Please read the case study and answer the following questions
AGP is a global internet and telecommunications services company headquartered in London, UK providing services in 120 countries. Its operations in the UK are the company’s biggest after the US, Japan, and Germany. When the new Chief Executive Officer Vishal Sharma was appointed in 2014, the UK Hub was a highly hierarchical organisation with a strong focus on structure and numbers. The UK Hub had a mixed reputation: It was seen as a great organisation with hard-working people and huge potential, yet its performance lagged behind. It had the worse profitability ratio amongst the various Hubs and had been unsuccessful at launching new products or bringing forth real innovation in delivery in recent years.
The UK Hub had five UK branches, located in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham and Plymouth, besides some plans for extending to Aberdeen and Cardiff. Fifteen years ago, the leadership team took the decision to centralise a number of activities to reduce costs. This centralised core included the HRM, Finance and Customer Services team – a 400-strong team of staff working out of Plymouth. The CEO was not sure whether this centralisation had really resulted in efficiency savings or enhanced performance in any way. There have been escalation in complaints from customers and employees about the inconsistent quality of the services that are being provided by centralised teams. There have been many complaints about the time taken to responds to customers, answer calls, the apparent inability of people answering the calls to deal with some enquiries promptly or effectively and the inflexible opening hours of the central service. It is thought that by returning these core activities back to the branches some of these issues will be overcome.
The new CEO’s objective was to get the UK Hub back on track with growth, expansion and profitability and make it an exemplar as before. Yet, simply doing the same things a bit better would not be sufficient and a radical transformation was required to achieve these objectives. With the help of Trip and More, a global leadership development consultant with solid experience in transformation, Sharma began to guide the UK hub on a transformation journey that would turn it into an innovative and resilient organisation, empowering its employees and enabling them to work to their potential.
With respect to this new phase of transformation, there is great uncertainty and ambiguity, with rumours building up regarding cost cutting and redundancies. Staff are anxious and this is causing emotions to run high. Many staff have become demotivated, and have started looking for alternative employment and the levels of sickness absence are high. Targets are slipping and competitors are catching up.
Complaints have been made by staff about the lack of direction, poor and mixed communications and there is an ongoing high profile equal pay dispute which is about to be the subject of formal legal action. Additionally, staff have made complaints about the limited attention given to health and safety issues, the employment of inexperienced line managers, an inflexible approach to hours of work and its practice of monitoring how much time staff spend on toilet breaks. Within the staff complaints, poor levels of commitment and engagement are frequently mentioned, although, this has not been formally measured.