Story:
Flex Teams

By Josh Harrington - Research Analyst at Headlands Capital

September 19, 2010 at 8:27pm

Moonshots

Capture the advantages of diversity

Experiment more often and more cheaply

Disaggregate the organization

Summary

Several years ago, Company X moved away from having part-time employees in their operations and customer support departments. Is now the right time to bring back part-time workers as a "flex-team?"

Context

Company X is a privately held financial services firm in the mid-west. The company grew rapidly through the 1980's and 90's, led by an inspirational founder, but has faced more difficult times recently as the company matured, the founder's retirement led to senior management turnover, and its markets have matured. The company's operations and support department is a cost center faced with continuous regulatory and technology changes.

Triggers

The pressure to reduce costs (primarily through headcount reductions) has left the operations department struggling to keep up with workloads, while requirements for transaction processing speeds and high-customer support quality continue to increase.

Key Innovations & Timeline

Company X's operations department is exploring the idea of moving away from specialist roles and moving toward a "flex-team" structure, where employee responsibilities will vary from the people-centric role of call center support to the number-crunching role of trade processing and accuracy checking. Although the change has yet to be implemented, the move to a more flexible workforce is expected to provide a greater variety of work to employees who may more quickly feel burnt-out from doing repetitive work over extended time-periods. In addition, employees trained across numerous different functions can be dynamically allocated as the intensity of work-loads changes across job functions. The reemergence of part-time work options will provide employees with a greater degree of flexibility to address non-employment life priorities if they choose, as well as save Company X on salary and employee benefit expenses.

Challenges & Solutions

The key challenge of implementing such a change is the need to change HR hiring practices. Generalist employees need to have a much more well-rounded skill set than specialists, which might be a challenge in current pay-ranges. Employees in the specialist role will have to go through substantial training to become proficient at their new job requirements.

Additionally challenging is communicating the impacts of such a change to other departments within the organization which rely on the performance of this Operations group. Changes in one department can have ripple effects across the organization and all stakeholders need to be aware of the changes and potential implications for them.

You need to register in order to submit a comment.

Sort By: Latest Oldest Likes Replies

February 6, 2012 at 7:57am

Keely Thomas-Moore

You made a lot of really good points. I think I am convinced of the benefits of creating a part-time flex team. I am a little confused by the end, though, when you start talking about pay rates. Are you saying the flex team are specialists? Usually, I don't think of broadly trained employees this way. But I guess they would be fulfilling a very specialized role in the company, one that is invaluable. Is this a correct understanding of your point?

February 6, 2012 at 6:18pm

Josh Harrington

Thank you Keely, you make a great point that can be a delicate issue within the organization. I think it comes down to the depth of skills of employees. The success of a "flex-team" relies on their ability to fit into multiple different roles as needed. My thought is that smart, talented, broadly effective employees are likely to be more expensive than execution specialists. Think elite special forces team, not infantry.

October 17, 2018 at 6:50pm

Yazmin Barajas

Call centre support are really a flexible team because they are bound to work with shifting schedules but their job is not that easy because they need to be very patient and composed when working. Call centre support are operating 24/7, they can operate like this because they have specialist that can work and they can shift from person to person that is why they are a flex team.