In our opinion, there is a critical fourth element, and possibly the most important one: “It should always stay up-to-date” It is readily accessible by anyone at any time.It provides clarity on who reports to whom.There are three key elements to creating a good org chart, says an in-depth blog published on. Organizational charts either broadly depict an enterprise company-wide or drill down to a specific department or unit.” “An organizational chart is a diagram that visually conveys a company's internal structure by detailing the roles, responsibilities, and relationships between individuals within an entity. The following definition of an organisational chart is from Investopedia:

Keeping all this research in mind, and using our own experience in user experience design, we decided to review a few organisational chart softwares and tools that offer organisational charts as a functionality (such as Lattice, which is a performance management tool that has an inbuilt organisational chart).īut before we get to that, we want to talk, very briefly, about organisational charts and their key elements. It also showed that ladder-shaped hierarchies undermined social relationships and group performance as compared to pyramid-shaped hierarchies. The study showed that businesses that display organisational hierarchies in the form of a ladder rather than pyramids or triangles experienced worse relationships within internal groups. The most common mental representations of hierarchy shapes are ladders and pyramids. Their different shapes and forms influence people’s perceptions of them.Ī research article that Greer co-authored in 2019 proposes and empirically demonstrates that people’s “mental representations of the shape hierarchy takes affects its consequences”. Management professor Lindred Greer posits that her research has shown that it’s not hierarchies that are problematic – but the way they make people feel. In keeping with our interest in data visualisation, we want to talk about the importance of visualising organisational charts the right way in this article. We believe that data must be communicated in such a way that all of us (not just the experts) can understand it effortlessly, spot patterns, trends and outliers. If you are a user of MuchSkills you’ll know that data visualisation is at the core of our philosophy.įor the uninitiated, MuchSkills is a skills visualisation tool for teams and organisations that visualises skills data in an attractive, easily accessible and comprehensible interface.

Modern organizational chart design