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A new report ‘Agile Ways of Working: The Great Leadership Disconnect’ from digital consultancy, Red Badger, has found that over nine out of 10 (94 per cent) senior decision makers believe project efficiency would significantly increase if enterprises simply re-arranged their office seating plans to promote cross-departmental collaboration between team members.
• Over nine in 10 (94 per cent) senior decision makers in UK companies believe project efficiency could increase significantly if they simply re-arranged their office seating plans to promote cross-departmental collaboration between team members
• Yet more than three in five (64 per cent) of the same respondents say their office can be best described as being arranged by departments
• The median length of time before any organisational structure change is expected to take place is almost three years
Despite these views, just under two thirds (64 per cent) of the 751 senior executives surveyed indicated that their offices are still structured on a traditional departmental basis.
Not only do these senior decision makers believe in the promotion of collaboration, but four out of five (81 per cent) digital leaders in organisations who were additionally surveyed, strongly believed that an inflexible office layout actively led to delays in launching a product or service into the market or to customers. “Waterfall” ways of working (62 per cent) and teams working on multiple projects at once (51 per cent) were also among the most cited reason for delays in the past.
To further demonstrate this point, those whose offices are arranged by departments are more likely to strongly agree that the current lack of flexibility in the office layout leads to delays in getting projects out of the door, than those whose offices are arranged in project teams (33 per cent vs 17 per cent).
However, despite this, the median length of time before organisational changes are expected to take place is a substantial two years and eight months from now.
With these organizational structure changes predicted not to take place for almost three years, the difference in opinion between digital leaders and senior decision makers are interesting to note:
• Some 44 per cent of general business leaders who did not expect to make organisational changes in the foreseeable future attributed their reluctance to ‘a lack of skilled workers’ and just over a third (35 per cent) were concerned that this shift would be too difficult to implement [See 2a of the report for more]
• A lack of suitable employee skills and willingness among teams were much less significant barriers for digital leaders. Instead, the number one perceived obstacle of the digital leaders was a lack of senior management buy-in (42 per cent), followed by waterfall ways of working (39 per cent) and thirdly, a lack of flexibility in seating arrangements (38 per cent) [See 2b of the report for more]
Cain Ullah, Founder and CEO of Red Badger says “Departmental silos, and arranging offices in this way, feel like a hangover from a time when industrialised workers needed to be closely supervised to ensure that they completed tasks efficiently. In today’s economy, where skilled workers have more autonomy, these seating plans are outdated and as our research shows, are actually slowing organisations down.
“This puts organisations at significant risk; they are only as fast as their slowest moving department. With more and more companies looking to disrupt the larger organisations, transformation is needed much sooner than in three years’ time.”
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