Organizational Design & Development - Managing Turnover

Turnover is people vacating positions.  Turnover may be either internal (someone leaves a job for another position within the same organization) or external (leaving the organization altogether). 

Typically organizations see between 5% and 10% turnover annually; that level of turnover is organic.  People leave their positions for personal reasons or to accept better positions elsewhere. 

When turnover exceeds these levels, especially when it exceeds 20% annually, OD experts look for causes.  The most frequent cause is a poor relationship between the departing employee and his or her manager. 

​Organizational Architecture

This cluster of methods is sometimes synonymous with the term organizational development.  It is more properly labeled a different OD – organizational design.

This discipline focuses on ensuring that teams get formed and reporting relationships defined in ways that maximize the organizations chances for strategic success. 

Classically, this involves designing organization charts.   However, more recently the discipline also designs teams so that members of one team also belong to other teams, ensuring better communications among teams.  Other design methods include indirect reporting relationships (A reports to M, but A also keeps P involved and informed about his or her work), and formally defining communications processes/channels, especially data transfer across information technology networks. 

Organizational design and architecture often attempts to strike a balance between maintaining functional reporting relationships (finance and accounting reports to the CFO; purchasing agents and contract managers report to the head of procurement) and ensuring process-oriented workflow and communications.

​Organizational Integration

When two organizations become one, either through a merger or an acquisition, an exhausting list of processes, procedures, practices, tools, systems and staffing patterns require attention.  Experts refer to this process as organizational integration. 

OI impacts many people, sometimes thousands or tens of thousands of people.  It occurs in an atmosphere of uncertainty, even anxiety, and suspicion.  Since mergers or acquisitions almost always involve reducing the number of jobs and laying people off, that anxiety is understandable, but it must still be managed. 

Mistakes, miscommunications and misinformation can cause key people and better performers to leave.  Carefully planned, openly communicated and effectively implemented OI minimizes that fallout. 

Org Integration also addresses a complex tangle of compensation and benefits questions.

Church Organizational Design & Development - Managing Turnover

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