Questions to ask employees after a reorganisation

After a reorganisation, ask employees what their role is now in their own words, who they go to for which decision, what work has landed on them or fallen through the gaps, and what knowledge left with the old structure. Ask four to twelve weeks after the new structure starts, when people have hit the first real problems but habits have not yet set. This guide gives you the questions in seven sections with probes, in about 25 minutes.

Why ask employees after a reorganisation instead of before?

Before a restructure you can ask what people expect. Only after it can you ask what happened. A new organisation chart answers who reports to whom. It rarely answers who signs off a refund, who now owns the supplier the old regional team looked after, or which weekly report nobody produces any more. Those gaps show up in the first months, in the work itself.

Role clarity was already weak before most reorganisations started. Gallup reported in January 2025 that just 46% of US employees clearly know what is expected of them at work, down from 56% in March 2020, and named rapid organisational change among the reasons engagement fell. A restructure that redraws every box without restating expectations makes that number worse.

Acas’s guidance on monitoring changes after they are introduced tells employers to keep communication open for a period after the change and review how people are adjusting, and notes that continued feedback helps an organisation adapt. This guide is a structured way to do that review.

If your change is a new system going live, use our change impact interview guide instead. That one walks through tasks before and after go-live. This one is about structure: roles, lines and decisions.

When should you run post-reorganisation interviews?

Between four and twelve weeks after the new structure takes effect. Earlier than four weeks, people are still finding their desks and the honest answer to most questions is “too early to say”. Later than twelve, workarounds have hardened into the way things are done and people stop noticing them.

If the reorganisation came with redundancies, give it at least four weeks and handle those who stayed with care. Our post on how layoff survivors feel covers that situation. If several changes are landing at once, watch for the signs in our post on change fatigue.

Post-reorganisation interview questions: the guide

Ask for examples from the last fortnight. “Is your role clear?” gets a yes from most people. “Tell me about the last time you weren’t sure if something was yours to do” gets the gap.

1. Opening (2 minutes)

1. Which part of the reorganisation affected you most directly?

Before this, say what the interview is for: to find what the new structure gets wrong in practice, so it can be fixed. Say who will see the answers and that results are only shown for groups.

2. Your role now (5 minutes)

1. In your own words, what is your job now? How is it different from before?
2. Tell me about the last time you weren’t sure whether something was yours to do.
3. What are you measured on now, as far as you know?

Follow up with:

• Has anyone told you that directly, or have you worked it out?
• Does your manager describe your role the same way?

3. Reporting lines (3 minutes)

1. Who do you report to on paper, and who do you actually go to day to day?
2. How often have you spoken properly with your new manager since the change?

Follow up with:

• If those are different people, how does that work?

4. Decisions (5 minutes)

1. Take me through a recent decision you needed someone else to make. Who did you go to, and how long did it take?
2. Is there a type of decision that has become slower or that nobody seems to own?
3. What can you decide now that you couldn’t before, or the other way round?

Follow up with:

• What did you do while you waited?
• Is that the same in other teams?

This is the section most surveys miss. Decision rights are where reorganisations quietly fail: two managers both think they approve something, or neither does, and the person in between waits.

5. Workload and gaps (4 minutes)

1. What work has landed on you since the change that wasn’t yours before?
2. Is there anything that used to happen that nobody does now?
3. Is anything now being done twice, by two teams?

Follow up with:

• Who notices when it doesn’t get done?

6. What was lost (3 minutes)

1. Who used to know things you now can’t easily find out?
2. Which working relationships did the change break, and have any of them been rebuilt?

Follow up with:

• What would it take to get that knowledge back?

7. Trust and close (3 minutes)

1. In your own words, why did the organisation make this change?
2. What would make you more confident the new structure will work?
3. Is there anything I should have asked and didn’t?

A worked example: four regions into two functions

This example is invented. Picture a distribution business that replaces four regional managers with two functional heads, one for inbound and one for outbound. The new chart is tidy. Six weeks later, interviews across depot staff and office teams might find three things the chart doesn’t show.

First, customer complaints about damaged deliveries now bounce between inbound and outbound, because the old regional manager used to settle them over the phone. Nobody owns the decision. Second, the weekly call with one large customer stopped, because it was in a regional manager’s calendar and she took a different role. Third, transport planners in one depot still take instructions from their old regional manager, who now sits in a different function, because nobody told them otherwise.

None of those would need another restructure. Each would need a named owner and a message to the people affected. That is what to aim for from a post-reorganisation round: a short list of small, specific fixes that the design work couldn’t have predicted.

How do you analyse post-reorganisation interviews?

1. List every decision people say is slow or unowned (section 4). For each, name an owner and tell the people who raised it.
2. List dropped and doubled work (section 5). Dropped work with a customer or safety impact goes first.
3. Compare how people describe their role (section 2) with what the design says. Where they differ by team, the message didn’t reach that team.
4. Map lost knowledge (section 6) to the people who still hold it, if they are still in the organisation.
5. Read the reasons people give for the change (section 7). If they are mostly about cost cutting and the official reason was customer focus, that gap is worth addressing directly.
6. Show each theme by department or site, with two or three quotes, and only for groups of five or more people.

Who should run the interviews?

Not the new managers. People won’t tell their new boss that the role is unclear or that they still ring the old one. HR business partners or the change team can interview a sample. To hear from everyone affected in the same weeks, an AI interviewer is the practical route. Spradley runs one-on-one AI interviews by text or voice, with a follow-up question on each answer, which is what the “take me through a recent decision” questions need. The report comes back within days, with themes and the quotes behind them, compared across departments, and numbers and ratings are never shown for fewer than five people. A leader can ask their Personal Agent which decisions people say nobody owns in outbound and get an answer that cites the evidence; where the evidence is thin, it drafts a follow-up interview on that theme, sent after one confirmation. A leader who commits to a fix, such as naming an owner for returns, gets a reminder at four and eight weeks until it is done. Our change management page shows how teams use it around a change.

Adapt it

• For frontline teams with little time, run sections 2, 4 and 5 as a ten-minute interview.
• For managers who gained new teams, add: “Which of your new team’s work do you not yet understand well enough to manage?”
• For a merger of two departments, add to section 6: “What did the other team do that your old team didn’t, and the other way round?”
• For a second round at twelve weeks, repeat sections 2, 4 and 5 only, and compare.

Frequently asked questions

Key terms

Role clarity

How well a person understands what is expected of them, what they own and how they are measured.

Decision rights

Who is allowed to make which decision, and who must be consulted or informed.

Reporting line

The formal manager a person reports to, which after a reorganisation can differ from the person they actually go to.

Lost knowledge

Know-how, contacts and habits that sat with people or teams who moved or left in a reorganisation.