Lessons learned to make reorgs less crappy for you and your team

I’ve been through 9 reorgs and here’s a few lessons learned on to make organizational restructuring less crappy.

While many people talk about the collective pain of layoffs, reorgs are equally painful, especially when people feel that they feel lost at work or no longer in the job they want. Here’s a few tips that anyone can take to make the transition less painful.

1. Speed to get answers is a top metric for successful leadership through a reorg. Teams won’t expect leaders to have the answer to everything immediately. But they will want you to continually receive their questions through multiple channels, to find answers, and to share information quickly.

2. After a reorg, weekly or bi-weekly updates on progress is a game changer— processes that are changing, new departments, who to go to, changes to KPIs, what’s been figured out vs not. Large batches of less frequent updates can be too overwhelming to digest and requires too much waiting for answers (the worst!). If people get no update or have to figure it out the answers themselves, they will be lost.

3. Give employees who are job titles or departments have changes even better onboarding than you would a new employee. They’ve just been assigned a job that they might not want. So introduce them to new people, take them to lunch, walk them through new processes, check in on them.

4. If you’re feeling disengaged after a reorg, one of the best things you can do to ease the pain and exhaustion is to nurture relationships with your colleagues. Find new mentors, start a lunch group with former colleagues, do some weekly teambuilding with your direct reports. Reorgs often have an undercurrent of loneliness, feeling like a kid in a new school, that makes it harder to adapt to all of the other parts of a reorg.

5. Clarify where teammembers will have agency to shape the future vs what is being decided by others. People managers can use this to create structure and a roadmap in what otherwise can feel like overwhelming ambiguity. This helps teammembers see where they have control or agency over what’s happening to their work, and can guide where they invest their effort.

6. If you’re a people manager, immediately set up a series of retreats or war rooms with a few stakeholders together and determine next steps for your team. Don’t wait until you “have more things figured out” or you “have more answers”. It will be more efficient than BAU processes for setting team’s tactics.

7. Most orgs underestimate the amount of engagement and productivity they will lose with reorgs, keeping some business as usual KPIs and while shifting the people and processes to execute. This makes engagement even worse than if they adjusted the KPIs from the start to accommodate the loss of continuity.

If you’re looking to improve your engagement for your team after a reorg:

• Get a 20-minute discovery chat. We’ll ask you a few questions about your team and then point you to the most research-backed techniques that match your needs. Book now 

• Join the our July masterclass: Improving Morale after Layoffs and Reorgs. We’ll cover other tactics and activities you can implement with your team to increase engagement and collaboration. RSVP here