Group Senior Organisation Design Specialist

Old Mutual, a prominent financial services group deeply invested in the African continent, is seeking an accomplished Organisation Design Specialist to join their Johannesburg-based team. This role is pivotal in shaping the future of how Old Mutual operates, ensuring that its structures, roles, and processes are optimised to support its strategic objectives and enhance efficiency across the organisation.

About the Role

As a Group Senior Organisation Design Specialist, you will be at the forefront of driving strategic organisational transformation. Your primary focus will be on conducting thorough diagnostic assessments of the current organisational landscape. This involves scrutinising existing structures, layers of management, spans of control, role accountabilities, decision-making rights, and interdepartmental interfaces. By meticulously analysing these elements, you will identify areas of complexity, duplication, and potential inefficiency.

Your expertise will be crucial in translating overarching business strategies, operational requirements, and identified organisational challenges into concrete design requirements. You will be responsible for developing and presenting compelling options for both current and future-state organisational designs, underpinned by robust analysis and a clear rationale for your recommendations. A key aspect of this role is ensuring the consistent application of Group-wide organisational design principles and standards across all your assignments, thereby fostering a cohesive and effective organisational framework.

The scope of this position is broad, encompassing several critical areas of organisational design and management:

• **Organisational Structure and Operating Model Design:** You will design and refine organisational structures, including reporting lines, hierarchical layers, and spans of control. This involves translating operating model decisions into practical structures and defining role requirements. Clarifying accountabilities, decision rights, and cross-functional interdependencies will be a significant part of your work, supporting the creation of appropriate centralised, decentralised, federated, or matrix structures aligned with business needs.
• **Role Design and Job Architecture:** Designing and reviewing individual roles to ensure clarity of purpose, accountability, decision-making authority, and interfaces will be essential. You will apply job architecture principles to standardise, differentiate, and ensure consistency in roles across the organisation, supporting the development of robust job families and career paths. Identifying and recommending simplifications for unnecessary role proliferation and layering will also be a key responsibility.
• **Job Analysis and Evaluation:** You will conduct job analyses and evaluations for new or significantly changed roles. This requires assessing role content, scope, complexity, and decision-making authority to support defensible job evaluation outcomes, adhering to approved group methodologies. Identifying potential grade anomalies and inconsistencies within organisational hierarchies and recommending interventions will be part of this function.
• **Headcount and Position Management:** Incorporating headcount and position management considerations into your design recommendations is vital. You will analyse workforce structures to identify vacancies, duplication, and anomalies, supporting optimisation efforts. Your work will ensure that organisational design decisions logically precede structural changes and recruitment, and you will partner with Human Capital to strengthen position management disciplines and data integrity.
• **Advisory and Stakeholder Management:** You will serve as a senior advisor on organisational design matters to Human Capital and business stakeholders. Facilitating workshops with senior leaders, constructively challenging organisational assumptions with evidence and insights, and presenting complex analyses in a clear, decision-oriented manner are core functions. Building stakeholder alignment while upholding design governance and standards, and partnering across various Group Human Capital disciplines, will be crucial for success.
• **Practice Development:** Contributing to the continuous improvement of organisational design methodologies, tools, and standards will be expected. Staying abreast of emerging practices in organisational design, operating models, and the future of work is important. You will also identify opportunities to digitise design processes and provide technical guidance and coaching to colleagues.

What They're Looking For

To excel in this senior role, candidates should possess a strong academic foundation, ideally an NQF Level 7 qualification such as a Degree, Advanced Diploma, or Postgraduate Certificate. Crucially, a minimum of 7 to 10 years of dedicated experience in organisational design is required. This experience should demonstrate a deep understanding of organisational diagnostics, structure and operating model design, role design, and job architecture principles. Candidates should be adept at stakeholder management, possess excellent analytical and problem-solving skills, and be capable of translating complex business needs into practical organisational solutions. A strong understanding of the South African labour market and regulatory environment would be advantageous.

Qualifications, Skills and Experience:

• NQF Level 7 - Degree, Advance Diploma or Postgraduate Certificate or equivalent
• 7-10 years’ experience in Organisational Design or Organisational Effectiveness
• Workday HRIS platform knowledge and experience advantageous
• Effective communication and stakeholder engagement
• Effective enablement of HR technologies

 

The Group Senior Organizational Design Specialists provide specialist organizational design expertise to support the design and evolution of effective, efficient and future fit organizations across the Group.

The role independently leads and supports complex organizational design assignments, applying organization diagnostics design principles, workforce insights and business contexts to develop practical organization and role design solutions. This includes organization structure and operating model design, role and job architecture, organization diagnostics, position and headcount management, and implementation planning.Working in partnership with business and Human Capital stakeholders, the role translates business strategy and operating requirements into clear organizational choices and provides evidence-based recommendations that improve accountability, organizational effectiveness, agility and sustainable workforce outcomes.

Skills

Adaptability, Adaptive Thinking, Business Requirements Analysis, Change Management, Current State Assessment, Customer-Focused, Data Compilation, Developing Creative Solutions, Evaluating Information, Executing Plans, Futures Thinking, Managing Stakeholder Expectations, Organizational Design, Probing Questions, Project Organization

Competencies

Collaborates

Courage

Cultivates Innovation

Customer Focus

Decision Quality

Drives Engagement

Drives Results

Ensures Accountability

Education

NQF Level 7 - Degree, Advance Diploma or Postgraduate Certificate or equivalent

Closing Date

19 August 2026 , 23:59

The appointment will be made from the designated group in line with the Employment Equity Plan of Old Mutual South Africa and the specific business unit in question.

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