How Bayer Pharma Schweiz Made Its Org Chart Match How They Actually Work

The Challenge: When the Org Chart Hides How Work Really Happens

The pharmaceutical business is organized around overlapping product lifecycles. As products move from research to production, commercialization, support, and eventually end of life, work shifts and people take on multiple roles. In 2022, Bayer Pharma Schweiz introduced a new organizational structure with Home and Work teams to support cross-functional, dynamic resource allocation and respond even faster to evolving market conditions and customer requirements.

In 2023, Bayer announced Dynamic Shared Ownership (DSO), a company-wide operating model to reduce hierarchies, cut bureaucracy, streamline structures, and accelerate decision-making.

In this context, three needs surfaced:

• Make the org picture match reality. The classical org chart hid cross-functional work. People were spread across projects and topic groups that cut across reporting lines. Because this work was invisible, it made it difficult to deploy expertise so that decisions affecting customers could be made competently, quickly, and with a solution-oriented focus.
• Provide orientation in the new organizational structure. People needed a clear visual to understand what DSO means for their roles, responsibilities, handoffs, and daily work.
• Support career development. Employees wanted to make visible the evolving expertise they were gaining in new roles. They needed a tool to document it and support development dialogues.

A Living Map

In 2023, the Pharmaceuticals division of Bayer Schweiz began mapping how work was distributed to clarify the new organizational structure and make every employee's contribution visible. They used Peerdom's Drafts app to preview alternative structures and the Contribution app to see how capacity changes across various scenarios.

Bayer Pharma Schweiz planned to keep home teams and reporting lines. Yet, since much of their day-to-day work happens outside those lines, they also wanted to map the project and topic work their classical org chart was missing.

To map these two realities side by side, they adopted five patterns:

1. Map reporting lines around the middle. Each person is hired into a single Home Team (Chapter) with a clear Chapter Head. Chapters correspond to functional teams on the traditional org chart and are stylized as hexagons for instant recognition.
2. Display fluid work in the middle. Cross-functional projects, working groups, and topic teams appear as circles. Bayer Pharma Schweiz calls these Nuclei. People may be active in one or more Nuclei in addition to their functional position in a Home Team (Chapter).
3. Embed skills into role descriptions. They added a Skills field to list capabilities required to enact a role. These keywords make search useful and help route decisions to the right owner.
4. Expose the Chapter and Job Title on profiles. Chapter and Job Title fields were added to each profile to indicate a colleague's home team and hired position alongside their contributions across the more agile Nuclei.
5. Attribute contributions to Chapters and Nuclei. Teams documented how people split time between their Chapter and Nuclei, making capacity and FTE allocation visible and easier to discuss.

Sharing and Understanding the Map

With the implementation of the new, flatter organizational structure in autumn 2024, the existing production map was replaced by the chosen scenario in the Drafts app. From day one, the live map made it clear where each person fit, what changed, and how to act. To make the new organization map easy to understand at a glance, Bayer Pharma Schweiz published a one-page legend in the Pages app. Shapes and colors carry meaning, and a few governance rules keep things consistent:

• Hexagons = Home teams / Chapters
• Circles = Work teams / Nuclei
• Colors denote core / non-core / special roles (e.g. Scrum Master)
• Stripes indicate underfilled roles
• Mirrored roles were used to share a single role description across teams. You can edit mirrored roles once and all mirrors update, while people remain assigned locally.

Impact: Four Outcomes from the Deployment

1. Ability to find the right expert with fewer detours. Before, finding the right contact meant interrupting colleagues and could take a week if an intermediary was busy or on holiday. With the map, look-ups are now instant. People search by role or skill and message the owner within minutes.

2. Increased clarity after implementation of the new organizational structure. Home teams and mission work were visible from day one at go-live.

3. Faster decisions due to role clarity. Across Bayer Pharma Schweiz, 90% of roles have a defined purpose, 80% have responsibilities, and 60% include skill keywords. Skills make search useful. Purpose and responsibilities make ownership clear.

4. Less bureaucracy. As long as the formal reporting lines remain the same, frequent updates to the work map can be made without having to constantly align with HR.

Implementation Challenges: Three Obstacles and How They Responded

Anxiety about transparency

Challenge: Some feared that their role's contribution would not be recognized or appreciated.

Response: Require every role to show a purpose and an owner. Use profile pages in talent 1-1s as a tool to review workload, capacity, and internal career options. Treat visibility as a coaching tool, not a threat.

Change resistance

Challenge: A familiar pattern in change emerged: one third were enthusiastic, one third ambivalent, one third hesitant.

Response: Secure leader sponsorship, run short "show your map" workshops, and focus education on personal benefits that come from clarity over one's work.

"Why do this in addition to my job?"

Challenge: Some questioned if the documentation overhead was worth it.

Response: Show concrete cases where a self-serve search replaces inefficient information relays or how making expertise visible can support one's development dialogues. Keep map updates lightweight and tie them to existing rhythms such as coaching sessions or quarterly team meetings.

Takeaway Lessons

• If your organization design mixes reporting lines with fluid working groups (e.g. a matrix organization), map both side-by-side.
• Publish a map legend for shared understanding. Use colors and shapes for readability.
• Make every role and peer searchable by adding 5-8 capability keywords.
• Add home teams or reporting line relationships on the peer profile to anchor the network view to the hierarchy.
• Use Drafts to test structural scenarios or temporarily store role descriptions that aren't currently needed.

What's Next: Bayer Pharma Schweiz Embraces Adaptability

FTE allocation in Peerdom: Bayer Pharma Schweiz engaged Peerdom to extend the Contribution app so that planning, review, and allocations happen entirely in Peerdom, not scattered across spreadsheets.

Move from one map to a network: After publishing their map, Bayer Pharma Schweiz shared it with other teams at Bayer. Within two years, 90+ Bayer teams created maps covering hundreds of people. The next step is connecting them with the Network app so that role, skill, and colleague search works across teams and locations. If the right expertise sits in another division or country, the aim is to find it in seconds.

By nature, pharma and R&D-based organizations are dynamic. Providing a living, shared reference helps reduce confusion. New hires onboard faster. Experts are easier to find. Re-allocation of resources takes fewer steps, often without a formal HR process. Teams coordinate with less friction. Most importantly, the org picture better matches the actual work as compared to a formal job description, so change creates less confusion and individuals have a solid reference for talent development dialogues.