Structuring and Design for a Startup Organization

Introduction

For any organization, whether established or a startup, to be successful in its domain, it is of paramount importance for the leadership to embrace change that would elevate the organizational effectiveness strategy that would lead to steady foundation built for the future.

 

The planned long-term efforts led and supported by the management to enhance the ability to solve problems by the behavioral skills and team-work spirit is the essence of organizational development. Such concerted efforts lead to a seamless workflow, enhanced efficiency, greater motivation, and perceptible results within the business.

 

To assist the organizations with Human Resource Development, Business Consultations, and Organizational Development strategies, Transcurve Consulting assists the organizations to get the best out of their business endeavors, leveraging the proficiency of a startup as well larger conglomerates.

 

This study is about an overall business strategy developed and implemented for a newly established IT solutions/consulting provider.

 

Problem

 

With the overall expertise in all domains, still, the firm was not able to meet the deadlines and the projects were getting delayed/cancelled at regular intervals. Many of the employees were not happy with the working patterns (daily operations) and the coordinators tried to work on the areas requiring improvement but most of the employees avoided/dismayed the appraisal and the review sessions due to lack in motivation to deliver what was required. The low performance also resulted in legal consequences which the company was not able to bear.

 

Diagnosis  

The firm elicited the expert (Transcurve Consultants) help to get things on track and initiated a transformation project. Several interviews and questionnaires were created by specialist and while assessing the company’s performance the first thing noticed was appraisals were not being attended by the employees and those who attended had answered the questions in haste.

Instead of asking the employees the reason for it, the consultants delved into the system, practices and existing documents and found that the administration had nothing concrete in place to evaluate employees performance and had some lengthy set of questionnaires (irrelevant) which because of time constraints were generally avoided. Then those consultants interviewed the whole team using the action-based research and recording the results.

 

 

Result Analysis

 

The comprehensive interview and appraisal sessions resulted in a large amount of data and the most important thing and obvious thing concluded was the lack of proper communication and efficient channels for seamless workflows. All the major problems were resulting because of these two situations and other shortcomings were like the absence of dedicated teams for regular operational delivery, no room for analytical work, and improper allocation of tasks resulting in IT tasks failure.

 

The Transcurve Approach and the solutions rendered

 

Employees at all levels need to be aligned on their companies' larger goal, and those goals need to be broken down to a smaller scale to ensure that people remain engaged in day-to-day operations.

 

Part 1: Things to be worked on by Management 

 

Starting with the firm’s administration, the special training session was arranged and three main steps were propounded for aligning the organization’s goals-

 

1. Consistent Feedback

 

Feedback acts as a reminder, and the managers who consistently provide it to the employees help them in enhancing the performance. The feedback keeps the big picture in front of the employees without letting them catch in mundane works. Transcurve suggested that feedback should be ‘corrective’ in nature not ‘belittling’ and the employees must see value in it. Transcurve developed Informal as well as Formal feedback tools and processes, that were easy to comprehend for all employees as well the management team. The practice builds up a foundation for the organization to start something that was not only missing but also did not added a motivation rigor for employees to take their work seriously.

2. Accurate Allocation of tasks    

The second step elaborated was making the employees know their specific roles in the project. This important step helps all in visualizing the company’s overall strategy and how each role helps in advancing towards the main goal. Using feedback and reviews, the employee’s level of competency, the strength and weakness, and the measures to improve the overall productivity can be assessed and based on this information; the task can be allotted to the most competent person for the job. The best working managers assist the employees set and achieve their individual goals and align them with the overall goals of the organization.

 

3. Recognition

 

While employee engagement is essential to keep the firm growing and reach its vision, the employee recognition program constructively impacts the engagement. Not recognizing employee’s effort leads them to lose the purpose track and when the wins are celebrated together, they like to win more. These simple psychological tricks must be deployed by the administration and a simple acknowledgment note, a small ‘thank you’ gift, or little incentive works wonders.

 

Part2: Integration of dedicated teams

 

1. A special team of goal-focused individuals with specialized expertise and complementary skills who collaborate, innovate and produce consistently superior results was also required in the organization; and taking a note, Transcurve structured and integrated three main teams within the organization:

ü  IT Infrastructure and Data Services,

ü  Service Delivery (Customer and Process)

ü  Analytics & Modelling

 

2. The firm also lacked the legal compliance and the advisory board to counter financial, HR and governance glitches. For the purpose, Transcurve suggested to outsource such tasks and instead of creating an in-house team, seek the services from a reputed firm first.

 

3. End-to-End finance and HR-related framework were established and implemented in the organization and calculated net savings of 20% in the same profit-loss statement with structuring of the team only.

 

Part 3: Revamping the organizational workflow

 

For the proper communication at various levels and streamlining the workflow various Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Management Tools like Office 365, Hubspot CRM, and ASANA, as per the requirements, were introduced, implemented, and on-boarded to all.   

 

The last step was to fabricate and integrate the new server setups, and IT infrastructure and compliance regulations within the organization that fixed all the loopholes assessed in the all-inclusive investigations at the start.

 

The entire solution developed and implemented by the expert not only helped saved cost and time for the organization, but also retained high potentials and build up the foundation to run and sustain the operations for the next 3 years.