Agile organisation structure boosted employee and customer satisfaction

In 2021 Telenor Shared Services (TSS) made a radical change in the organizational structure. To become more customer focused and to empower our employees, we rebuilt the entire company structure around our services.

Each service domain in TSS were organized in cross-functional Squads with an end-to-end responsibility for their deliveries. Squads that naturally belonged together were organised in Tribes; Digital Services, Finance Services, People Services and Procurement Services. Supporting functions were kept to a minimum and organised in Chapters.

When summarizing our 2023 survey results, it was evident that the change resulted in more engaged and enabled employees - and more satisfied end-users!

In our old organizational structure the service deliveries were fragmented across the organization with multiple dependencies and internal handovers. By introducing the new Tribe, Squad and Chapter structure the service ownership and delivery became clearly defined and organized. The new organizational structure is the same whether the service is process based, transactional or if its an IT system.

Their own CEO

“Each Squad Lead acts like a “CEO” within their domain. They have full end-to-end responsibility for development, maintenance, operation, financials, customer contact etc. for their service. We believe that the experts within each squad knows their service and customers’ need and expectation the best”, CEO Morten Dunham says.

Fantastic NPS score

Pinning full responsibility for the services to the Squads, has paid off in several ways. Increased user satisfaction is one of them. We are using the industry standard ‘Net Promoter Score’ (NPS) to measure it.

“When we started to measure NPS in 2016, our score was as low as -78%. After evaluating the findings and constantly adjusting our services and support accordingly, we climbed to a positive 35% in 2019. After our reorganization in 2021 we reached a whopping 74% in 2022 and an all-time-high of 81% in 2023”, Dunham proudly announce.

To put this amazing result in context; the industry average for ‘Technology & Services’ is 64%, according to “Recently 2023 NPS Benchmarks for B2B”. A number above 80 is nothing less than EXCELLENT and means that 8 out of 10 users have rated their TSS Help Desk experience with a score of 9 or 10!

Engaged and enabled employees

It’s not only the end-user’s experience that has improved. The employees in TSS feel more empowered after the re-organization. In the resent Employee Engagement Survey (EES), TSS scored 79% favorable on the Engagement index and 81% on the Enablement index. That is 6% points above the Telenor average, and 4% points higher than High Performance companies worldwide!

CEO Morten D. Dunham during the highly engaging AI Ideathon last year…

“Through our work with NPS, we have learned to take feedback seriously. Also, internally among our employees when working on the EES. Each Squad has come up with a set of actions on how to improve areas they are not satisfied with”, Morten Dunham says.

By following up frequently, 74% of the employees now say that TSS take actions based on the feedback from previous survey. That is a significant 10% higher score than Telenor average.

Interesting work

Working systematically with change and improvement is according to Dunham not the only reason for great survey results and employees feeling ‘Enabled’. “We also acknowledge that the work we do and services we now deliver is appealing to a lot of professionals. We are frontrunners in several areas and are working with the latest and greatest technology. We offer interesting and challenging jobs and have created great teams of experts within areas like automation, cloud, AI, security, privacy, and architecture to mention a few. If people enjoy what they do and are empowered to grow and develop, satisfaction and a good company culture comes by itself”, Dunham says.

Other notable EES scores

• ‘Our opportunity to develop’ – 86% favorable – 14% points higher than high performing peers.
• ‘My team actively share ideas’ – 83% favorable – 14% points higher than high performing peers.
• ‘Flexibility in my work’ – 87% favorable – 12% points higher than high performing peers.
• ‘People are recognized for a good job’ – 83% favorable – 11% points higher than high performing peers.
• ‘Able to be myself at work’ – 90% favorable – 7% points higher than high performing peers.