Over the past decade, HR has increasingly been boxed into culture, engagement, and talent-related work. Meanwhile, organisational design — figuring out how a company should actually be structured — moved over to strategy teams, consultants, and transformation offices. That was a mistake. The most forward-thinking HR leaders over the next decade are going to reclaim organisational design as a core part of their job, because eventually, almost every business problem becomes a people-and-structure problem.
Deloitte’s 2024 Global Human Capital Trends report, which surveyed 14,000 business and HR leaders across 95 countries, found that 31% of C-suite executives said changing how their organisation approaches HR is one of the three hardest challenges they’re currently facing. And honestly, that difficulty says a lot — HR struggles with structural change precisely because it’s spent the last decade building expertise everywhere except there.
Why HR Lost Its Seat at the Table
This shift didn’t happen by accident. Boards and CEOs rewarded HR for things like engagement scores, retention numbers, and culture metrics — outcomes that were easy to measure and directly tied to HR’s work. Organisational design, on the other hand, was harder — more politically tricky, more structurally complex — so it was easier to just hand off to someone else. That’s exactly where consulting firms and transformation offices stepped in, redrawing reporting lines and restructuring entire divisions, without ever really being accountable for whether the people inside those new structures could actually deliver results.
But organisational design is really a people and capability question at its core. How a company assigns accountability, connects decisions to actual execution, and distributes authority across teams and regions directly determines whether the talent inside that structure can actually do their jobs well. Research from i4cp (the Institute for Corporate Productivity) found no real connection between a company’s structure alone and its market performance — but that finding actually strengthens the case for HR’s involvement, not weakens it. Structure alone doesn’t drive results — it only works when the right people are placed within it.
What Actually Needs to Change
CHROs who want to take back ownership of organisational design need to build up skills their teams often don’t currently have. Things like workforce planning, capability mapping, and structural analysis need to become just as core to HR as recruiting or employee relations already are. While a consulting firm typically treats structure as a purely technical design problem, HR’s real value is in judging whether the people inside that structure can actually deliver — something no outside team can really assess on its own.
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Every major business challenge — entering a new market, integrating an acquisition, responding to new competition — eventually comes down to structure and people. HR shouldn’t just be handed a decision that’s already been made elsewhere to execute. It should have a real seat at the table from the very beginning, helping shape that decision directly.
FAQs:
Q1: Why did HR lose ownership of organisational design?
HR was rewarded for measurable outcomes like engagement and retention, so complex structural work shifted to consultants instead.
Q2: Why should HR be involved in organisational design decisions?
Structure alone doesn’t drive results. HR can judge whether the people inside a new structure can actually deliver on it.
Q3: How many executives find changing HR’s role challenging?
31% of C-suite executives say changing how their organisation approaches HR is among their three hardest current challenges.
Q4: What skills do HR teams need to reclaim organisational design?
HR teams need stronger capabilities in workforce planning, capability mapping, and structural analysis, beyond traditional HR work.
