Assessment Of Employee Perceptions On Decentralisation Of Shared Services: A Case Study Of World Agroforestry Centre, ICRAF

Decentralisation of shared services is an important strategic tool because it standardises business processes and operational procedures, reduces costs and optimises operational efficiency in a way that enhances compliance with regulatory requirements and better services to the customers. The purpose of this study was to assess the employees‘ perceptions on decentralisation of shared services model for ICRAF. The study used a case study of ICRAF to bring out the benefits of decentralising shared services, determine the criteria that should guide decentralisation, establish the challenges to decentralisation, determine the factors that influence effectiveness of decentralisation and to craft strategies that can enhance decentralisation of shared services. Stratified random sampling was used to select 118 employees from ICRAF payroll of whom 84 responded to the survey. Data was analyzed by use of descriptive statistics and one way ANOVA. The study shows that the benefits of decentralisation are standardization of operations, streamlining, and consolidating common business functions and processes in an organisation in order to improve efficiency and effectiveness with both cost reduction and overall profitability in mind. Other benefits include enhanced cross-regional collaborations, performance without strong supervision, staff motivation and reduced bureaucracy. The study further discloses the criteria that should guide decentralisation as providing staff with clearly defined objectives, clarity on services that are to be shared, identified core competencies, agreed tasks to be identified and ensuring that qualified and capable team leaders are available among others. The challenges to implementation of decentralisation of shared services as determined by the study are constraints by poor management skills, insufficient budgets, job losses, resistance to change, lack of understanding of staff role, time to train staff on decentralisation, duplication of services and changes in work policy as well as inadequate facilities. The strategies that can be put in place to enhance implementation of decentralisation of shared services are 1). Communication strategy — a clear, simple communication with staff: top-down-top is key to success. 2). Staff development plans: organisations must invest in training staff to equip them into taking up new roles and 3). Transparent work policies — this would lead to significant efficiency gains and increase the time spent by Centre resources on more strategic functions and core research activities. The study recommends enhanced managerial training so as to build adequate capacity for the decentralised structure. The organisation should clearly define the decentralisation process provide simple updates to all staff in addition to carrying out awareness campaigns. Most importantly, the organisation needs to create consultation and e-groups for staff in the regions for ease of processes integration.