In today’s fast-paced environment, workforce planning should be an ongoing process. Manually creating organizational charts can be time-consuming, and risks producing work that becomes obsolete at the first sign of change. Discover six ways the right org charting software will help you streamline your approach with charts that can be easily updated in real time.

Org charting software can rapidly give you a snapshot of your entire organizational structure.

With all that information at your fingertips, you can be more proactive, be better informed and make better decisions. A well-presented org chart can provide clarity and guidance to everyone in the business on responsibility, accountability, and exactly who they should be reporting to at any given time and circumstance.

This combination of clarity and timely accuracy sounds great, but there’s a long list of further time savings to uncover.

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How Can Org Charting Software Save Time?

Having a detailed overview of your business has many benefits—you can use it to streamline your processes, better schedule your workloads, and cut down on duplication of effort. This all means saving your business both money and time, but there are other ways in which robust org charting saves you time too.

1. Efficient Creation and Maintenance

Good org charting software allows you to make and update a chart in a matter of minutes. There’s no need to scrap your work when someone leaves or moves around within the business, either. Because data syncs automatically and pulls from multiple sources, it’s easy to keep abreast of new hires, terminations, promotions, lateral moves, changing titles, relocations, and expanded departments. Gone is the need to wade through different files to find the information you need. It’s all right there.

2. Improving Lines of Communication

It’s hard for people to work together if they don’t know each other. This can especially be an issue for larger organizations. With a visual, it’s clear to see where each person fits in within your organization, improving time efficiency. Org charting will highlight opportunities for departments to share information and reveal collaborative opportunities you might have otherwise missed. The synergy you’ll get from this can make your business more dynamic, fast-paced, and innovative.

An org chart also helps people to better understand who to report to. Learning who fits where within the company can increase efficiency because it becomes as easy as simply glancing at a chart to understand exactly who to speak to when faced with a given issue.

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3. Organizational Planning and Restructuring

Org charts are an effective way to understand how resources are currently being used. For example, a chart can include an employee’s responsibilities and upcoming projects. This can help managers assign tasks more effectively based on the current workload.

An overview of everyone’s workloads can also be used to spot any inefficiencies in current processes. Businesses can see which projects teams are working on and whether or not they’ve got the resources and the skills necessary to conduct this work thoroughly. If not, they can easily redistribute their workload to save time.

You can even see if your organization has any choke points. You can see if one manager is managing too many employees or if a single department is taking on too much of the burden of responsibility for certain projects. Org charting allows you to redistribute employees and responsibilities and make your business run more smoothly.

4. Making Onboarding Easier

Starting a new job can be overwhelming and it can seem like an impossible task to navigate the maze of interrelationships that exist in any company. There’s a lot to remember! An org chart can help new starters more quickly get a feel for the rest of the organization and remember who does what. Presenting org charts can help new hires get acquainted with their new co-workers and help them to remember each person’s role and responsibility more easily than they otherwise would—this can cut down on time spent onboarding and help new employees get bedded into their team more quickly.

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5. Identifying and Closing Skills Gaps

Org charting also makes it quicker and easier to identify and close skills gaps. It allows you to visualize where any department or team is lacking in a particular skill and take steps to close this gap.

You can even play around with your org chart to test out new structures in your business. The ability to drag and drop means that you can easily see what a restructure would look like and explore the possibility that you may be able to use your existing talent for any given challenge. Equally, your theoretical restructuring may reveal otherwise unforeseen and undesirable consequences, saving you a lot of time and grief later on.

6. Future-Proofing Your Business

Org charting allows you to run “what if?” scenarios for upcoming events. Will you have resource gaps or gaps in your organizational structure? Strategic planning now will save time and money in the future as, armed with the knowledge that the chart has given you, you can take steps to avoid those problems down the line. You can more easily visualize the economic impact of different situations and more readily determine the optimal structure for your business going forward. Org charting gives you the power to anticipate and quickly adapt to ever-changing business requirements and market conditions.