Building Employee Success: How Home Depot Structured Their Team with Optimal
America's largest home improvement retailer
Home Depot, America's largest home improvement retailer, partnered with Optimal to enhance their organizational structure and team competencies. By leveraging Optimal's card sorting capabilities, Home Depot gained crucial insights about their internal role definitions, management hierarchies, and support team workflows. The result? A more cohesive organizational framework, clearer role definitions, and improved team performance across their corporate structure.
The Challenge: Constructing the Right Team Foundation
Let's face it—the home improvement retail industry is incredibly competitive, and Home Depot knew their organizational structure needed to be rock-solid. They were facing some real hurdles:
- Ambiguity in how different roles and competencies were defined across departments
- Complex management hierarchies potentially causing operational inefficiencies
- Confusion around call center support team workflows and responsibilities
With thousands of employees across their organization, even small improvements in role clarity could yield massive returns. They needed structured data, not guesswork, to guide their organizational decisions.
The Solution: Optimal's Card Sorting Framework Builds Structure
Home Depot turned to Optimal to bring clarity to their organizational blueprint. Here's how they put Optimal's research platform to work:
Competency Clarity: Role-Based Card Sorting
Home Depot conducted targeted card sorting studies to understand how competencies were perceived and categorized across various roles. This wasn't just about job descriptions—it was about understanding the mental models employees had about their roles and responsibilities within the organization.
Management Structure Evaluation: Team Leaders and Managers
Home Depot implemented specialized card sorting studies for team leaders and managers to clarify reporting structures, responsibilities, and decision-making authorities. This approach helped them identify overlapping responsibilities and opportunities to streamline management processes.
Support Team Optimization: Call Center Workflow Mapping
The customer-facing call center teams needed clear processes to handle diverse customer needs efficiently. Home Depot used Optimal's card sorting tools to analyze how support teams categorized different customer inquiries, helping to identify confusing protocols and opportunities to improve response workflows.
Implementation Approach: A Strategic Research Initiative
Home Depot's use of Optimal's card sorting tools reflected a thoughtful, phased approach:
- Initial Discovery Phase: The most intensive use occurred during an early exploration period, when multiple teams were actively mapping out organizational structures
- Targeted Refinement: Following the initial phase, a small number of additional studies were launched to refine specific aspects of the organizational structure
- Specialized Applications: Each of the seven teams involved typically conducted one or two focused studies, with card sorting being the primary research methodology across all teams
- Cyclical Reassessment: A draft card sorting study in recent years suggests an ongoing commitment to periodically reassessing organizational structures as business needs evolve
Results: A More Structured Organization from Foundation to Roof
Home Depot's investment in Optimal's card sorting tools paid off in multiple ways:
- Competency Frameworks Redefined: The role-based card sorting revealed key insights about how employees understood their responsibilities, leading to refined job descriptions that better aligned with operational needs and improved role clarity across departments.
- Management Hierarchies Simplified: The management-focused card sorting allowed Home Depot to create more intuitive reporting structures. The result? More efficient decision-making processes and clearer lines of authority throughout the organization.
- Support Protocols Streamlined: After reorganizing their call center workflows based on card sorting results, Home Depot saw significant improvements in response times and reductions in case escalations.
Conclusion
Home Depot's partnership with Optimal showcases the power of structured, data-driven organizational research. By making competency definition and role clarity a priority, they created an organizational framework that truly empowered their teams.
The home improvement industry may be about helping customers build physical structures, but Home Depot proved that understanding how to build effective organizational structures is just as crucial to success. With Optimal's card sorting tools providing actionable insights, Home Depot positioned themselves to build not just better homes, but better teams as well.
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