#sharedservices

Everyone ready for smiles week?

Rough month to schedule it, but the calendar invite had already gone out.

For the uninitiated: SMILES Week is when a large company that sells both chips and soda sends everyone a calendar invite to be happy. It's also the month a chunk of our jobs moved to a shared services center in India or Mexico and everyone left behind got a second job's worth of work to "absorb." The timing is either an accident or the funniest thing HR has ever done.

The agenda, roughly:

Monday: Gratitude Circle. Share one thing you're grateful for. I'm grateful my role wasn't in this batch. Yet.

Tuesday: "Doing More With Less" fireside chat. Less is the headcount. More is you.

Wednesday: Wellness Wednesday. Twenty minutes of guided breathing to prepare you for the twelve hours of work that showed up when your teammate got "transitioned." Chair yoga, because standing up looks too much like a walkout.

Thursday: Career Development Day. Big news: the beverage rep and the snack rep are becoming one person. Two P&Ls, two scorecards, two bosses, one paycheck. That's not a merged role, that's a hostage situation with a route sheet.

Friday: Free lunch. One bag of chips, 40% air. Also the target fill rate for open positions.
Closing note from leadership: "Our people are our greatest asset." Assets get depreciated. Please see the attached schedule.

Weekend Edition
SMILES Week officially runs Monday through Friday, which is the schedule of the people who planned it. The people it's about work seven days.

Saturday: Customer Obsession Day. Corporate is at brunch. The field is in a big-box backroom looking for a pallet the system says arrived Thursday. Our in-stock score is tracked to the decimal point and worked by a merchandiser we pay $20 an hour, hired Tuesday, who can make $22 with no weekends at the warehouse across the highway. We told him he's the face of the company. He asked if the face of the company gets mileage.

Saturday, 6:40 a.m. He quit by text. His route is still green on the dashboard, because the dashboard finds things out on Monday, same as his manager.

Sunday: Rest & Recharge Day. The email says rest. The store manager's text at 7:15 says the cooler is empty. That same store manager fills out our customer service survey. "On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us?" He gave a 3. The rep who covered the route unpaid will be coached on that 3 during Monday's Gratitude Circle.

Weekend Bonus: #SmileSelfie Challenge. Post a photo of yourself smiling in an account. Winner gets a $25 gift card, the biggest raise anyone in the photo has seen since 2024. Pro tip: crop out the shelf.

Coverage note. We are a "One Team" culture. The team is currently one guy covering three routes, because the other two are open reqs HR paused for the transformation. He does not give a sh-t about the service score. It is the only rational position anyone in the company has taken all week.

The org is basically Game of Thrones now, except nobody wins the chair, the chair got outsourced, and the survivors get a lanyard that says SMILE.

Someone told me "smiles" is the longest word in English because there's a mile between the first S and the last one. It's also the distance between the all-hands deck and the org chart

Wellstar is implementing workforce reductions affecting 761 employees. These layoffs target corporate and shared services functions, along with some administrative roles. Frontline medical workers will not be impacted by these changes. The company stated the reductions follow an organizational review and are based on industry benchmarks. The exact timing of the layoffs has not been disclosed.

Atlanta

https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/wellstar-layoff-nearly-800-employees

3M GSC Poland is gonna be officially shut down. Of course they did a workaround and they're gonna "move" people instead of firing them so they can save on severances. Philippines and CR are next. They hold crucial processes so I don't think pi----g that many people off is a good idea. It's all gonna fall apart soon. It's impossible to keep any company running while disrespecting so many employees over and over again.

Open forum. What functions do you find relevant for moving to shared services?

Which functions and teams coild be ki-led around the world and why?

The Grayson mill energy Houston office that was shut down, all those people that were let go are probably laughing now that the shared services cuts are going to hit OKC. If you aren’t where the center of power is, you are expendable and it’s only a matter of time. Can’t manage data, can’t support your customers, can’t IT hundreds of miles away :)

Shared services picking what they want to do, Engine revving up jobs (more job losses y'all), collateral damage, scapegoats removed immediately somewhere in S.E.A. while the head roams around Free-ly

The old WIM CAO new to WiIM Shared Services was gutted pretty hard today. Lots of people packed up and displaced……

Whats the impact on shared services

There’s been a lot of snarky posts indicating that the sale of Oxychem to Berkshire Hathaway is going to lead to a lot of people not having any work to do resulting in layoffs. I don’t see this happening. Berkshire Hathaway is well known for not having shared services arrangements inside the conglomerate. Each company operates as a separate unit with its own HR, Treasury, IT, etc. I see the need for a lot of support staff from Greenway to go to OxyChem as a part of the acquisition. Thoughts?

If layoffs are really coming, which group do you think gets hit first: tech, retail, or shared services?

What’s going on with Buenos Aires support center? Will Chevron be able to sublease entire floors by contracting staff in support centers…how will the face to face and relationship between teams work out if your in different timezones, different languages, different cultures..