How We Built a National HR Shared Services Model at the Canadian Red Cross
A case study in centralization, process standardization and change management that delivered at least $500,000 in recurring annual FTE savings while improving service, consistency and the ability to scale nationally.
As organizations grow, local teams often develop their own ways of working.
At first, that can make sense. Local teams understand their operations, their people and the realities of their region.
But over time, local flexibility can turn into duplication.
That was the challenge facing the Canadian Red Cross.
HR, recruitment, emergency response staffing and volunteer support had historically been delivered through decentralized provincial teams. Each region had developed its own processes, templates, workflows and ways of working.
The model provided strong local support, but it also created duplication, inconsistent service and significant challenges when the organization needed to scale quickly during a major emergency response.
The solution wasn't simply to centralize everything.
It was to determine what should be national, what should remain local and how to build a model that could do both.
About this case study: This transformation was led by A&A Consulting founder Shilo Burt while she was an employee of the Canadian Red Cross, prior to founding A&A Consulting. Shilo led the work from current-state assessment and future-state design through implementation, process standardization, team development and ongoing leadership of the new national shared services function.
At a Glance
Organization | Canadian Red Cross |
Scope | National, coast to coast |
Functions | HR, recruitment, emergency response staffing and volunteer support |
Challenge | Highly decentralized provincial teams with duplicated roles, processes, tools and ways of working |
Approach | Current-state assessment, process mapping, Start/Stop/Continue sessions, operating model redesign, standardization and national governance |
Future State | National shared services function combined with locally embedded HR Business Partners |
Financial Impact | At least $500,000 in recurring annual FTE savings |
Service Improvement | Two-business-day turnaround standard and extended national coverage |
Long-Term Impact | A scalable national HR infrastructure capable of responding to significant spikes in operational demand |
In This Case Study:
The Challenge: One Organization, Many Ways of Working
Before the transformation, HR support at the Canadian Red Cross was largely decentralized.
Individual provinces and regions had their own HR teams supporting their local operations.
Alberta, for example, had its own HR Business Partner, HR Coordinator and recruitment support. British Columbia had its own team. Saskatchewan and Manitoba had theirs.
The same was true across much of the country.
While everyone worked for the same organization, the regional HR functions often operated almost like independent teams.
Each had developed its own processes, templates and approaches to delivering services.
There was limited national governance and limited opportunity to share capacity or best practices across regions.
That created duplication across:
HR administration;
recruitment;
emergency response staffing;
volunteer support;
employee documentation;
forms and templates;
workflows;
processes; and
day-to-day HR support.
It also meant an employee or operational leader could have a very different HR experience depending on where in Canada they worked.
As the organization grew and responded to increasingly complex emergencies, that model became difficult and expensive to sustain.
Why the Existing Model Couldn't Scale
Cost savings were one of the original drivers for exploring a centralized model.
But emergency response operations exposed an even bigger problem.
When a major disaster occurred, demand for HR and recruitment support could increase dramatically and almost overnight.
The 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire response was one example.
Under the decentralized model, much of the responsibility for rapidly scaling staffing and HR support fell to the local team.
But in an emergency response organization, the local HR team may also be personally impacted by the same disaster.
At the same time, there could be HR capacity elsewhere in Canada that wasn't easily accessible because every region operated relatively independently.
The organization needed to be able to move work and capacity across provincial boundaries.
The question became:
How do we create national scale without losing the local knowledge and relationships that are still important?
Understanding the Current State
The work started with discovery, not restructuring.
Approximately three months were spent understanding how HR services were actually being delivered across Canada.
That meant speaking directly with the people doing the work and the operational leaders receiving the service.
Key HR employees in every province were interviewed, along with operational leaders across the country.
Existing workflows, templates, tools and processes were collected and compared.
Rather than attempting to redesign every edge case immediately, the work followed an 80/20 approach, focusing first on the activities and processes with the greatest impact.
