Posted by Every company, even with a dozen or so employees, should have an organizational structure where employees can find their position and see who is responsible for what and to whom. An organizational structure consists of an organizational chart and job descriptions. I will briefly introduce you to these two issues that you need to think about before starting a company.
First – job description
Each of the anticipated associates or employees should have clearly defined four characteristics:
- tasks, i.e., activities to be performed with a clear end result and completion time; you can plan a task for a marketing person, e.g., in a month he or she is to reach out to 10 key customers and convince them of the uniqueness of the offer,
- responsibilities, which determine how to perform tasks assigned in the future; manual workers should perform any construction work with the utmost care and on time,
- authority, or in other words, the decisions that employees can make under favorable circumstances; a marketing person can look for new clients for the company without explicit instructions from the boss,
- responsibility, that is, sanctions for failure to perform assigned tasks.
The above features of a position do not have to be on paper, but the principle that works here is that the larger the company, the more complete the documentation should be.
Second – organizational structure
A company of several people can be organized in several ways. In management, the most popular structures are functional and task structures. The former group employees according to their duties, that is, there may be departments of marketing, accounting, production – in the case of a construction company, there will be a department that brings together manual workers. Sophisticated names borrowed from large companies are not relevant here. Rather, it is a matter of assigning functions to particular people employed in the company.
A task structure will work better in an advertising agency or a website development company. It consists in creating a team for a specific period of time, consisting of people from different professions and their supervisor. This team performs an assignment for a specific client. The people who are part of it do not have to be permanently employed by the company, but only on a contract for work or an assignment.
In a company of several people, the flow of information is important. It is not a matter of everyone knowing everything, but that employees do not act blindly, calling several times to the same client, knowing the status of the work and the scope of their tasks. Ensuring a good flow of information is in the interest of the company owner. If the company will number up to a dozen people, he himself should set a date for weekly meetings with the team to discuss the progress of the work so far and assign tasks for the coming period. Over time, the company may grow and then each team or group of people performing similar functions should have its own boss.