JAMIE's DIARY: A Difficult Decision...

It’s been almost 3 weeks since I made the difficult decision to move on from my current employer, accepting a new challenge to design, set-up and run a new shared services centre in Budapest. I have spent the last few weeks reflecting on this transitional period – how it feels to let go of the "old" and embrace both the anxiety and the excitement of the "new". Perhaps most people tend not to reflect on this too deeply, after all "it’s just business". However, as I started to tell people here in the Budapest office that I was leaving, I began to think about the consequences of attrition on an organisation’s culture, and I started to think that it was a mistake to think of it as "just business". I began to wonder about the hidden consequences … what happens to the fabric of an organisation when will people move on and new people come in? Come to think of it: in the complex and competitive people market of shared services environments – does it really matter when people move on? Anyone who has experience of working in a shared services environment knows that churn/attrition is commonplace. We go through the first 2-3 years of creating our SSC and feel a sense of new beginnings … the freshness of it all … the challenge … it’s exciting and we are all in it together. Then, inevitably, as things settle down, the buzz and pace of transition and growth settle down and we reach a more difficult stage, namely that of trying to harmonise processes. We have to deal with the difficult issues that we have put off for a while: how to demonstrate operational improvement and the inevitable FTE savings that are expected. We come to terms with not being able to meet everyone’s expectations and career ambitions, and people start to move on … some internally, some to other SSCs, some to completely new environments. We get used to measuring churn and attrition in percentage terms. We get smart at measuring churn and employee lifecycles for different role profiles, and we comfort ourselves with the thought that, as long as people are leaving transactional roles that require low experience, it’s ok. I am not saying for a moment that trying to manage and minimise the disruptive impact of high attrition is invalid, indeed there are already a whole range of fantastic ideas out there to help control attrition. But perhaps, in addition to the best practices of induction, career pathways, L&D, knowledge management tools and employee engagement events, there are some simple ways to check the pulse of the workplace. Let's face it, most senior SSC leaders come under huge pressure and feel burdened with the expectation to deliver, whether to customers, to employees, efficiencies, audits, or technology changes. This is part of the territory, but sometimes that " burden" translates into an over-emphasis on top down control, metrics, formal structures and formal communication – all of which are with good intention, but the lower down the organisation you get, the more they can feel counterproductive. In fact, it can be difficult to make sense of what those at the top are trying to achieve, especially after ideas have gone through multiple translations and interpretations, from top to bottom. When we look at attrition, we have a tendency to focus on the hard facts of operational impact, and pay less attention to the effects on the fabric and the culture of the SSC, and the underlying dynamics. We become accustomed, in large, multi-site SSC operations, to looking to data to give us the signals: we look at employee engagement indexes, we look at churn trends, and we look to HR to help design better initiatives. Perhaps it is also time to focus on getting better at understanding more about the social dynamics in the workplace. Otherwise, no matter what fancy schemes you put in place, they may fail to create an environment for people to thrive. I simply don’t believe that money is the main reason people choose to leave an SSC. What I’ve realised these last few weeks is that, as senior leaders, we need to combine good analytics with a showing up on the floor and paying attention. We need to hone our intuition by spending time on the floor with teams and with people, being curious about what’s really going on and asking ourselves whether this is a place we’d want to work in – and why. What does it feel like to us? To others? We need to use our own senses, and encourage our team leaders to do the same – and then combine that knowledge with operational facts to gain a more complete picture about the kind of SSC we have. Here are some examples of how we, as leaders, can get a pulse of the workplace, in addition to the metrics: Go and look around the "shop floor". Do the teams have daily huddles? Ask yourself whether the team leaders feel too remote in interacting with their team. Speak to the newest joiners. What induction did they have about the company and the SSC’s values beyond a slideshow and learning to post an invoice? Go and speak to some of the people who have announced they are leaving. There are for sure some there. Sit down informally and learn from this discussion not to rely on the HR exit interview. Allow yourself to do a "day in the life of" in a different team each month. Do the same work, go to lunch with them, and let them trust you enough to tell you what organisation you are creating. Ask the team leaders to talk through how much time they spend coaching and developing versus doing a process task. And then ask yourself, is that what you expected? Get a feel for how much interaction is taking place between people, or are they all heads down with their headphones on? As I prepare to leave, I remember that an organisation is not a machine. Neither is an SSC. It is first and foremost about creating relationships, both inside and outside the SSC. Great metrics should assist in doing that – not overtake it. Jamie Davies will be reporting from his new position soon. We wish him the best of luck in transition.

JAMIE's DIARY: A Difficult Decision...

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