How corporate hierarchies have dissolved during the pandemic

One of the more unexpected side effects of the pandemic has been that it has steamrollered organisational hierarchies. Many businesses have emerged from the Covid crisis much flatter – culturally, at least – because of their enforced adoption of remote working.

Their retreat from HQ has removed several of the physical symbols of seniority – the CEO’s well-appointed corner office, for instance. In the era of online collaboration software such as Teams and Zoom, the person leading the meeting no longer sits at the head of the table.

Meanwhile, many firms, particularly those whose sales revenues have been decimated by Covid, have sought to adopt a so-called revenue operations (RevOps) structure. In this set-up, the traditional silos of sales, marketing and customer success are combined, either under a new overall head of RevOps or a revenue board making the leaders of those three teams cooperate more closely. They will share technology, data and, crucially, targets.