What about a re-organisation ?

A company shall adapt its organisation with its growth and towards its ecosystem. For the past years, re-organisation (so-called restructuring, agility, changement management..) is a so frequent and well used process within most of large companies, whatever their financial position, that we can ask ourselves on their rational. Very often, top management justifies this change towards their employees with a written organisation note and associated chart in the aim of a better efficiency to face with their business and competition. Therefore, like after politic élections, there are some winners and some loosers (power influence, authority, team census for each department,…).
From my own experience, the major issue is that the sens linked with this change is missing and moreover disconnected from the vision and the strategy of the company, with no pre-study of the financial and humain needs required to set it up with expected short and middle terms payback. Personnaly, I’ve experienced cases where organization could be reshuffled more than 6 times in a year, with same head managers, without being able to demonstrate any gain on the short term, which is by the way quite normal due to the leadtime between each change !
In fine, an excess of reorganisation can lead to an important lack of intrinsic motivation of the coworkers, their ontologic security of their positioning in their organisation can be continuously reconsidered. Worst ca&se could be when when an organization is performing badly, employees expect a major earthquake at the head of the pyramid in order to clean the air and set up a new organisation with hope of better future. According to Eric Berne, the group imago adjustment is a step by step procesus which can easily require 9 to 18 months towards team efficiency… much too long compared with the current organization change frequency !
In my posture of professionnal coach for teams and managers, I will recommend to systematically link the change to the vision and focus on the expected outcome (positive or negative). Therefore, transparency, recognize its mistakes, tell the Truth is a simple and pre-requisite parameter to succeed. It’s important to capitalize on what’s working well and how to maintain and reinforce the good habits, and work on the improvements axis in order to help on durable effects.
Change management is indeed compulsory but without vision and sens could be totally counterproductive.