Safaricom Employees In Fear of CEO’s Ndegwa Agility Plan

Safaricom CEO Peter Ndegwa seeks is to transform Safaricom into a world-class technology company as part of his transformative agenda. This agenda, however, has created anxiety among employees.

The telecommunication company says the strategy is common and is known in global circles as agile. It entails the formation of small teams known as squads. These squads will then be put together in a tribe, and the tribes will report to the executive committee.

Every tribe will have 60 to 100 employees while every squad will have 8 to 10 workers. Squads will deliver on a customer journey or the customer outcome. The teams will not pre-determine how many squads or tribes they will contain. After a period of time, there will be frontrunners where other squads can learn from and the formation of other teams can begin.

The main aim of the plan is to break hierarchical structures, eliminate some roles among other significant changes. The employees have been left anxious since they have been told to reapply for their jobs. Speaking in an interview, Mr.Ndegwa insisted that the changes are for the company to improve its services.

“We are not changing because we are weak. We are changing because we are strong and we want to access new growth areas. We are not under pressure to save costs,” Mr. Ndegwa said.

He added that they have been using their town hall meetings to communicate changes to the employees to calm fears of dismissal.

He affirmed that the plan was not to reduce staff, but rather, the changes would give the employees a chance to improve and learn a new skill.  He also said that the changes would ensure the shareholders get better returns. As a result, the CEO hopes to still remain relevant in the community since the purpose of agile is to ensure customer satisfaction.

The CEO intends to increase its staff at the end of the process “since we will hire more people with a technology background and digital skills”.

John Jim