NexGen Advisors, a global business restructuring and transformation firm, collaborated with American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC), a premier benchmarking organization, to launch the first-ever cross-industry Global Organization Efficiency Survey (GOES). The result of GOES is a comprehensive white paper that outlines key benchmarks for Organizational Efficiency.

NexGen and APQC worked with 31 Fortune 1000 companies operating across 113 countries, with more than $430 billion in total revenue, to benchmark Spans of Control, Management Layers and other important structural benchmarks.

The Survey revealed that over the past 18 months, most companies (76%) had already performed, or were in the process of performing, headcount reductions to increase efficiency, and many had hired consultants to help re-design their organizations to drive cost out and ramp-up productivity.

Yet, the data analysis of Spans of Control, defined as the number of direct reports a manager has, and Reporting Layers, the number of layers as defined by the solid line reporting structure, indicates that 52% of the participating organizations are highly inefficient or "unhealthy." This factor is reinforced in the qualitative section of the survey, which shows that only 52% of respondents believe their organizations are "well organized." Despite taking initial measures to improve current processes and structures, most companies still see an ample need for better organizational efficiency, higher productivity and more cost savings.

With the pressure companies continue to face as a result of the economic downturn, the importance of having a properly structured organization is paramount to a company's success and can be a competitive advantage. In the white paper, we discuss the use of an Organizational Efficiency (OE) Index to determine the health of an organization. The OE Index is a metric that measures the efficiency of your organization structure based on rules, weightings and data. 52% of the survey participants had an OE Index below 55%, which is considered "fair" to "average", and only three participants were in the 80% range, or "above average," while four companies fell below 40%, which is considered "poor."

Carla Zilka, Founder and Principal Advisor of NexGen Advisors said: "In order to truly understand the efficiency of an organization structure and identify areas for improvement, we benchmark each function separately, by layer. Providing a company with blanket benchmarks irrespective of the function and layer is like prescribing one form of medicine to a patient with aliments in different parts of the body - it doesn't work. One size does not fit all. This survey demonstrates this point and provides companies with invaluable benchmarks that were not available until now."