Identifying AAA Employees in Shared Services

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Editor Coda
May 21, 2014

At our Summit for Leaders in Finance and Procurement Shared Services last week in Chicago, Dennis Dodo, VP of Shared Financial Services at Ontario Power Generation gave a fascinating presentation on how and why they tackled some serious workforce planning issues within their organization.

Ontario Power Generation is a Canadian Utility with a 2013 revenue $4.9 Billion and with over $16B in operating assets. In 2011, OPG embarked on a major business initiative to transform the company into a more streamlined, agile and efficient organization, and they leveraged a unique attrition opportunity to right size headcount as baby boomers were retiring.  

Tackling attrition and one of a kind system experts

When OPG implemented their Shared Financial Services Centre in May 2012, they looked at their workforce profile and realized 55% of Shared Services employees were eligible to within the same period.

So how did they work to ensure continuity and sustainability of services? As with many shared services, OPG had “one of a kind” system and process experts, people who had worked on the same systems and processes for years. However when those people are not in the office, few people had such in-depth knowledge. So OPG knew they needed a plan to survive these retirements, however any shared service organization with a significant attrition rate could learn from their experience.

Creating effective talent pools

Once the pieces were all under the SSC and under one leader they proceeded to group similar functions and activities together, creating a “single pool of talent”. They moved to break down organizational silos from all the functions centralized into the SSC and consolidated into just 3 functional  universes: Accountants, Transaction Processors and System and Database Administration.

They then asked themselves, whether they had the right “Talent Pool” groupings, talent pools being a grouping consisting of all the employees within who share enough commonalities in their educational, technical, or functional background to allow for collaboration, knowledge transfer, mentorship, cross-training, and economies of scale.

Identifying AAA employees

One of the key things they did was to identify high flyers – those possessing a “AAA Rating” those with the right Aptitude, Attitude and Agility. They also looked at the core competencies and had a healthy mix of Compliers, Result Seekers, Problem Solvers, Functional Experts, Adaptors, Communicators, and Self Starters.

To identify the AAA employees, they obtained each manager’s view on their own employees, and based on that, put together a list of potential AAAs. They then tested them by stretching them and assigning them additional workload to see how they coped. For example one employee was assigned the task to redesigning the Travel Expense exception report. Each employee was monitored focusing on competencies, teamwork, attitude, and agility. AAA’s  were able to not only deliver, they improved upon the expectation,  worked well with others, and adjusted well to changing workloads and group dynamics.

So by taking the “one of a kind” system experts out of their roles, and shuffling them around with other AAA “One of a kind” system experts, they forced knowledge transfer in a way that was much more efficient than job shadowing. And by ensuring that as many AAA employees were spread throughout the organization, they knew they would be able to cope with changes to the workforcea and made them a more flexible and responsive organization.

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