The organizational structure of any company is like its root as it displays how a company, team, or corporation is set up. As Huawei Technologies is one of the top Chinese multinational technology companies in the world. To understand its setup and working it is important to first understand its organizational structure and its factors and levels. Let us know about the ‘Huawei Organizational Structure’.
Huawei’s Organizational structure works on several factors aimed toward the company vision. Organizational structure not only makes the functioning of the company easier but itself functions in separate ways in a single company towards the same task but expertise in different areas.
To know more about, Huawei’s organizational structure, its importance, and several other factors read the article below.
What is an Organizational Structure?
An organizational structure is a structure or system that explains how Huawei works and how its activities such as – R3 or Rules, Roles, and Responsibilities, team and task setup, and other factors are directed toward achieving goals and missions.
Not only the Huawei structure but every other company’s organizational structure determines –
- information flows,
- each employee’s job affects and benefits the companies,
- chain of command,
- variety of factors for deciding the best business, goals, industry, and so on.
There are two ways by which organizational structure works
- Centralized work around the chain of command and provide leadership to one over other. In a Centralized structure employees have transparent responsibilities and are supervised by their superiors.
- Decentralized structures function without a chain of command, and this structure is usually found in start-ups. In this structure, employees have more agility and adaptability in business and provide a high level of personal agency to each employee and client.
Understanding and Importance of Huawei’s Organizational Structure
In today’s fast-paced era not only start-ups but various corporations and companies struggle to manage and evolve alongside a market, match up to customers’ needs, product technology updates, and so on. However, Huawei not only matched the pace but managed to stay at the top list and the company explains that organizational structure is the key.
Many corporations and organizations use their functional support services such as HR and Finance and work as product-centric business units. However, Huawei uses a “twisted pretzel” structure of a broad business group that uses shared services groups and no support from embedded functional support services.
Along the line as the market paced and technology updated, Huawei has adapted and updated its organizational structure to meet customers’ demands.
The company realized in the early stages that command from headquarters was inflexible and won’t be able to keep up with growing customers, so it adapted to a Country-based structure opening regional offices for connecting with customers and sales.
After opening representative offices or regional offices, customers demanded to customize network, which required combining resources and realizing the potential of product lines, functional units, and distinct countries.
The company opened more than 15 district offices in distinct regions along with launching customer-centric sub-units. The basic motive behind setting up the district office is to support customer solution teams at regional levels. The customer-centric subunit structure was established to partner with customers, manage the risks, and build the future.
despite customer-centric units, there were several other innovational structures such as the Organization of Top talent. In the organization of top talent, all resources were gathered into one resource pool.
Simply put, in this structure, there were no specific units or functions as the only employees or people in this resource pool were top-level and most talented people of the corporations who work swiftly, efficiently, and in a flow.
Huawei’s organizational structure was important, as when customer demands increased and coordination of resources Chinese MNC took several innovative steps to meet the expectations such as: –
- Joint Chiefs of Staff – US military-inspired idea was to deploy its customer service teams in distinct locations at a rapid pace.
- Support services via functional platforms – Huawei realized that multiplying HR, PR, and other teams or business units will help in increasing flexibility.
To take this idea one step ahead company decided to create several major supporting groups and platforms with test and trial functions including –
- Marketing and Sales
- Manufacturing
- Finance
- HR or Human Resource
- Administrative service
- Data Management
- Data Sharing
- PR or Public Relations and so on.
- Middle and Senior Management – According to the Middle and Senior management plan unlike other competitive companies which hire their employees from college graduates and distinct leaders from other companies and industries to motivate them to learn about the company.
However, Huawei changed the whole idea around keeping the concept the same, as the company started to rotate their middle and senior management inside the company to different levels and locations including – the CEO, COO, and others.
In the starting, this idea may look like a problem creator rather than a problem-solver. For low-level jobs and employees, this idea may work as the work, responsibilities, and roles are almost the same, but with employees and leaders to understand and adapt to new teams and jobs, responsibilities every six months seem hard.
