On 24 April, Jimmy Smith held a town hall for all staff. It covered Restructuring, repositioning and consolidating ILRI; Managing change; and adjustments to compensation in 2014. It also touched on financial performance, staffing levels and distribution, diversity, the reclassification exercise, critical success factors and ILR@40.

View the presentation

Watch/listen to the audio recording

Read a summary prepared by Susan MacMillan:

Colleagues:

I’m sharing with you ILRI news that I presented to the staff a couple of weeks ago. My focus was, and remains, about three main things: Performance—and how we translate individual performance into institutional performance; Integrity—no smoke and mirrors at ILRI; and Change, because we’re in a period of great change, both externally and internally.

Key changes in the coming weeks reflect our aim to achieve ILRI’s strategy and ensure that our matrix structure functions well, enabling us to deliver on CGIAR research programs and ILRI’s wider livestock mandate.

• John McIntire, deputy director general for integrated sciences will leave ILRI on 3 June to take up a position as vice president at IFAD in Rome, an appointment for which we offer our sincere congratulations.
• Appointment of Iain Wright, leader of ILRI’s Animal Science for Sustainable Productivity Program and representative of the director general in Ethiopia, as interim deputy director general for Integrated Sciences
• Appointment of Siboniso Moyo to replace Iain as leader of the Animal Science for Sustainable Productivity Program and the director general’s representative in Ethiopia
• Expanded portfolio for Martin van Weerdenburg, director of corporate services, who will become chief operating officer (and we will be recruiting for a senior finance officer)
• Recognition of the expanded portfolio for Shirley Tarawali, director of institutional planning and partnerships, who will become assistant director general and remain secretary to the board of trustees
• Creation of a new department, ‘People and Organizational Development’, to reflect the need to address much more than human resources per se, and the appointment of Patricia Chale as director and Margaret Macdonald-Levy as associate director

I also provided updates on the institute’s financing and staffing as well as plans for 2014.

Some good financial news

• We’re growing: Starting in 2011 as a $45m organization, we’re now an $83m organization
• In 2013 we executed 98% of our budget, which is exemplary
• In 2013, we reduced our overheads from 23% to 14% (due to greater efficiency and execution of our entire budget)

Some good staffing news

• In East Africa, 386 staff are based in Kenya, 232 in Ethiopia, 2 in Tanzania, 5 in Uganda
• We’re working to get more of our staff based in regions outside of East Africa (625 of our 685 staff are presently based in East Africa)
• We’ve reduced staff based on our Nairobi campus from 90% in 2011 to 69% now
• We’re becoming more diversified, with large numbers of staff from Africa, Europe and North America, but also now from Latin America and Asia, and even Central Asia
• 50% of our managers are women
• 3 of the 6 people who report to me, and 14 of my 28 next-level managers, are women
• At staff request, we reclassified 86 nationally recruited jobs (of 97 applications)
• We changed research job titles and promoted 5 internationally recruited staff
• We’re developing a workforce plan and an employment model to make ILRI career-oriented
• ILRI’s average length of service has dropped considerably in the last two years to 5.5 years for nationally recruited staff and 4.8 years for internationally recruited staff
• The average age of ILRI staff has also dropped
• Half of our international staff and a third of our national staff have joined ILRI since 2012
• Notwithstanding all the pain of outsourcing and trying to deal with the shocks of change, we have recruited many more people than we have terminated

ILRI@40 anniversary

• ILRI will be 40 years old this year (20 years of ILRAD and ILCA plus 20 of ILRI)
• We’ll mark this occasion by raising the profile of livestock in the development agenda and building awareness of the importance of the livestock sector, which makes up about 40% of agricultural GDP in many countries but gets only 5% of agricultural funding
• We’ll mark the anniversary particularly at the following events:

• Tropentag (Europe, Sep)
• World Food Day / Prize (USA, Oct)
• All-Africa Conference of Animal Agriculture (Kenya, Oct)
• Major ILRI conference (Ethiopia, Nov)

Staff commitment

• As our new long-term strategy outlines, we’re assessing our progress towards three strategic objectives by monitoring five critical success factors: 1 Getting the science right, 2 influencing decision-makers, 3 developing capacities (internally as well as externally), 4 ensuring that ILRI is fit for purpose, and 5 securing new funding (with a new business development unit)
•  ILRI’s culture is based on ethics and integrity, on performance, on being innovative and adaptable, on being a fun place to work
• II end this conversation as I began: We shall continue to pursue three priorities: performance, integrity and change