The Great Restructuring of 2022: A Primer on Business Operations

Business Silos Will Be Destroyed Forever…

Before the pandemic, the last organizational change within the business structure came about 15 years ago with the addition of a team that would oversee in-house digital marketing efforts. Along with this Digital Marketing team came a new challenge in how to pay and manage these new team members.

At the time, businesses viewed the job of digital marketing as something more than a fad but more akin to being a “necessary evil” business activity. Thus, their Digital Marketing teams became a highly fractured, generalized cost-center for their organization - where they were not quite responsible for generating revenue but were also doing activities and services that were not quite able to be billed to their customers.

Had businesses realized that in less than 20 years, all sales would have been touched by the digital world, then this department would not have been seen as an expense but rather as something that was responsible for generating revenue, and thus would have been more closely aligned with the sales departmental structure.

This is just a single example of how the traditional way of aligning your organization under a departmental structure led to implementing policies that did would not hold up under the digital “New Normal.”

Digital Changes, Real-World Implications

Now, if we look at how the business will be structured in 2022 and beyond, let’s assume that the rapid digital adoption that was necessitated along with the 2020 pandemic led to new policies and ways to operate a business.

The next big challenge will come from these internal changes being implemented in a real-world setting when the roles and connections between sales, marketing, product, and finance have become blurred in the digital world to such a degree that middle management cannot possibly manage their team members, their deliverables, their clients, and the overall direction of their departments period.

Naturally, the only way to compensate for this loose departmental structure will be to flatten the organization.

How Will This Look In A Real-World Setting?

In a middle-management-free organization, Data Operations Specialists will take over the supervision of their teams. Once these specialists manage their various data sources, the company will need to group employees based on their team’s shared responsibilities.

Think, one team is responsible for “generating qualified leads for an organization,” and another is responsible for “aligning the product features to the demands of the market.”

The first team would probably be composed of new business salespeople, marketing leadership, SEO specialists, Content-based writers, and people tasked with tracking how marketing generates leads and ties the data together to show a connection between marketing and sales efforts.

On the second team, you will have product managers, Account Management Leadership, the CS/CX Team Leadership, product marketers, copywriters, and even the software engineering team. Clearly, you can see how businesses in 2022 and beyond will need to evolve to become results-oriented, leaving the need for the traditional business silos to become unnecessary. Hence,

“The Great Restructuring” will inevitably change how businesses are operated in 2022 and in the future.