Radio’s Digital Transformation BLOG – Part 4: Creating Your Digital Organizational Structure

In our third post in this series, we looked at the workflow and processes that will help your sales team achieve maximum success with a digital advertising platform. Here, we discuss the steps required to build a digital organizational structure that leverages the skills needed for digital growth.

As your broadcast and digital workflows start to coalesce, the next phase is to align digital skills with current roles and to identify skills missing in your organization. Augmenting the skill sets of current employees and refining responsibilities is the key to early success, while bringing in new talent over time will fill digital expertise gaps. In this manner, the organizational structure will evolve to a more collaborative environment that will counteract departmental silos and will position your team for future change initiatives.

Here are the steps to take as you begin to define org charts and job descriptions:

1. Assign Digital Responsibilities

It is important to align digital responsibilities with roles in the current org chart that require similar skills. Giving employees a clear understanding of their digital roles will direct training and development, as well as increase the adoption of digital sales within your organization. In cases where digital skills can tie directly to a role in your current organization, you may consider changing job titles as employees (and their job scope) evolve.

2. Integrate Digital Responsibilities into Current Roles

If you set up your digital business but delegate the responsibilities to only a few, they may end up inadvertently competing with sales efforts instead of enhancing them. Therefore, for the greatest likelihood of transformational success, digital responsibilities should be added to key roles across all departments. This approach leans on established relationships with employees and advertisers, while elevating digital knowledge for the entire team and giving employees opportunities to learn new skills and grow professionally.

3. Reimagine Sales Expectations

The first milestone in this step is to place the responsibility of selling digital on the entire sales team and to train them as a group, which enables them to grow their expertise together and focus on delivering digital results. The next milestone is to identify and leverage the account executives and managers who have the greatest capacity to excel with digital — about 15% of account staffers in typical sales teams. Finally, it is essential to understand how the skills needed to capture traditional radio transactions differ from those needed for a combination of traditional and digital advertising. Once digital revenue becomes an established, meaningful part of the business, you can then realize efficiencies around teams structured by strength and customer type, rather than traditional versus digital skillsets.

4. Hire Digital Expertise

As digital revenue grows, you will want to consider bringing in new hires with strong digital experience. Source people with the talent and expertise needed to manage a digital program. It is also critical to define the roles and expectations of these new positions clearly and to make sure new hires are integrated and welcomed easily into the team. One tip is to hire two digital roles at the same time, while will help prevent isolation of the new employees and will foster their confidence in sharing digital ideas with the rest of the team. (Our free Digital Transformation Playbook shares examples of new hires with digital expertise together with sample job descriptions.)

5. Revise Organizational Charts

With new roles and responsibilities integrated into the organization, revising the organizational structure will be necessary for maximizing digital skills and talent. The structure will evolve over time with increased digital growth and investment; therefore, it is useful to think of the org chart in beginning, middle and complete phases. (In our free Digital Transformation Playbook, we break those phases down in detail and provide example org charts for each.)