Organisational Strategy: A How-To Guide With Examples

An organisational strategy is a detailed plan on how a business allocates resources to best support its internal processes and work towards achieving long-term goals. The strategy is typically adjusted every few years or more frequently to stay in line with company goals.

Strategies like these often include an analysis of where resources might be put to best use, prioritising areas that require the most help or can potentially drive the biggest impact.

While organisational strategies don’t always have to change, public interest and industry standards do change. It’s important for companies to keep those shifting realities in mind when reviewing their organisational strategy. 

Using a well-constructed and intentional roadmap, leadership can make better decisions while keeping in line with company values. 

The main purpose of an organisational strategy is to maximise results from your resources, but its significance goes beyond this simply stated goal. 

Some of the benefits and importance of an organisational strategy include:

An organisational strategy gives your company direction and guidance to effectively work towards its goals. What does success look like for your company, and what action do you need to take to reach success? Without that direction, company-wide directives become more reactionary than strategic and may lead your company off-track.

A plan is your reference guide as you embark on each step to achieve company-wide objectives. When it’s time to make big decisions, refer back to it to make the optimal choice more easily. This built-in infrastructure helps your organisation respond to obstacles down the road in a way that supports company objectives. 

A common goal helps align the work of your company’s departments, so each contributes to organisational progress and success. Lacking a clear objective can cause misunderstandings among your workforce that slow down productivity.

Challenges and changes are par for the course in any workplace. Having a clear path to your business’s ultimate goals can help you adjust processes to course correct or adapt to evolving circumstances. Without an organisational strategy, it’s possible to overcorrect or make adjustments to the wrong component.

There are three types of organisational strategy, each targeted at a specific level of your business and working to accomplish its own strategic goal. Each strategy is designed to further the overall corporate objective. 

A corporate level strategy is a high-level overview of the company’s main goal and the broad strokes of how to achieve them. Top stakeholders formulate it to inform their workforce about upcoming milestones and provide resources they’ll require to meet them. 

This is the level of planning where the current state of the market is most important. If your company’s product has reached the peak of its value, then stakeholders will create a corporate-level objective to find new business opportunities. It’s a great example of the adaptability of your organisation strategy in action. Goal creation processes like SMART goals can help ensure that corporate objectives are clearly defined and achievable.

The business level strategy translates the vision set by the corporate level plan into actionable tasks. Department and team leaders scale down the overall company objective into a step-by-step process specific to their area of responsibility.

For example, suppose the company’s goal is to double revenue in five years. For HR, this may translate into an effort to recruit top-quality talent. A business level strategy would therefore dictate HR’s role in identifying and bringing in the best candidates. For the marketing department, this could involve developing a plan to train top performers in emerging technologies or expanding the best-performing marketing strategies.

A functional level strategy defines the targets workers need to achieve the organisation’s main objective. Each department creates its own, so any outlined milestones best fit its typical roles and responsibilities. For example, the IT department has different tasks and deadlines from the finance department. 

Action items derived from your functional level strategy are usually specified for each department. If the company wants a product to appeal to new demographics, R&D may reimagine the product function while the marketing department researches the most effective ways to attract people in the target demographic.

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Creating an effective organisational structure can be an intensive process, requiring in-depth knowledge of your company to get the best results. 

The essential steps to develop your own include:

The human resources department is often critical for long-term strategies because it oversees a company’s most vital resource: its staff. HR collects information about your workforce and identifies problems that could halt progress towards company objectives. 

Some other benefits they can provide to your organisation strategies include:

• Recruitment. An organisational strategy’s effectiveness often depends on how engaged employees are with the overarching objective. Because that objective often defines core values and corporate culture, the HR department can develop a recruitment strategy that finds candidates who best fit in.

• Job Performance. The HR department often oversees developing training programmes to fill gaps in your employee’s skills, ensuring maximum effectiveness when working towards company goals.

• Change Management. When the company is going through major transitions, HR can act as a point of contact between the employee and leadership. This helps ensure that significant changes go as smoothly as possible. 

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The company sets an organisational goal to increase profits by a specific amount. Department heads use that goal to create strategies that achieve it, such as breaking into new markets or developing new ad campaigns. Finally, employees perform the work needed to follow through on the proposed strategies.

Organisational strategies help guide a company’s internal operations, keeping employees on track while ensuring efficient use of resources. 

A well-developed organisational strategy helps the company avoid costly mistakes by aligning internal operations to one overarching goal. Having one for yourself helps focus your business practices towards specific outcomes. 

Determining where you want your organisation to go in the future can be time-consuming. However, following organisational design principles can give you a comprehensive understanding of your company’s situation to help you improve it.