How to Effectively Organize Work of Secondary Departments-Publication

Lyudmila SHUSTEROVA, Director for Strategic Development, BDO Unicon Outsourcing

Good work of secondary departments and related expenses are the pain in the neck for all managers, and the source of never-ending conflicts between employees.
A familiar story, isn’t it? Ask your secretary what she thinks about the bookkeeping office, cleaners, HR or IT. Is she comfortable with those people? Do they help her solve her problems? The mystery of those departments is that even though they’re called ‘support,’ in fact there’s not too much help from them.

A worker who comes in with a request to pay for production materials gets in return a bunch of incomprehensible instructions saying them to go to some other place to harmonize an agreement which is to become payable in some while, possible a couple of months.

An employee talking with an IT specialist often hears some mumbo jumbo roughly translated as ‘it’s totally your fault read the goddamn manual.’ Why does a user have to know every single detail about software? Why not setup in in such a way as to make it actually easy to use?

Still, expenses to sustain such support departments grow at exponential rate. There’s one more opening at the accountant’s office as fifteen are seemingly not enough to finalize a statement. The IT department insists on buying a new server. Are those expenses justified? Why does this department fail to do the job in time? Is it true that the project’s collapse was caused by objective reasons, or is it about mistakes of the department’s workers?
Let’s try to find out.

First of all, not every secondary department may find itself turning into a small domestic dictator wielding unlimited power.

It takes at least two parameters:

1. Complexity and ‘the technological extent’ of the knowledge it possesses (even if this complexity is purely superficial)

2. The organization’s high dependence degree on the processes maintained by said department.

Say, your administrative department wouldn’t be able to terrorize everyone for too long: bad janitor work is obvious; and nothing serious would change if you hire a different cook. Nobody would notice closure of marketing department either (at least within the first two months, while the momentum of the earlier work is still going.) However, pushing a single button on a server is quite capable of putting the entire company to a halt. An error in bookkeeping documents may cost a fortune, or even freedom.
It’s the managerial fear of consequences of making mistakes in an alien area that allows ‘service’ departments to endlessly cajoling them of money and people. What can be done about that?

1. Benchmarking. Count and compare. It’s not really necessary to be systematic: asking your CEO friend every now and then how many people are involved in payroll calculation at their company is quite enough. It may turn out there are as many as in your company even though their company is twice as smaller. It’s a good cause to think a bit, isn’t it?

2. Assessment by workers. Your sternest judge is your client, as he or she votes with their money. What about support teams? Their client is your workers. Unfortunately, such departments have their share of revenues regardless of quality of their work. Ask your workers to estimate them.

Of course, such estimation won’t always be objective. There’ll always be a place for grudge and settling accounts. However, if all four hundred workers actually loathe the support team, maybe there’s really something wrong with it? Add personnel estimates in the KPI of your service subdivisions, and the lives of your regular workers will become much easier. Another important tool is a system of queries. Add an item ‘performance quality,’ and many things will get clearer when it comes to the work of service departments.

3. Outsourcing (full or partial). It lets you avoid the lion’s share of the pain in the neck caused by organizing a department and managing related expenses. However, it doesn’t cover a different issue: in order to let an external provider render a better service to you, you have to correctly articulate the issue first. Certainly, it requires deep comprehension of the area.

4. Regulations. Set up strict terms for approval of documents, responding queries, and a number of operations per minute. Sadly, this method has its downside as well: not all industries have examples of such regulations as sometimes they are pegged to peculiarities of the company’s business. It’s quite obvious that forming a financial report in an ERP system or without it wouldn’t take the same time. In some cases, the method of working day shooting could work (an external observer spends several days with workers and photographs all they do.) Having seen such footage, an expert could say whether work efficiency could be enhanced, and how it could be done. On the basis of such observations, a company could develop its own regulations.

5. Audit. Many consulting firms offer services like audit of a part of processes (IT infrastructure, HR administering, financial bookkeeping) or an entire department’s work. Audit will help you get an insight as to whether the processes are arranged properly, the department’s work is in line with best practices, and how big is the room for the department’s improvement. Audit isn’t always expensive: it depends on what data and recommendations you desire to get from the advisors in the end.
However, the best way to make secondary departments run at full blast is to motivate the personnel. It will be people answering their colleagues’ aid requests; people you could trust; and check up only occasionally.