In the new structure, Safaricom will adopt an agile system that will get rid of the traditional hierarchical model that the company has been following previously.
In March this year, Safaricom chief executive officer Peter Ndegwa said that he was working to change the work structure at Safaricom. “I want people to be free and know they can make a career regardless of where they come from or who they are. If there’s something I could do is collapse this structure so that people can feel free to innovate and deliver on their careers,” he said.
This was followed by a memo in which Mr. Ndegwa announced that the restructuring had kicked off.
“Two weeks ago, we started the journey towards becoming an agile organization. This will enable us to serve our customers better by sustaining our customer obsession efforts, achieve deeper engagements with our colleagues, connect with our community and deliver greater shareholder returns for the company. As detailed in the organizational and divisional town halls, our agile transformation will unfold across several months. This will be through a graduated approach that will ensure we collect feedback and literate as we launch more tribes,” he said in the memo in late March.
Many of the current departments and offices will be collapsed in a move which will severally blur traditional boundaries between superiors and their subordinates. The changes intend to make employees work in groups called squads, where several squads will form a tribe.
Each tribe will then report to the executive committee (exco). So far, four tribes namely Digital Care, Mobile Data, Fixed Data, and Payments have already been created with positions advertised internally, and are open to all employees
COTU Puts Safaricom CEO on Spot for Asking Employees to Reapply for Their Jobs
Weighing in on the matter, the Francis Atwoli led union expressed concerns about the prospects of job security of the workers, especially after they were required to re-apply for their positions.
Therefore, the trade union demanded Ndegwa to abort his mission, which it claimed was causing anguish, despair, and depression among its employees.
Should he persist, the workers union said it would appeal to the company's board of directors, including other shareholders, to relieve him of his duties over what they termed "poor managerial style".
It is unacceptable for Safaricom to come up with new models of management that would end up affecting the lives and livelihoods of many. As @COTU_K we are opposed to such models considering they go against ILO conventions on protection of jobs. pic.twitter.com/fYHRiSMQSi
— Francis Atwoli NOM (DZA), CBS, EBS, MBS. (@AtwoliDza) April 25, 2021
New structure
In the new structure, in East Africa’s most profitable company, there will be the formation of small teams known as squads.
The squads will then be put together in a tribe and the tribes will report to the executive committee. Every tribe will have 60 to 100 employees, while squads will be made up of eight to 10 workers.
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Ndegwa said the company would have increased its staff at the end of the process since they will hire more people with a technology background and digital skills, contrary to the reducing employees notion. As previously reported, the company's M-Pesa was for the fourth year running voted Kenya’s leading superbrand.
The mobile money transfer platform emerged as the winner of a survey undertaken in 2020 by top urban consumers in the country's three leading cities of Kisumu, Mombasa, and Nairobi.
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