The current-state assessment explored questions such as:
What is working well today?
What isn't working?
Where are we duplicating effort?
Where are different regions solving the same problem differently?
What needs to remain local?
What could be delivered nationally?
What would prevent a national model from working?
What do operational leaders actually need from HR?
That discovery became the foundation for the future-state operating model.
Designing the Future-State Model
The goal was never to move every HR activity into one centralized team.
Some work benefited significantly from standardization and national delivery.
Other work still needed local context.
The resulting model was intentionally hybrid.
Shared Services
Transactional and repeatable HR activities, recruitment support, emergency response staffing, volunteer support and other services that could be standardized moved into a national shared services model.
Embedded HR Business Partners
HR Business Partners remained closer to the operations they supported.
That preserved local relationships and provided access to people who understood regional operations and provincial employment requirements.
The principle was relatively simple:
National where consistency, efficiency and scale mattered. Local where relationships, context and specialized knowledge mattered.
That distinction became critical to both the operating model and the change strategy.
Using Start, Stop, Continue to Prepare for Change
Once the current state had been mapped and the future-state model began taking shape, the next challenge was helping regional teams understand what the change actually meant for them.
A coast-to-coast series of Start, Stop, Continue exercises was used to translate the operating model into practical action.
For each region, the discussion focused on three questions.
What do we need to START doing?
What new processes, behaviours and ways of working would be required under the shared services model?
What do we need to STOP doing?
What regional activities, duplicate processes or old ways of working needed to end?
What should we CONTINUE doing?
What was already working well and needed to be preserved?
These sessions did more than prepare teams operationally.
They also became an important part of the change-management strategy.
People could see where the organization was going, challenge assumptions and understand how their feedback was influencing the future state before everything was finalized.
Standardizing Without Losing Local Expertise
Centralizing the work created another practical challenge.
A shared services team member needed to be able to support an employee in Alberta one day and an employee in Nova Scotia the next.
That meant the national team needed tools that made regional differences easy to navigate.
The answer wasn't to ignore provincial differences.
It was to incorporate them into the national process.
Templates, workflows and resources were designed so that shared services employees could clearly identify where provincial requirements differed.
The goal was to make HR support increasingly plug and play.
Employees shouldn't need to hunt through different provincial folders, ask someone which template was current or recreate a process every time a request arrived.
The approved national resource should tell them what they needed to know.
Creating One Source of Truth
Standardization ultimately extended across virtually every aspect of HR service delivery, including:
standard operating procedures;
offer letters;
employment documentation;
forms;
templates;
policies;
workflows;
intake processes;
service standards; and
supporting HR resources.
But the organization didn't wait until every document was perfect before launching shared services.
The function was centralized first.
Then the library continued to be built and improved as the team operated.
When a process or document needed to be standardized, the existing regional versions were collected and reviewed.
For example, if multiple versions of an offer letter existed across the country, the team would compare them, determine what was actually required, develop a proposed national version and obtain stakeholder approval.
Then came an important step that is often missed in standardization projects:
The old versions were removed.
Creating one new template doesn't create a national standard if six old templates are still sitting in six different folders.
Previous versions were archived and removed from general access.
The organization gradually moved toward a true single source of truth.
Standardization Also Required Governance
The work wasn't only about creating better documents.
It required decisions about:
where documents would live;
who owned them;
who could update them;
how changes would be approved;
when resources needed to be reviewed;
how previous versions would be archived; and
how employees would know they were using the current version.
A centralized SharePoint repository became an important part of the solution.
Over time, the project became as much about information and process governance as document creation.
Without that governance, the organization would eventually have ended up with multiple versions again.
Building Coast-to-Coast Coverage
A national model didn't mean putting the national team in one location.
In fact, geographic distribution became one of its strengths.
The shared services leadership team itself was distributed across Canada, including Calgary, Ottawa and Nova Scotia.
Employees worked schedules based largely on their local time zones while maintaining common core hours for collaboration.
