An organizational chart, or “org chart” for short, is like an X-ray of your company or group. It shows the basic structure of how departments or teams work together, and—importantly—it provides a quick view of who reports to whom and how work gets done.
Perhaps your team just formed, or your company is growing fast and the previous chart (or charts) are out of date. If you’re ready to build an org chart, you can create a customized, colorful chart in just a few minutes in Airtable. It’s also easy to keep your Airtable org chart up to date and connect it to other internal systems, like an employee directory or a company goal tracker.
Here, Dana from Airtable’s content team walks you through each step of building an org chart.
To get started, use Airtable’s template for creating an organizational chart, or import a spreadsheet or other source of employee data. If you’re starting from scratch, your base should include new records and fields with info like an employee’s:
- Name
- Role
- Department
- Supervisor
- Location
- Brief bio
- Headshot
One of the most critical functions of an org chart is to show who reports to whom. To accomplish this in Airtable, you’ll need to create a linked record in your base, reflecting the relationship between two or more employees.
Once you’ve input that information, start designing the org chart in Airtable’s dashboard panel with a special app. (If you haven’t yet, opt to add an app, incorporating the Org Chart app into your base.) Then, in settings, choose which table and view to pull information from. You can create an org chart that highlights any aspect of your workforce you want: who reports to whom, where employees are located, their titles, or their faces.