Public Sector Shared Services Success

A Look at Glasgow City Council’s Finance & HR Shared Services Organisation, Customer and Business Services With a top quartile programme savings of £12m to-date, Customer and Business Services (CBS) is the forward-thinking multi-functional Shared Services Organisation behind Glasgow City Council. CBS Director, David Heneghan shares his insight into how the public sector SSO will continue to add value and generate significant savings as a captive model. Twice as Much by 2013 Due to Customer and Business Services’ (CBS) success with its recent "Twice as Much by 2013" programme, plans were drawn up to expand CBS’ remit to see what other savings could be achieved. Originally designed to save £4.5m a year, by March 2014 the programme had already delivered a cumulative savings of £12m. "In the beginning, only 140 staff in Finance and HR Shared Services out of a total of 3,000 support service staff were working in the SSC. This meant there was a great opportunity to do much more," explains David. "We brought Glasgow City Council’s Customer Care Centre into scope because the challenges that needed to be addressed were the same as CBS. Also, a lot of the answers the people needed to provide in the customer centre were available in SAP, which had already been implemented in the finance and HR community, so there were synergies between them." He continues: "90% of the work that was capable of being done in a shared services environment was not being done in that environment. So we concentrated on the 280 people in the two centres and the people that they supported, to change the processes that they collectively managed." Culture Shock for Widespread Buy-In Changing the processes and embracing this change was a big cultural change for the council: "Glasgow City Council approved a budget for the change of £6.5m, but it was important to ensure that there was a widespread willingness to embrace the change," says David. "So we chose a difficult project for our first big change; payroll rationalisation. This changed the way people were paid and really tested the appetite for change." "Originally, people got paid weekly, fortnightly and monthly resulting in over were 900 payrolls," he continues. "We now have 80 as a result of switching to a ‘lunar’ 4 weekly payroll as our standard. It only saves £200,000 a year but it demonstrated that the council was serious about making the change. "It helped getting the change accepted by illustrating that £200,000 saved in a back office process would fund 5 teachers. Every change that saved money in the back office could free up resources for education, or wherever the GCC [Glasgow City Council] priorities were. That message resonated and we’ve continued to use it ever since." [eventpdf] Involving Employees One element of the change process was to involve employees. The ‘Twice as Much by 2013’ programme meant changing the way CBS worked with employees, which produced some great outcomes. "We started encouraging staff to be more involved because the best solutions come from them," David explains. "One of the projects in ‘Twice as Much by 2013’ was about how we handled parking administration. The team themselves came up with all of the ideas for change resulting in a 50% reduction in the number of people required to carry out the work. Despite reduction in resource the team is now doing parking administration for GCC and for 2 other councils. That played a significant part in changing our culture." Bringing Services Together GCC were keen to find out what other savings could be achieved, and ‘Twice as Much by 2013’ had paved the way for CBS’s expansion. So what is the future program that extends the Finance and HR shared services scope? David reveals: "Our next proposal is ‘Tomorrow’s Support Services (TSS)’, which is a 4-year programme with the aim of generating another £5m p.a. savings by bringing the rest of GCCs support services under one structure. That requires 2,000 more people in 400 locations having their work managed within CBS. The first year is about migrating all of the people and their work including changing people’s line management, which will be complete be April 2014. Even during the transition savings of £300,000 will be achieved this year. From next April, it’s all about changing how people work. "The savings are all based on natural attrition appropriate redeployment, and a reduction in the use of fixed term temporary contracts. That’s why we are very confident with making the savings; the challenge is changing how people work." Who’s Joining? The additional 2,000 people are closely linked to David’s multi-functional SSC, showing how integrated Finance and HR is in everyday business. "In essence anyone who collects cash, makes payments, handles customer contact, or deals with general administration will be part of our team," explains David. "This includes 600 people that work in schools supporting staff, pupils and parents. Many of the tasks are very similar to those in our finance service centre such as collecting cash from the parents. We aim to simplify that work. School staff also put communication into school bags; they email parents, phone them etc., and that’s customer contact. That’s already part of our core work. Our job is to make sure we have