That naturally extended the organization's HR coverage.
When employees in Calgary were beginning their workday, colleagues in Atlantic Canada had already been online for hours.
An urgent Atlantic issue didn't need to wait for someone in Alberta to start work.
Likewise, the entire function wasn't dependent on one regional team being available.
Instead of several disconnected regional teams, the organization now had:
One national team distributed across multiple time zones.
Creating a National Intake and Service Model
One of the most useful improvements was also one of the simplest.
The organization needed a way to see the work coming into shared services.
Initially, requests were captured through email and fed into a Smartsheet-based ticketing process.
It wasn't a complicated enterprise platform.
It didn't need to be.
The system allowed requests to be:
captured;
assigned;
tracked;
completed; and
reported on.
For the first time, the team had much greater visibility into national demand.
There was less risk of an email sitting unnoticed in someone's inbox.
Work could be assigned based on capacity rather than simply geography.
And the team could establish and measure service standards.
A two-business-day turnaround standard was introduced for shared services requests, representing a significant improvement over the previous model.
Using Data to Continuously Improve
Centralized intake created another benefit that hadn't been as readily available before:
data.
Once requests were being captured consistently, the team could see patterns.
For example, imagine a sudden increase in questions about vacation entitlements.
The immediate response could be to answer those questions faster.
But the more valuable question is:
Why are so many employees having to ask us this in the first place?
Perhaps the information isn't easy to find.
Perhaps managers don't understand it.
Perhaps the SharePoint page needs to be clearer.
Perhaps a process isn't working as intended.
The team could use service data to identify those patterns and address the underlying issue.
That created a continuous-improvement cycle:
Request → Data → Pattern → Root Cause → Improvement → Fewer Requests
Shared services was no longer simply processing transactions.
The function could start using its own operational data to improve how HR worked.
The Hardest Part: Getting Buy-In
Designing processes wasn't the hardest part of the transformation.
Getting people comfortable with centralization was.
The Canadian Red Cross operated within a complex matrix structure. Regional areas had their own leadership, priorities and established ways of working.
For some stakeholders, a national shared services model sounded less like efficiency and more like:
Everything is going to Ottawa.
That concern was particularly strong in Western Canada.
So rather than beginning implementation with the easiest or most supportive region, the change strategy deliberately started in the West.
The reasoning was straightforward.
If the people with the greatest concerns were brought into the process early, they would have more opportunity to influence the model.
And if some of the strongest skeptics could ultimately support the future state, implementation elsewhere would become significantly easier.
That meant spending time on:
open conversations;
listening to concerns;
explaining the rationale;
showing people where the model was heading;
demonstrating how feedback was being considered; and
building trust before asking people to change.
It wasn't about convincing people that every concern was wrong.
In many cases, their concerns helped identify what the model needed to get right.
The Start, Stop, Continue sessions therefore weren't simply operational planning exercises.
They were change-management interventions.
The Results
The transformation delivered substantial financial savings.
The redesigned model ultimately resulted in approximately eight FTE positions being removed from the decentralized structure, with individual salaries ranging roughly from $60,000 to $100,000 before benefits and other employment costs.
The conservatively documented financial impact was:
At least $500,000 in recurring annual FTE savings.
The actual total employment-cost reduction was likely higher, but cost reduction was only one part of the outcome.
The organization also achieved:
More Consistent National Service
Employees and operational leaders were no longer relying on completely different HR processes depending on their province.
Faster Turnaround Times
The national shared services function established a two-business-day service standard for incoming requests.
Extended Service Coverage
A geographically distributed team created broader coverage across Canadian time zones.
Less Duplication
Processes, documents and transactional activities no longer needed to be independently recreated and maintained by every region.
Better Visibility
Centralized intake made it possible to understand volumes, demand, service levels and recurring issues.
Greater Self-Service
Service data helped identify information gaps that could be addressed through better tools and employee-facing resources.
