You have two options:
Line manager hierarchy
Organogram
What do these terms mean?
Line manager hierarchy:
In a line manager hierarchy, it's like having a ladder in the workplace or a family tree. Each rung is a level of management. Managers directly oversee the employees in their team. It is a complete visual representation of the entire organisation, detailing the reporting line link from top management to entry-level employees. The organisation structure is built up from the lowest level up, by reflecting who reports into who, ultimately ending up with the top of the tree, the CEO.
An Organogram
An organogram, also known as an organisational chart or org chart, shows the relationships and relative ranks of its parts and positions/jobs. In other words, it is designed around the functions a business performs (e.g., sales, marketing, finance, engineering, etc.).
Highlighting the differences:
They do sound similar but there are some key differences:
Organogram | Line Manager Hierarchy | |
How is it designed? | Designed around the functions a business performs (e.g., sales, marketing, finance, engineering, etc.). | Built around people and titles. |
What does it define and represent? | Defines the purpose, accountabilities, and key performance indicators (KPIs) for each business function and role. | Shows each person's job name and who they report to. |
When does it update/change? | Once correctly defined, an organogram infrequently updates — for example, when there’s a change in strategy like a new product initiative. | The line manager hierarchy needs to be updated frequently as people come and go. It’s out of date almost the minute it’s created. |
What do you need to consider if choosing a Line Manager Hierarchy?
Data Quality
Our platform uses employee and line manager IDs to create a tree structure, requiring unique IDs for each employee, including vacancies or potentially line managers who may sit outside the organisation (e.g. contractors).
The hierarchy must be clear, with one direct line manager per person and the CEO at the top. There can be no matrix relationships. We show data for direct and indirect reports. Trends are shown company-wide on our Dashboard, rather than on a like-for-like basis of manager names.
Data quality is crucial, and broken managerial links are not accommodated, nor are accidental “circular references” No “dotted” lines can be represented in a line manager hierarchy, there can only be one line manager for each person.
The Line Manager hierarchy is quite unforgiving: your data needs to be perfect before going live and it is complicated to move around once live.
People Insight’s strong recommendation is to only use a line manager hierarchy where your data quality is excellent and your question set is majority focused on line manager related questions.
On balance
People Insight’s strong recommendation is to use an organogram. Here are some tips Organogram survey tips You can set up each of the flat filters to become a logical organogram, giving lots of flexibility.
With that flexibility, it will be worth doing some logical checks:
Lowest level shouldn’t contain all/majority groups below cut off
Highest level (Level 1) should represent each person in the Exec Team (bit of sleuthing on google)
When using organogram, try not to use same name under different parts (e.g. “Sales” or “Finance” under each BU or if this does happen, create a unique name each time by adding in a pre- or suffix which includes the BU name for example