a common way of doing it as well as taking workload out. That will allow the people in the school to get on doing what they should be doing, which is raising educational attainment, rather than using scarce resource to carry out administrative tasks. There are also the people who collect council tax and process benefits claims from eligible citizens. This work is now also part of CBS." The Real Success: Increasing Staff Satisfaction The figures speak for themselves: 2,000 extra people, transition savings of £300,000and a cumulative savings of £12m… the list goes on. But what David is really proud of is not just figures, but of employee satisfaction. "‘Twice as Much by 2013’was delivered with increasing staff engagement. I am proud of us managing to keep people engaged, even though we have been asking them to take on additional challenges" acknowledges David. "What we have done here in CBS is encourage staff to realise that everyone is equally important. We introduced a new face to face approach to briefing staff known as ‘Stand Up Catch Up’. Every second month, one of the leadership team speaks to everyone and give them the opportunity to raise issues. "We demonstrate that we are accessible, acknowledge our mistakes and encourage others to speak up, partly by having a completely open plan work space, but also by the leadership team getting out and about constantly talking and listening to people . As a result even though people don’t always like the changes we are making, they understand them and are prepared to give them their support. "We asked in a survey recently: ‘Do you believe in the leadership team?’ 75% said yes. "That’s a big vote of confidence particularly in a shared services environment." Centralised & Decentralised However, being a shared service centre with a centralised strategy but decentralised locations poses a challenge to employee engagement and satisfaction with these changes, as David acknowledges: "It was relatively straight forward managing two buildings; but now we’re based in over 400 locations. Some of the people we are employing will be sitting beside people who were colleagues in their previous organisation. We will be asking them to change the way they work while others around them may not. "Changing culture will be the biggest challenge for us in the coming year. We believe that by putting staff at the centre of what we do, and treating them as professional staff they will develop an allegiance to the way we want to work and buy into the changes." Future David’s plans for CBS don’t stop at changing culture, an expansion of employees and tasks though. "In the next year I want us to deliver our commitments to the council, by continuing to maintain the level of service at current standards. To date we have seen a number of improvements so I’m confident we will deliver," he says. "I want to see the levels of engagement with our new teams grow as they begin to trust us. This underpins our ability to deliver the changes that will deliver the savings over the next 4 years or so. Beyond that we want to find other opportunities to save money. One way of doing that is if we can generate business externally, so I’d like to see us collaborating with other similar organisations where we can deliver service for them. We often go and meet people like Shell, for example, that are held in high regards and up among the best in shared services. I want CBS to be a model for others to visit." Proud of What We Do With a vision that reflects CBS as ‘proud of what we do; chosen for how we do it’, it seems further successes are afoot for the SSC, as David summarises: "Our drive is to involve staff fully in the journey and despite being a captive shared service organisation our desire is to ensure that our customers get a great service that they would freely choose." The 2014 Commonwealth Games CBS will have a very busy year kicking off with phase two of the "Tomorrow’s Support Services" programme and also supporting the Commonwealth Games, which Glasgow is hosting during the summer. Glasgow City Council is a key partner of Glasgow 2014 Ltd, the Organising Committee of the Commonwealth Games. CBS plans to support Glasgow 2014 and the Scottish Government in the delivery of an excellent Games this year. "We expect lots of our people to be volunteers and also to attend the events. Like most shared services, we are aiming to create a games-related environment in our teams. I imagine we’ll have great fun, especially as we get closer to the Games," David shares. I got tickets for gymnastics which is great because my daughter loves gymnastics. It seems the tickets were massively over-subscribed which is a good sign for the success of the Games. When it comes to the Commonwealth Games, through good planning and communication, CBS and the wider Council will keep disruption to a minimum during what will hopefully be the best Commonwealth Games ever." David Heneghan, Director of Customer Business Solutions (CBS), Glasgow City Council, is a speaker at SSON’s 14th Annual European Shared Services & Outsourcing Week, taking place 12-15 May 2014 at the Convention Centre Dublin.He will be leading a session, ‘How to Manage a Centralised Strategy with Decentralised Locations.’ Register today

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