Pillar Administration is undergoing an internal restructure that will see the amalgamation of its client teams by function, reducing the total number of teams from 27 to 18 and affecting 400 people within the organisation, with the changes expected to eliminate “single points of failure”. The restructure, which began this month and is due to be completed in November, will see the 27 client teams within the operations area merged by function, with 16 team managers appointed to oversee separate teams for benefit payments and contributions.

Peter Beck, chief executive officer at Pillar, said the restructure would result in 16 promotions to the role of team manager, with interviews conducted internally last week. Pillar has 10 trustee clients which represent 18 super schemes in total, since most trustee offices have more than one scheme. “We’ve figured out that best practice is to have your contact centre client facing, so we’ve got different teams for different clients, but for administration we used to have a team for each client, so we had contributions and benefit payments in one team, and it doesn’t make sense,” said Beck.

“It’s much better to have teams that are functionally oriented for operations.” Beck said while the group’s leadership would change, Pillar was not looking to hire any additional staff as part of the restructure. It is understood the reorientation would allow Pillar to take on a new client without significant headcount increase as well. “At the coal face it won’t change very much but the teams [staff] are in will change and it’s much easier for us then to manage those volumes and move people around and to cross train,” he said. “It’s much easier to multi-skill somebody for benefit payments for different clients than it is to go from contributions to benefit payments.”