How to Keep Organizational Charts Up to Date

If you are a highly organized business, you likely use an organizational chart to lay out your business structure and define employee roles and responsibilities. Like other businesses, yours might be outdated. This is typical in large companies where the HR manager is always busy or there is a high employee turnover. Keeping your organizational chart up to date is crucial, and there are various strategies you can use to ensure it is.

Set a Schedule

With everything else happening around you and the business, it is easy to forget to update your organizational chart. Instead of waiting for it to fall behind, set a regular schedule for reviewing and updating the organizational chart. For many business owners, quarterly or semi-annual reviews work best. 

However, you can change this frequency depending on the business’s size and how often roles change. You might also need to set shorter intervals if you are actively hiring, which is typical for companies in the growth stage.

Use Organizational Chart Software

Organizational chart software makes it easy to keep yours up to date in various ways. First, the org chart software can allow you to let relevant stakeholders access it to update it as needed. Doing this lets you spread the responsibility among various people, so you know at least one person is always looking at the chart and updating it.

Second, the right software can allow you to import data from different sources to update the chart. For example, you can keep a Google Sheet that shows all employees, their roles, and their relationships with each other. With this arrangement, you only have to update the sheet and the chart will update automatically.

Lastly, such software can also connect to a human resource database and pull in data like it would if you integrated it with other external services.

Encourage Employee Feedback

It is also a good idea to let employees provide feedback to help you keep the organizational chart up to date. When doing so, they can talk to their team leader or the human resource manager if they find inaccuracies in it. 

Their feedback can also become crucial for keeping the chart accurate and improving its accuracy. They might even remind you to look at the whole chart instead of only their positions if you have not done so in a while.

Review Your Organizational Chart After Major Changes

Businesses change all the time. For example, you might change the business structure or pivot to a new industry that requires a review of all employee roles and responsibilities.

Major changes can also be made in the form of acquisitions and mergers. In both cases, employee roles change, and the business might let go of some employees, hire for new positions, or promote employees to fill new ones.

In all these cases, you should consistently check the organizational chart to ensure it is accurate and up to date. Also, set a shorter interval to check it until the turbulence of the change has passed.

An up-to-date organizational chart ensures everyone knows their roles and responsibilities, enhances communication and collaboration, and makes hierarchies clear for everyone. Businesses should, therefore, maintain a proactive approach to ensure theirs is always updated and accurate.