We need to restructure our administrative and accounting departments to prepare for an eventual sale, but we do not want to lay off our long-time staff. We want to transition them into client onboarding and account success roles to increase our retention metrics, but they are comfortable in their current transactional tasks and are pushing back. How do we restructure these departments without a layoff while ensuring our people actually transition successfully?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Restructuring your organization without laying off loyal employees is a noble goal, but it only works if those employees can transition into seats they fully GWC™. You cannot simply move names around on the Accountability Chart to avoid hard conversations.

Start by designing the ideal administrative and customer success structure for your three-year exit plan. Do this with blank boxes, focusing only on the seats and the five core roles each seat requires. Do not look at your employee list while doing this.

Once the structure is locked, map your existing people to the new seats using the GWC™ tool. Have open, honest discussions with each team member. Explain that their current transactional seats are shrinking because the business must evolve to scale. Show them the new customer success seats and explain the five core roles.

Ask them directly if they get, want, and have the capacity for these new relationship-focused roles. Some will embrace the challenge and thrive. However, you must be prepared for the reality that some administrative staff may not want or have the capacity for client-facing work.

If a team member does not pass GWC™ for the new seat, you cannot force them into it. Doing so will lead to poor client retention and internal frustration. In those cases, you must make the difficult right-person-right-seat call, helping them transition out of the company gracefully.