone in the loop and make sure your new practices are shared with all members of the team.

Your departments need to work together and give input on whether any aspect of the new process could be simplified based on their knowledge of the system. Sharing the new processes with the entire team will remove redundancies and unnecessary regulations.

Restructures are never easy, but they can be extremely beneficial if done correctly. Use this guide to simplification to make sure the new shape of our company is streamlined and efficient.

Written in partnership with BigSpeak.