Organizational Redesign Gives Employees Clear Customer Line of Sight

THE SITUATION

The e-commerce arm of a Fortune 500 retailer turned to Blue Beyond to help design and implement a transformational strategy with the goal of improving the company’s connection to online customers.

The e-commerce division had been operating for 12 years and served as a key business channel for the retailer. However, as the organization grew, the internal operating structure did not. A lack of clarity around roles and responsibilities made it difficult for teams to react, grow, and scale from both a business and a personal development perspective. Without structured accountability, sales were at risk.

The company needed to rethink their current structure and ways of working and shift their operating model squarely towards how customers shop in the digital space. They needed to also build in a culture ready and able to support this work. They embarked on an organizational redesign affecting thousands of employees with a specific emphasis on creating strategic alignment and mapping roles directly to the customer experience.

WHAT WE DID

The Blue Beyond team quickly understood the issues and provided support in developing the change strategy. We worked closely with leadership and fully integrated into the client team to support workstreams across the initiative. Over the course of five months, Blue Beyond supported the:

Development of strategy and organization design

• Partnered with the CEO and select members of his executive team to analyze the effectiveness of the current organizational structure, identified redundancies, and determined which elements would best serve the strategic direction of the company and support its growth moving forward

Communications and engagement approach and plan

• Socialized the new organizational structure with the larger executive committee, solicited feedback, and gained alignment on plan and timeline
• Developed a communications and engagement strategy specifically tailored to employee groups ranging from those “most effected” by the change to those that needed to be “informed-only”

Development of new department structures, roles and job descriptions

• Supported the organization with the largest amount of impact and change, the Digital Store Operations team, in the following areas:
  • Supported the leader in developing a new organizational structure, identifying new roles, reporting structures, dependencies, inclusion and exclusion of roles and responsibilities to align with the new, larger organization vision
  • Informed the leadership team of the changes and engaged them in creating outlines of job descriptions designed to impact a team of 250 people
  • Created outlines of all new job descriptions and org charts for the organization
  • Helped identify which roles would be moving out of the organization and into other areas of the business, which would be joining the new org, and ensuring their roles were being considered and captured in the process
  • Supported all communications activities from All Hands meeting materials to manager communications and one-on-one HR conversations
  • Provided coaching and guidance to the leader and members of the team throughout the process
• Worked in partnership with Executive Communications and HR to ensure a unified approach to all aspects of the organizational design process, particularly once it received executive approval
• Helped design official Town Hall sessions marking the official start of the new organization