Client Case: Team Restructuring

James is a Human Resources Director based in an Asian country and looks after the regional HR department. His company has 4500 employees in the region. His HR department has 25 members in 4 different departments - Talent acquisition, Systems HR, Total Rewards, and HR Operations serving these employees.

Coaching Issue

The company is transitioning into a new Enterprise Resource System (ERP) that will allow employees to perform most of their HR tasks (leave application, approvals, etc) via self-service. Currently, the HR team performs 98% of the annual 450,000 HR tasks manually.

The new ERP system will introduce artificial intelligence and chat-bots, which will reduce the number of manual tasks significantly. This will have an impact on the manpower requirements of the HR function. At the time of the coaching, it is 15 months to go live of the system.

James is the executive sponsor of the project and has a dedicated project team working on the transition.

James is concerned about the restructuring of his team given the upcoming system changes. From the coaching session, James would like to have a sounding board to see if there are things which he has missed out.

Coaching Process

I examined these factors thoroughly in the 45 minute coaching session.

Company level overview

A portion of the coaching conversation was devoted to fact finding and understanding the company from a broad perspective. Some issues not directly related to the issue surfaced up – eg: Legal policies that need to be redrafted to put into the new ERP system.

Team Level: Restructuring strategy and department morale

People movements: Currently, the organization is looking to redeploy affected personnel rather than to make any of them redundant. Compensation will also have a few people retiring and people will need to be hired to fill these roles.

Clarifying the morale of the department: In any major transition, people’s morale would definitely be affected. In this case, the team’s morale is quite happy at the moment as they have worked successfully through some issues to get to where they are right now.

Key Personnel issues: People in key positions would have a direct influence in the department.

The HR Operations Manager is concerned about resources, and has been reminded to hire 1-2 more people. This is the department that would most be affected as the majority of the manual tasks are carried out here. James realized that he would need to check into how the Operations Manager is feeling.

The Total Rewards manager can be pedantic and will need to be constantly engaged. This has been addressed as James has instructed the project team to constantly keep the Total Rewards manager in the loop.

There is concern about the Talent Acquisition (TA) head as he may have life circumstances which will cause him to leave the company. The TA head is the person who can step into James’ role should James not be around. We discussed that, if the TA person leaves, his role will be split into two different roles. James will need to look for someone else to step into his role should the TA person decide to leave.

The HR Systems team is not an issue right now.

Leadership Style

James is generally able to remain calm and steady in situations. He appears comfortable and clear in his leadership style. He did realize during the coaching session that he shouldn’t assume that everybody is taking the situation as well as he is and needs to ask people more often how they are feeling.

Why this process was adopted

A major system transition eliminating 98% of the manual tasks will have a big impact on the operations on the team and company as a whole. For an issue like restructuring, a holistic picture of the entire situation would need to be adopted so that the coachee would have a clear idea of the various moving parts.

The approach taken in this coaching case was to go from a macro view to a micro view and the issue was examined in this sequence.

Understanding the nature of the issue from company perspective and where the HR department fits in relation to the whole company.
Examining the structure of the HR department and how it could possibly change given the systems transition.
Then narrowing down into the key personnel in each team.
Following which, the coachee’s leadership style is discussed.

This covers all the relevant factors required to be looked at when planning to restructure a team.

In general, Asian cultures tend not to deal with uncertainty well. In times of major change, it is important to have strong leadership and to manage uncertainty.

In a case like this, it is important not to be distracted by other issues that come up – such as the legal policies to be redrafted and to deliver value to the client to what the client wants in the coaching session. This is an important issue that still needs to be looked at but not within the scope of this 45-minute session.

Results from the coaching session

James would need to clarify career path for HR in the organization.
Have a conversation with the HR Operations manager about how she’s feeling
Ask people in the HR department how they are feeling more often (Don’t assume everybody is ok).
Look into the team re-skilling into the new ERP system.
Look into possible contingencies for the replacement of the Talent Acquisition manager.
Bounce ideas off the HR team about how to do the transition and get a collaborative approach to creating the new organization chart

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Michael is looking to relocate back to Canada with his family.

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