When transitioning to shared services, failing to deliver on customer service expectations can reinforce stakeholder skepticism about the model’s effectiveness. Oftentimes, this is a product of understaffing. To ensure the new service centers have sufficient support, institutions should perform an activity survey during the design phase.
The survey is used to identify unit-based staff whose work portfolios include tasks associated with a transitioning function. By detailing the volume of transactional activity that is taking place in the units, campuses can more accurately predict initial levels of staffing required for a shared services center.
This resource is part of the Design a Shared Services Model That Reflects Campus Priorities Roadmap. Access the Roadmap for stepwise guidance with additional tools and research.
Deploying an in-house activity assessment
Leaders should follow three steps in conducting a shared services activity assessment.
These surveys ask staff about the percentage of time spent on specific activities and the volume of work completed. The survey should also ask for feedback on how processes can be improved to address unnecessary complexities or pain points across the transactional tasks. These on-the-ground insights are helpful for reengineering processes alongside shared services migrations.
(e.g., reimbursement request submission records). Collectively, this information provides a good estimation of the amount of staff effort required to complete tasks that have been targeted for consolidation. The responses will also suggest staff with enough specialization to warrant moving to shared services.
These interviews ease anxiety about shared services and serve as an occasion to discuss the opportunities presented by either transferring to the center or staying in the home unit. Staff often express more interest in transferring to a shared services center during private meetings than in the presence of unit leaders or faculty.
Identifying candidates for shared services positions
Armed with data from the activity survey, campus leaders can estimate the necessary amount of labor to initially dedicate to the shared services center. The next step is to determine where shared services staff will come from. There are three possible sources for recruitment:
- Distributed units: For large institutions seeking to stand up a shared services operation that serves all or most of campus, shifting staff from academic or other distributed units into the shared services center is the most straightforward—though potentially disruptive—approach. Setting a threshold for transferring unit-based staff, such as those who spend at least 50-60% of their time processing transactions for one functional area (e.g., finance or HR), is a good method for identifying strong candidates for shared services. However, some staff—and the faculty they support—may resist the expectation that they move to shared services, equating the removal of staff with a decrease in service quality.
- Central units: Another approach is to move staff to shared services from central administrative units (e.g., central finance or HR) without touching unit-based staff. Relocating central staff who already process a large volume of transactional work can help distinguish the shared services center as the processing and customer-facing entity, and central functions as strategic, policy-setting, auditing bodies. This approach minimizes unit disruptions, but given the limited number of central staff, it is usually reserved for smaller shared services centers.
- New hires: In some cases, campuses may hire all new staff for the shared services center. Given that new hires increase costs for the institution, at least initially, it is the rarest of the staffing scenarios and is most common for smaller shared services centers (e.g., less than 10 FTEs). The advantage of this method is that new staff do not have any legacy expectations about how the institution operates, so they are more amenable to new processes and behaviors.
As with most shared services design choices, decisions around staffing must navigate the delicate balance between the opportunities for efficiency and the willingness of the institution to change.