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BUS-521

Dr. Campo

September 1, 2019

Organizational Structure and Management Philosophy

Benzino Incorporated will use the hierarchical organization structure by grouping employees into departments based on their functions, with each department having a supervisor to whom they report. All the department heads will report to the company’s chief operating officer who in turn reports directly to the company CEO. The main departments will be; technology, technical support, business development, human resource, accounting & customer experience. Through this structure, the company will have a clear management policy that outlines who is in charge of a function of the company and how information should be cascaded. As a result, there’ll be ease of communication, elimination of roles repetition or allocation of several roles to one individual. Lastly, the CEO will have only one line of direct communication hence clear communication to him as compared to miscommunication that might occur if all the employees reported directly to him.

From the structure and policy, the human resource department will be fully equipped with all required skills for hiring, complemented by clear competency requirements supplied by the department heads on what kind of employees they’d recommend. As a result, we’ll hire appropriate workforce. Lastly, all team members will be satisfied as they’ll have a clear guideline on what’s expected of them and who to report to. Additionally, involvement in department decision-making will give them a sense of belonging and ownership hence fostering satisfaction and unity at the workplace. Organizations should have a well-defined structure in order to achieve their set objectives (Maduenyi et al, 2015)

Corporate Culture

Elements of our Corporate Culture

The company will have three main elements as its corporate culture, defined as shared values of our identity, which all employees are expected to adhere to for achievement of the organization’s goals. The elements are: innovation, competency, customer experience and great relationships. Innovation requires the whole team to maintain an innovative mind and keep developing new ideas to improve products in line with changing market needs. Competency as a culture will require all employees to have appropriate skills and continuously develop them to the required levels as per their job description. This will filter into our customer experience culture, as the competent staff will not only deliver efficiency but also handle customers accordingly to ensure excellent customer service and satisfaction.

This element also explains why we have a customer experience department, dedicated to managing all aspects of customer service, to ensure our clients are well taken care of and happy to return or refer. Great relationships dictates the need for employees to relate well with each other, and bosses to treat their subordinates well; resulting to a unified workforce that is happy to work together while maintaining respect and friendship hence making the workplace a place to look forward to. An organization will achieve its objectives if its employees’ norms and values are aligned to its set values (Ahmed & Shafiq, 2014).

Employee Motivation

To motivate employees, the human resource department will have a sub function of employee welfare; in charge of formulating functions, offers and activities geared towards attending to the employee’s human needs and handling complains and disputes fairly. Additionally, our employees will have benefits such as medical covers, fitness sessions twice a week, yearly medical check-ups, yearly team building and quarterly trainings to up-skill their competencies. Lastly, we’ll provide a friendly work environment which will have adequate space, vibrant colors and flexible seating spaces as compared to the norm of boring chairs and desks fixed where one is expected to sit daily. As a result, employees will be happy, have fun while working, and be fully motivated and empowered to give their best.

Operational Strategy

Our operational strategy will involve two main aspects: cost efficiency and customer centrism. All elements of our culture are meant to align to these two aspects for our business to run successfully. In cost efficiency, all our operations will be done with a consideration of cost. Being a start up, it is important to ensure all costs are managed efficiently by avoiding wastage, allocating resources accordingly, continuous sourcing for new businesses and ideas of how to further manage costs. As a result, the company will ensure all its projected costs are maintained within the anticipated margins or reduced further. The company will be able to maintain its operations without losses; it will also be able to achieve break-even within the projected two years time.

Customer centrism is of importance to us as a company, and forms a major part of our daily operations. The customer is at the core of our business; we believe that if there were no customer then we wouldn’t be in operation as there would be no one doing online purchases. As a result, it is important for us to take maximum care of them in every possible way. This explains our values in that being competent and innovative renders our employees fully equipped to deliver excellent services to our clients. Having great relationships will keep our employees happy and motivated, filtering directly to how customers will be served. A sad and demotivated employee will automatically not speak to a client accordingly.

Our customer experience department will be in constant communication with clients; attending to complains, complements, doing surveys to determine changing needs, organizing customer related activities such as tokens to our top merchants during customer service week and continuously training employees on customer experience. With all these, our customers’ needs will be met, they’ll be happy and will not only be repeat customers but also refer their friends and family; as a result of the excellent treatment and extra care as compared to other online market places. This strategy is supported by research, which states that a customer-centric culture provides focus and direction for the organization, ensuring exceptional value is offered to customers resulting to enhanced market performance (Weinstein, 2016)

Technology strategy

Being in a technology space and considering the ever-changing technological innovations, it is important for us to have a clear strategy that will ensure we not only beat competition but also remain relevant. To achieve this, all department heads will be involved in a panel led by the head of technology, to come up with a clear strategy, which will then be documented, reviewed and maintained as the company’s official technology strategy. Our strategy will involve an analysis of the market, competition and available technologies, followed identifying the main technological approaches we need to adopt for our success.

Among the technological strategies will be: reviewing the available options of ecommerce system vendors and selecting the best and most reputable to build our core system, analyzing competitors’ systems and working towards making ours better based on mistakes identified and running a customer research to identify specific customer relationship management systems to adopt. By doing this, we’ll have a technology set up that not only works best for our customers but also beats the existing competition. Additionally, due to rampant fraud attempts in the ecommerce space, we’ll employ a fraud management system to ensure we have continuous system checks on the ongoing transactions and raise an immediate alert in case of detected fraud. This will ensure we have an upper hand in mitigating fraud, as there’ll be minimal cases of fraud and losses reported from our site.

Lastly, our technology strategy will include a policy that bans the use of personal laptops within the premises. This will ensure we lock out any possible cases of malice, hacking or phishing that one may install in our system through their personal laptops. All these strategies will ensure we have a robust system that results into up to date efficient systems, customer satisfaction, reduced fraud and an ultimate competitive edge against our competitors.

References

Ahmed, M., & Shafiq, S. (2014). The impact of organizational culture on organizational performance: A case study on telecom sector. Global Journal of Management and Business Research.

Maduenyi, S., Oke, A. O., Fadeyi, O., & Ajagbe, A. M. (2015). Impact of organizational structure on organizational performance.

Weinstein, A. (2016). Superior customer value: Strategies for winning and retaining customers. CRC Press.