Stronger Governance
National ownership, review processes and document controls helped prevent the organization from gradually returning to multiple versions and regional workarounds.
Greater Ability to Scale
Perhaps most importantly, the organization was no longer limited by the capacity of whichever provincial team happened to be experiencing the demand.
Work could move across the country.
That capability became increasingly important during major national response operations.
Designing a Model We Actually Had to Live With
There was another important difference between this transformation and a traditional consulting project.
The work didn't end when the future-state operating model was approved.
Shilo built the national shared services team, implemented the new ways of working and then led the function once it was operational.
That created accountability for whether the design actually worked.
Processes continued to evolve through real-world use.
Gaps became visible.
Governance matured.
Service standards could be measured.
Intake data identified new opportunities for self-service and process improvement.
And the team continued refining the model based on what employees, managers and operational leaders actually needed.
By the time Shilo left the Canadian Red Cross to move into consulting, the shared services function was established, the team was stable and the model had become part of how HR operated nationally.
It wasn't a future-state PowerPoint.
It was a functioning national operation.
And Then the Model Was Tested at an Entirely Different Scale
One of the strongest tests of an operating model is what happens when demand suddenly changes.
The national HR infrastructure established through this transformation later helped create the foundation for a dramatically larger scale-up during the COVID-19 response.
The HR operation ultimately scaled from approximately 12 people to 100 while supporting the onboarding of approximately 5,000 people in six months.
That transformation deserves a case study of its own.
But it reinforced one of the most important outcomes of the original shared services work:
The organization had built an HR model that could scale nationally when the operation needed it most.
What Other Organizations Can Learn From This Transformation
Centralization doesn't have to mean putting everyone in one building.
It doesn't have to mean removing every local role.
And it shouldn't mean taking ten different versions of a broken process and forcing everyone to use the eleventh.
The strongest operating model will depend on the organization.
But there are several lessons from this transformation that continue to influence how we approach this work at A&A today.
1. Understand the current state before designing the future state
You need to understand why different ways of working developed before deciding which ones should disappear.
2. Don't centralize everything just because you can
Some work benefits from national consistency. Other work depends on local relationships, context and expertise.
The answer can be both.
3. Focus on the 80% first
You don't need to solve every exception before improving the processes that represent most of the work.
4. One source of truth has to actually mean one
Publishing a new template isn't standardization if employees can still access six old versions.
5. Governance matters
Every standardized process eventually needs an owner, review cycle and clear method for making changes.
Otherwise, standardization slowly unravels.
6. You don't need perfect technology to improve visibility
A relatively simple intake and tracking system created enough data to understand demand, monitor service and identify improvement opportunities.
7. Use service data to reduce service demand
The goal isn't always to answer the same question faster.
Sometimes the better solution is figuring out why everyone keeps asking it.
8. Design for the spikes, not only the average day
A model that works beautifully during normal operations can still fail when demand triples overnight.
For emergency response organizations, seasonal businesses and rapidly growing companies, scalability has to be part of the design.
9. Start with the resistance, not around it
The people most concerned about a transformation often understand its risks better than anyone else.
Involving them early can improve both the solution and the likelihood that people will adopt it.
10. Implementation is where operating-model design gets real
An organization chart can look perfect on paper.
The real test is whether employees can work within it on Monday morning.
Transformation Should Work After the Project Ends
A future-state operating model is only valuable if people can actually work within it.
The experience of designing, implementing and then leading this national shared services model continues to influence how we approach transformation work at A&A Consulting today.
We focus on practical operating models, clear processes, usable tools, defined ownership and the change management required to move from the current state to a future state that actually works.
Whether you're centralizing a function, redesigning how work gets done, standardizing processes across locations or trying to scale an organization that has outgrown its current model, the goal isn't simply to design the future state.
It's to make the future state work.
People. Process. Performance.
Do you have an upcoming transformation you could use support with us? Book a free, no-obligation discovery call.
