As organisations develop and grow the needs of members of staff necessarily change over time. If you work in an office where there were originally a few teams who generally knew one another, what their role was and how to approach them the structure needs to change as the company expands. The informal, close networks of a small band of employees will simply be insufficient and generally unsuitable for a larger organisation.
However, employees will often be resistant to change, they have their own working methods which they are comfortable with even if they are not very well fitted to the position they now inhabit within the company today. If you find that time is being lost because you’re confronted with the attitude of “That’s not the way we do things here” when what you’re proposing is essentially an industry standard or your finding resistance to the introduction of new tools and software it could very well be time to review your matrix organization.
Needs of the Market
Once you begin to handle matrix management, inspecting how the organization can be more efficient and flexible to the needs of the market and the company itself you’ll begin to realize that there could be a single operational change which could be implemented wholesale, or a number of smaller changes that will have very little impact in people’s day to day role fulfilment. These small changes, when put together will form a slim lining and alignment of processes which can save time, money or increase productivity.
Intercultural training, that is, skills in understanding how different working cultures work can become especially important when your company expands to become an international concern. Cultural and language differences mean that overseas colleagues will have different methods and expectations which, while being valuable as local knowledge, can hinder performance when one group has a different outlook to another. Understanding these variance and how you are able to either embrace or overcome them will mean the difference between your overseas arm flourishing or ultimately becoming moribund.