Shared Services Teams that Inspire

For organizations with more than one location, a high-performing shared services team can allow growth without sacrificing quality and local experience. These "back office" teams succeed when focused on every local site being its best. Below is an introduction to ten principles that guide excellence, value, and success across the enterprise.

1. Excellence Before Scale

   Shared services must first be about enabling excellence, and then about capturing economies of scale. There's no win tied to how identical you can make everything. Success comes when you focus on excellence for everyone. That excellence may result in similarities and efficiencies across sites, but the similarity is a byproduct of excellence, not the goal. Spreading expertise and resources efficiently is part of the formula for excellence.

   
   

2. A Clear Line to Dollars Raised

   Each shared service position should have a clear, direct connection to increasing dollars in the door at a local site. Being able to clearly articulate value builds trust in the system and the people guiding it.

   
   

3. Being the Best and Always Learning

   Shared service leaders should be the best at what they do and steadily get better. Local leaders should rarely or ever feel like they could do the job better than their shared services colleagues. Being a subject matter expert requires a constant focus on education, innovation, collaboration and a learning mindset.

4. Be IRL

   Being at a local site comes with specific physical demands, and so does shared services. Be physically present as much as possible. Plan your visits to each site and accept that much of your success is tied to your willingness to be in person. The "yes, and" to this guidance is do not make your visits extra work for the local team, and don't make a huge show of you being there. Just be a thoughtful guest, ask how you can add value, be a team member they look forward to seeing, not "one of them" swooping in for the day.

   
   

5. Make Expenses Visible

   Develop a formula for allocating shared service expenses. Be transparent about the formula and remove any mystery about what is included in the allocation. Review the formula every few years with the local teams to ensure it’s the right approach. During budgeting, develop the share services budgets with local leader feedback and share the final shared services budget including the allocation carried by each site. Provide talking points about the shared services value to local leaders. It's these local leaders who often have to defend shared services to their boards.

6. Incentivize Collaboration

   Either hold one shared operational goal across the entire organization or tie the shared services goal to the number of local sites that meet their local fundraising goal. It's important that shared services not just invest in the local sites with the biggest donor potential. Examples of an operational shared goals across the organization are number of meetings with new donors; new physician referrals; number of major gift solicitations made. Each of those goals is influenced by work that is both local and centralized.

7. Make Connections

   Shared service team members get the benefit of learning about every local site. Actively connect those sites with each other for collaboration and cross-learning. Have a Zoom/Teams call bringing employees from multiple sites around a single topic or just make a warm email introduction between two leaders working on similar challenges.

8. Survey Every Year

   Create a survey that measures both shared services effectiveness and the way local sites partner with shared services. Share results both ways, be transparent about the survey, and build action plans where needed.

   
   

9. Build Systems with Flexibility

   Process and systems are important to successful shared service teams, but the goal is to raise the most, not to have the most rigid system. Listen to the local teams and be open to adjusting and to making exceptions. Opportunities sometimes come quick and sending a canned response about turnaround time erodes the trust you need to make shared services really work.

   
   

10. Weave into Local Life.

    Weave shared service employees into the life of the local site, including staff retreats and celebrations. Don’t overthink this part, and do understand that some shared service employees will worry about imposing. Help everyone by explicitly inviting shared service colleagues to be on-site. If you don't want shared services colleagues to act like vendors, treat them like full members of your team.

If you'd like to learn more about these principles and how to build shared service teams that enable, and not smother, excellence, reach out.