Creating an organizational chart is two jobs that get treated as one: drawing it, which takes an afternoon, and keeping it right, which takes the rest of the year. The first job is mostly arithmetic and the second is mostly a decision about where the reporting line lives. This page does both. It walks what belongs in a box, how deep the chart has to go for your headcount, how to handle the people with two managers, and what the update routine looks like when twenty-eight people join, move or leave in a year. On the worked example that upkeep is under three hours if the chart is drawn from records and six hours of redrawing if it is not.
Decide what a box shows before you draw one
Name, title and department is the minimum; a photograph and a location earn their place in a company where people have not all met. Anything else belongs on the profile behind the box rather than on the chart itself, because a chart is read at a glance and a box with six lines in it is not read at all. Settle this once and every box is consistent, which matters more than any other design decision you will make on the chart.
Work the depth out from the top
The people reporting to the chief executive multiplied by the span of control tells you how far each layer reaches: four leaders at a span of seven reach 28 people in two layers and 228 in three. A company of 120 therefore sits inside four layers. If the arithmetic says five, that is a real finding: five layers between the top and the work is where decisions start taking a week, and it is easier to argue about now than after the chart is published.
Make the update the same action as the record
The reason organizational chart updates do not stick is that the chart is a second copy of the staff list, so every change has to be made twice and the second one gets skipped. Put the reporting line on the person's record and the chart becomes a view: twenty-eight changes a year at six minutes each is under three hours, against six hours of redrawing four times a year. Same company, same changes, half the work and none of the drift.
Questions people ask about how to create an organizational chart
How often should the chart be redrawn?
Never, ideally. If the chart is drawn from records it changes when a record changes. If it is a drawing, quarterly is the usual compromise and it means the chart is wrong for most of each quarter.
Where do dotted lines go?
On the person, not on the picture. A dotted line is a second relationship the record should carry, and once it does the chart can draw it and the dotted line reporting sheet can count what it costs.
Who should approve the chart?
Whoever owns the structure, usually the chief executive or the head of people, and only for the published version. Keeping the previous version beside it is what makes that approval quick.