industry & policy
Reorganising?
5 tips on how
to get it right
Government reforms in aged
care and the NDIS mean
many for-purpose service
providers must merge to create
significant scale, or restructure
to become customer‑centred
organisations.
By Bruce Mullan
F
or many service providers, there comes a time when
it’s essential to reorganise the business. The external
environment has significantly changed, with a 40 per cent
rise in new service provider entrants, a squeeze on operating
margins and a changing customer mindset. Thus the impact
of consumer choice is driving mergers or major business
transformations, such as becoming customer-centric or digital
transformation. Many smaller providers may be in crisis and will
no doubt need to reorganise to survive, as their competitors
have ramped up and they need to change to keep up.
Reorganising to be more customer-centric means aligning your
organisational functions to your customer, such as consolidating
common service delivery functions to provide a single holistic
view irrespective of how those services are being funded. For
some providers with diverse service offerings, this means merging
teams managing in-home disability support and in-home aged
care services into one customer-focused operating unit. Similarly,
there is a growing trend of divesting service programs that either
don’t have sufficient scale or are not your core business.
It’s important to accept that in most cases change is necessary
and inevitable. However, that doesn’t mean you can just launch
into a huge reorganisation. When organisational change isn’t
managed effectively, it can have disastrous effects and possibly
damage your reputation and brand name. Some of the top
reasons reorganisations fail are:
14 agedcareinsite.com.au
• Internally, no-one is clear on the ‘why’. Why exactly is the
reorganising happening? Often leaders and employees rebel or
resist in the absence of clarity of vision.
• Too much focus is placed on positions in the org chart, and
not enough on the really important elements: the right people,
integrated processes and a healthy culture.
• The change effort isn’t sustained – leaders sometimes
prematurely stop at some time before the reorganisation is
fully embedded or complete.
• The importance of the process of change implementation
has been underestimated. That is, the success of the change
process is probably more important than the new structure.
Now we’ve looked at what to avoid, what can you do to help
success? Below are five tips to keep in mind when deciding
whether to reorganise and how to implement the change.
1
Why reorganise?
You must first determine the return on investment and identify
the benefits of reorganising. This will help assure your team as
you go through the reorganisation that there’s good reason for it.
Determine the real reasons you need to invest time, money and
effort to go through the process. Are you cost cutting and/or
trying to increase revenues? How long will this take before you’re
settled into the new state? What’s the value of lost opportunities
of going through a disruptive process? All of these can be
measured in time or dollars to have a clear understanding of why
it’s important to move in the new direction.
2
What to reorganise
Before you dive in and start moving boxes on an org chart,
identify what you’re good at and where your weaknesses lie.
Diagnose your business and understand it first in those terms.
Engage widely. Take your people on the journey. Listen intently.
You might restructure the wrong part of the business and
thus damage your brand or revenue streams (i.e. what you do
well) if you don’t listen hard enough. Effective diagnosis will