Advantages and Disadvantages of Organizational Charts Structures

Although extremely useful for many purposes organizational charts are not for everybody. In our previous articles we’ve covered types of org charts and best practices to follow when creating org charts. Now lets look at advantages and disadvantages of organizational charts so you can make an informed decision to whether to have one or not.

Advantages of Organizational Charts

Lets get started by exploring the benefits of organizational charts.

• Shows clear reporting structure – employees know who to report to, who to contact when there is an issue that needs resolving or a question that needs to be answered. This is especially important in large organizations where there are many departments. Someone else from another department can quickly get in touch with the relevant person of another department.
• Helps new employees – enables them to get to know the people he or she is working with even before meeting them, thus helping them to connect much more easily.
• Helps to manage workload – A well managed organizational chart helps to visualize the workload of individuals. This is especially useful to manage the workload of managers because you can clearly see how many people they are managing and in some cases how many departments are under them.
• Makes planning easier – Because you can visualize the structure it helps in future plans. You can allocate resources better, quickly find competencies of individuals and much more.

Disadvantages of Organizational Charts

Depending on the situation organizational charts can be a disadvantage as well. So lets take a look at some disadvantages.

• Not showing informal channels – This is one of the biggest disadvantages of organizational charts. Not all communication channels are formal and well defined and org charts fail to capture them. Although org charts are not meant to capture them, informal channels are vital in any organization or business so failing to capture them might hinder communication.
• A maintenance headache – An outdated organizational chart is almost worthless. But keeping it up to date is very hard, specially for large organizations. Employees might change departments, leave the company, assigned a new role etc. in a short period of time. Since it is hard to keep track of these changes properly maintaining an org chart will be time consuming.

Above I have listed down advantages and disadvantages of org charts. I feel the advantages outweigh the disadvantages but that might depend on your organization. Also you can get started right away with our ready to use organizational chart templates.

What do you think about organizational charts? You think they are beneficial or a waste of time? Do let us know in the comments. If you think they’re beneficial you can easily draw one using our org chart software.