However, Huawei believes that the disadvantages are low, and its advantages are more. Some of the leader’s advantages through this idea are as follows –
- Quick-witted,
- Motivating leaders to adapt fast,
- Increase the understanding of distinct teams,
- Providing the company with an unmatched pool of leaders with broad perspectives,
- Breaking any attachment to past work or team and many more.
- Changing culture – Huawei is a broad cultured, future-obsessed, change-obsessed organization. The company was future and change-obsessed to such a degree since its establishment, as Founder Ren Zhengfei fired 1000 employees and later 7000+ employees from their jobs and expected them to apply again in the company based according to their qualifications and performance level in the company time.
The Chinese Multinational also encourages leaders and senior employees to retire at the early age of 45, and before the leader or employees retire company opens vacancies to hire new individuals with fresher minds.
With these many rules and ideas company is still considered broad-minded and cultured as they release an anonymous form where anyone or everyone can complain about policies, terms, and services and even individual leaders and employees. The idea behind this was – to succeed, forget the past, don’t get attached to the present, and aim for the future.
Types of Huawei Organizational structure
According to Huawei, five types of organizational structures are implemented in every other company, business, or industry organizational structure. Types of structures are as follows –
- Functional Structure – The first and most common type of organizational structure is the functional structure commonly known as Bureaucratic organizational structure. In this structure, a corporation divides itself into smaller functioning departments such as –
- Market and Sales
- Operations
- Finances
- HR or Human Resources.
After distribution, the departments become a functional or bureaucratic structure. However, this type of structure is usually seen in small or new companies or start-ups.
- Divisional or Multi-divisional Structure – Multi-Divisional structure or commonly known as (M-Form) is the second most used structure, it is used in large companies with distinct smaller business units.
The companies that use this are leadership based and revolve around products, projects, subsidiaries, and several other factors. Among many companies using this method Johnson & Johnson is one of the biggest with thousands of products and various small business units and lines others are General Electric and so on.
The Divisional structure company structures itself for managing and operating smaller business units efficiently. Also, the main companies act as parent companies or presidents, or smaller business units, and smaller units are divided geographically and according to specialization.
E.g. – General Electric is a type of divisional structure company and it divided its firm into six parts – energy capital, home and business sol, healthcare, aviation, and transportation.
- Circular Structure – Unlike other structures circular structures are hierarchical and they usually take place by placing high-level employees or leaders at the center of the organization and expanding the organization around them with low-level or regular employees such as – interns, part-timers, staff members, and so on.
Many companies by adapting to this structure encourage collaborations, communications, risk management, distribution, and several other factors among distinct levels equally according to the role and responsibilities.
- Team-Based Structure – Team-based structures are quite like divisional and functional organizational structures. As in this organizational structure, an organization is divided or distributed among several smaller teams each team with different roles and responsibilities.
Each team formed contains a leader who is a high-rank employee such as a manager or a head who monitors and supervises the rest of the team containing low-level employees.
Team-based organizational structure is used in both big and small organizations and companies.
- Network Structure – Network organizational structure is a contract-based structure that includes – third-party vendors and contractors to do some roles and responsibilities. Network structure works only for small organizations with distinct geographically dispersed offices around the world.
In this like a team-based structure, there are small teams formed who work independently however, they are not part of the organization, firm, or industry and are not working particularly for the company instead working towards the same goal.
In this model, the company does not monitor or supervise the teams.
- Matrix Structure – In a Matrix structure, unlike others is more complicated and least used, the companies that use this have matrixes employees among high-level and low-level employees.
In this, a matrix employee or an employee working in a matrixed company may not only have a single responsibility but can have two or more roles and responsibilities. For example – a low-level employee such as – a salesperson in a matric structure will have the duty to complete not only the sales task but also the customer service and more.
Except these, there are various other organizational structures such as flat or flatarchy structures, but because of being new or not being used not much is known about them.
Conclusion
By the analysis of the topic Huawei organizational structure 1600 S1, it is concluded that Huawei’s organizational structure consists of distinct benefits, importance, and types of structure.
We also understood that each organizational structure varies on distinct factors and works differently depending on companies functioning and their effects functional platform, the cultural workplace of the company, and so on.
