How To Create An Organizational Chart For Your Business
What is an organizational chart? An organizational chart provides a way for businesses to present their organizational hierarchy in an easy-to-understand and logical layout. This helps employees understand who they can go to when they need something and how the organization is structured. When a company is just starting out, organizational charts can be used to show potential investors the different roles in the company and how people work together.
After determining what organizational structure your company needs, it’s time for the hard part: making the organizational chart itself. Using Venngage, an organizational chart maker, you can browse through a library of templates.
We’ve listed down a few steps to create an organization chart in this article, so keep on reading!
Step 1: Start by drawing the organizational structure you have chosen.
In many business organizational charts, rectangles represent people or departments in your business that arranged in a particular way, such as horizontally or vertically. It is crucial that you note how each rectangle in your organizational chart is related to the other. For example, it might help to show a relationship by drawing a line between them to make it easier for someone else to understand.
Make sure you label your organizational chart clearly and describe what each rectangle represents. You can do this by writing down the name of the department or person inside the rectangle; or even drawing an icon next to each one so that it’s more apparent what their position is.
Step 2: Write down all the job titles within your organizational chart.
After you’ve finished drawing out the organizational structure; start listing down all the different job titles in your business so that others can easily see who does what. If there are too many to fit in one organizational chart, don’t worry; – feel free to make more organizational charts for each department rather than trying to squeeze everything into one chart. The chart should also include the relationships or interactions between department members.
For example, if an employee of Department A reports directly to an employee of Department B; write “reports directly” underneath their name and draw a line from Department A to Department B to show this.
Here’s a template for creating a business organizational chart containing their job titles:
Step 3: Make sure your organizational chart is clear and easy to understand.
Once you’ve got all of the organizational titles written down; make sure it’s easy for people to understand what your organizational chart is trying to communicate; – whether it be through color or the use of images. Using colors that represent different departments can help viewers quickly distinguish one department from another.
On the other hand, using images that represent the departments is a great way to create a chart without any text at all. Check out this template for a futuristic font, subtle colors, and images you can customize:
Just remember that if you’re making an organizational chart template with shapes instead of text; try not to crowd the page too much or it might become difficult for others to understand where everything goes on the organizational hierarchy.
Step 4: Make sure it meets your organizational needs.
Organizational charts don’t always have to complicated or confusing; – they can also used as a way of organizing information in an orderly fashion. For example, organizational charts are often used by schools to present how students are grouped based on their abilities and skills. This organizational chart is more simple than the others because there isn’t much separating each group from another; but you can still tell which group is more skilled than another just by looking at which shape is bigger.
While organizational charts for businesses usually have several colors representing different departments and job titles; organizational charts that are for academic purposes will usually have fewer colors representing specific groups or classes of students. If you’re making an organizational chart for academic purposes, then make sure that group differences are obvious. Nevertheless, you should not overcrowd your Powerpoint organizational chart so people find it difficult to read.
Step 5: Make sure it is accurate.
Even though business organizational charts are supposed to be a type of visualization tool; they can also be useful when trying to keep track of hierarchical relationships between different departments or employees in your company. Organizational charts, however, aren’t always correct and you might find yourself making changes to them later on down the line. If this happens, try not to worry too much – just go back into your chart with another color or image and update what needs updating so that everything else lines up with what’s current.
For example, if somebody resigns from their job and you need to update their position on the organizational chart, simply replace their name with a rectangle and write “resigned” somewhere near it to show that somebody’s no longer working at your company. Just make sure not to forget to change around other parts of the chart as well; such as who reports to this person or who they report to – otherwise; the organizational hierarchy might become confusing for others.
Organizational charts aren’t always the easiest thing to create; but hopefully, this guide has given you an idea of how organizational charts are put together. If you’d like to see organizational chart examples that use shapes instead of text, please visit Venngage today!