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How A Role Study Is Used In Organisational Design

How A Role Study Is Used In Organisational Design

16th January 2025

What is a role study? What is organisational design? And precisely what do we do, here at ReThink? 

Role study

What is role study?

A role study is where a given role is shadowed for either a ‘Day in a life’ shift, or to get a bigger picture with a ‘Week in a life’ – with a week typically being five working days.

What roles can it be used for?

It can be particularly useful for:

  • Specialist and professional roles, such as pharmacists and service-led roles
  • Leadership roles, such as store managers, team leaders, supervisors and deputies
  • Field leadership roles, such as area managers and other support roles
  • Roles in an office environment, such as for data entry clerks, service providers, call centres and more

What is it used for?

A role study identifies four things:

  1. How time is spent – When conducting an activity study, analysts are looking for specific tasks. A role study is different because analysts capture everything a specific role does. This highlights how time is spent, including measuring time on their core tasks and on the things that get in the way of them adding value for your business. We measure how much interruption there is, such as time taken up by phone calls, emails, team chats and other messaging platforms or admin
  2. The difference between roles – When reviewing multiple roles (such as a store manager and an assistant manager, or an area manager and an area coordinator role) analysts can look at those two roles and see how different or alike they are, and put a number on the amount of time it takes them to do the same task. If you have a separate role in a structure, it should be differentiated with a unique purpose. If supervisors and assistant managers carry out the same task for most of the time, are both roles needed?
  3. The consistency between roles – If the same role is being carried out in multiple places, how consistent is the role? For example, if it is a well-defined role, it should be carried out consistently, whether it’s done in the north or the south
  4. The cost implications – If you have leadership roles spending significant time filling shelves, are you getting the right work done at the right cost? With challenges such as the increase in National Insurance and National Living Wage, this is something that can be reviewed and balanced

Organisational design

What is organisational design?

Organisational design is deciding what the structure should be within an organisation. For instance, how many departments should you have? How many layers should be within that department? This can be for leadership roles, but also for head office. So do you have a finance department, or do you combine it with other functions? Do you have a separate properties department? Is HR separate? It is the flow from CEO/managing director – what are all the things that sit under them? Where do they sit? So the organograms of:

  • The Finance Admin reports into…
  • The Finance Supervisor, who reports into…
  • The Finance Manager, who reports into…
  • The Finance Director, who reports into…
  • The CEO…etc

It’s designing the structure of the organisation that informs the job titles, role specifications, and where they fit in the organisation, together with their accompanying job descriptions.

It can be a way of aligning to your customer, or carving out cost – because every layer has a cost.

How can ReThink help with organisational design?

Our role studies provide the data that is the foundation of robust decision-making. It means you can make informed decisions rather than relying on a gut feeling to try and alleviate costs. An extra perspective comes from our role study benchmarking database, which is unique and particularly useful for obtaining insight into how your roles stack up versus peers.

Our role studies help businesses understand what their people are currently doing. We can also revisit after changes have been introduced. Changing how people work is a difficult thing to do, so we can measure if the change has happened as desired. Are roles doing what they’re supposed to be? Have the interruptions and blockages you planned to remove been eliminated?

Our service has been carried out in various continents around the world, and across various roles. 

Discover how your specific roles are spending their time with this powerful work study. Contact our team today.