Organizational Behavior

Industrial Visit
A study on Organizational Work Culture, Team management,
Motivation and Human Resource Management

Section B -
Ranjana A Kadaramandalgi (179278013)
Venkata Hareesh Kodi (179278014)
Lionel Fredrick (179278058)
Chirag D (174273001)
About the company:

Cloudesign is a leading solution provider for Internet based applications with its main office
located in Powai, Mumbai. The Company has been promoted by some highly experienced
professionals dedicated to provide total IT solutions under one roof.

The company has catered to providing technical solutions for 45 companies which includes
startups and corporates in duration of 15 months. The company has a vast client base, and
includes well known companies like Schindler, Edelweiss, Stellar, Kevin Cold chain Logistics,
Rubique and Flysauce.

Method of approach

Our team had evaluated various factors in choosing the company to be visited such as
strength of employees, domain of work, proximity to college and the work culture
(established company / startup). So, after weighing down all the factors we decided to go
with Cloudesign Technology Solutions which is 2 years old in the industry. This newly
formed organization would be a perfect fit to evaluate various criteria which we had in mind
as well as align the insights that we gained from the OB course with the learnings that we
gained from the visit.

We first contacted the founder of the organization through LinkedIN post which we had a
telephonic conversation. We had to make multiple calls to convince them with the agenda
of our meeting as they had many apprehensions initially about the visit. We dealt with this
by informing him about the official permission letter that we would produce to them. Once
they were convinced they had asked us to send an email confirmation finalizing the timing
and date of meet. Once again, we had faced roadblocks regarding the free slot availability of
the company’s founder. However, we were able to sort this out by continued follow up.

Objective of visit:

Our team’s objective of visiting this company was to analyze the organizational behavior
specific to start-up’s, and how various factors like human capital management, team
building and inter-team relationships in start-ups vary from those in bigger, more
established firms.

The agenda of the meeting that we had with the founders of this company included the
following key objectives

 To analyze the organization structure by examining the hierarchy and/or autonomy in

place and delegation of responsibility among the heads of various departments and the
corresponding inter and intra team relationships.
 To get to know its story and how it came into existence.
 To know how effective the team members are in filling up for each other, i.e.
understanding, cooperation and adjustment and also how the team comes together to
 solve any critical issue, i.e. information sharing, communication, and openness for
different alternatives
 To understand the functioning of dispute resolution in the team, and the consequent
measures taken
 To check if periodic reviews are conducted and based on skill assessment and goals set,
are the team members offered and encouraged to attend specific training programs
 To gauge the inter-team relationships by assessing the coordination and cooperation
with other departments/domains when working on the same project, and how
watertight is the demarcation across domain, and if the employees engage in cross-
domain functioning while working on a particular project
 To measure the intra-team relationships by checking if there are initiatives taken by the
team members to train each other in various skills (excel, programming etc)
 To get to know if there is an incentive system at place that includes group/ individual
incentives and financial/ non-financial incentives like bonus schemes, special perks (trips
etc)
 To assess the level of comfort the employees have to discuss their personal and
professional problems with the upper management based on mutual trust

Execution during the visit:

 Our team first started off by integrated with the employees and their informal feedback
about the company policies and the work culture. Post which we had a formal meeting
with the founders (upper management) who addressed all the topics that we planned
for discussion.

 Our team had split up into two sub teams and each team focused on the objectives that
we had defined before. This gave us a broad picture of employee mindset and their
perception of the work culture as well as inter and intra team relationships.

 Post this informal discussion, we interviewed the founder to gain deeper insight into the
work culture. The founder mentioned about the main agenda employed by the
company to gain momentum in the initial phase and how they were able to efficiently
use their networking skills to improve relations with external stakeholders to.

 The founders were of the belief that with the current scenario in India, technology
based start-ups have a stronger foothold and that they sustain better, and hence they
intended to effectively capitalize on this fact. Considering the huge growth in this space,
the founders were of the belief that acquiring and managing the right talent pool is
imperative to ensure continued success in the same.

 Another anecdote given by the management was with regard to service-based start-ups,
which are more prone to fussy client demands when compared to product-based
startups. This comes as a drawback to service based startups.

 When questioned about whether the teams indulge in cross-functional or cross-domain

working, the management did not respond with an affirmative, and went on to say that
the employees prefer to work restricted to the team that they are assigned to, and since
 the start-up has a lesser number of employees, the co-ordination between the domains
is taken care of by the management itself.

 When asked whether the management was open to new ideas from the employees, he
responded by saying that the culture was so open that the employees usually
implemented their ideas if they thought they were worth it. Then, they brought them to
the notice of the management, knowing that their voice would be heard. This was a big
shift from the early days of the company; the co-founder himself confesses that he used
to look at his employees as labourers when the company was in its initial stage, and now
he sees them more as friends than employees.

 The review system at Cloudesign is usually on a project-by-project basis, evaluating

employees' performances within a project's scope. They also hold regular team
meetings to bring everyone up to speed on the status of other tasks. On further probing,
it was revealed that Cloudesign does not fire underproductive employees; however,
they were given a reduced workload on the next project to help them get more time to
overcome their technical shortcomings through learning.

 Apart from the issues faced at the workplace, the management also encourages the
employees to share the personal issues that they are dealing with. This was further
explained by the management by citing the example of employees who have come all
the way from the village of Jalgaon, Maharashtra, to work at the Powai office of
Cloudesign Technologies in Mumbai. These employees were initially finding it very
difficult to afford a place to stay or take rent in Mumbai, and this issue was addressed
by the management by facilitating their initial down payment before renting a house,
depending on the existing financial condition of the employee.

 The employees use an internal online messenger to get their points across, when face to
face communication is not possible. This helps the tech-savvy generation to be updated
at all times.

 The biggest challenge faced by the company so far has been the lack of proper HR
management. Up until now, the management used to take HR tasks upon themselves
and bundle their way through them. However, with the impending growth of the
company, there is a growing need to hire an HR professional to perform tasks like
structuring leave policy, benefits policy and so on.

 Another challenge faced by Cloudesign is that they are unable to redeem many
incentives that the Govt of India has promised to startups, because of the lack of clarity
in the redemption process

Learnings and Insights gained from the visit:

 We were able to relate the learnings from our course with the field visit. Firstly,
motivation is extremely crucial to glue the company’s people, processes and growth
together.
 Inter-department interaction was found to be less and as a result, we feel that they had
coordination issues and were not able to utilize other teams competencies. However,
this was compensated for by the good intra-team relationships which was an outcome
of the small strength of the organization.

 We also found that the startup considers transparency as one its core values and was
felt during our interaction with the employees.

 We also found that employees whose performance was below par were given a lesser
work load / a work of lesser importance. This brought about a sense of distributive
justice among all the hard working employees. Also those employees who were shifted
were provided with special training to upskill themselves. This also showed that
company also takes care of the motivational and inequity issues arising from such
moves.

 Company also focused on giving personal incentives for the employees by financially
supporting those who are new to the city. As a part of this, company takes care of the
advance down payment to be paid to the landlords. This shows that company is willingly
taking steps to better motivate its employees and ensure retention.

 Since the company encouraged the employees to pitch in with their ideas, this gave
them a sense of ownership and empowerment with respect to the work that they were
doing. This move was very critical to keep the motivation of the employees intact.

 The company initially didn’t felt the necessity of a separate entity to take care of human
resource management. Instead the three founders were directly addressing the
employee issues. However, with the cumulative growth of the company, they felt a
need to have a separate HR professional and also introduce well structured HR policies
to be as per the industry standard.

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