An organizational restructure at Kenya’s leading telecommunication giant Safaricom has caused anxiety among her staff.
Safaricom seeks to adopt what it calls “agile organizational structure” which requires a huge number of employees to re-apply for their jobs in a bid to fit the new structure.
The agile structure that Safaricom is rooting for will do away with the hierarchical structure that the telecommunication firm has been operating on for years.
The new stricture will have four major departments which it has christened as “tribes”. All other current departments have hitherto, been collapsed into tribes.
The new plan will eradicate the existing barriers between junior and senior staff and employees will work in squads which form tribes.
An executive committee will be formed to receive reports from each of the four tribes – Payments, Fixed Data, Mobile Data and Digital Care.
Employees are now required to apply for the advertised positions afresh. The management has communicated the changes in organizational structure to the employees.
“Two weeks ago, we started the journey towards becoming an agile organisation. 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,” Safaricom CEO Peter Ndegwa said in a memo according to People Daily.
“As detailed in the organisational 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 added.
The fears from a section of employees are that some of them may end up losing their jobs if they fail to secure a position under the new plan.
“We are currently applying for the agile jobs as we go on with our normal duties. You simply check the responsibilities and skills required and apply if you qualify.
“If you don’t get the position, you wait for the next tribe to be formed and apply,” an anonymous source told said.
Some former Heads of Departments have landed new roles as tribe heads. Squads formation comes as soon as all tribe leads are sourced.
The positions under the new structure will only be advertised externally once all internal human resource measures are exhausted in filling the positions.
