Questionnaire According to your opinion what do you think are the strengths and weaknesses of the current organisational structure of your company? We follow Functional Organisational Structure in our company. This has led to each of the staff member to specialise the skills needed to perform their relevant tasks. This has in turn increased the efficiency of the individuals involved and increased the productivity over time. I believe these are some of our strengths of the structure we follow. The same structure has allowed complacency to creep in into some of our staff. It has also limited or reduced the communication between different departments. When the top management has to take decisions for the organisation, do they consult the employees if the decisions affect them? Most of the decisions that top management takes are taken after consulting with employees or relevant team if the decision will impact most to that employee or the team. The type of decisions which doesn’t involve individual employees are about the tasks or projects which needs to be completed in conjunction with multiple teams. These decisions are taken by top management and the respective team leaders only. In your organisation how important is the communication between employees? Communication is a critical factor within each of the teams of our organisation. Via clear communication we ensure that everyone involved in a team is on a same page and we all are going in one direction. It also allows the ideas to be shared more easily as everyone is on same page already. Clear communication also allows new staff to possess necessary knowledge in a short period of time which in turns allows us to focus more on creation, implementation and supporting of our products. Communication is also an important factor when team needs to communicate to the other team but it is not as important as communication within the team. When working in a team does each and every employee have the say on choices that would best advance the team’s work or is it just the team leader who decides everything? Our organisational environment encourages everyone involved in a team to share their ideas. We believe that new point of view can come from anyone based on their unique life experiences. Thus, everyone involved does get a say & express themselves and if majority feels that it is a right way to move forward then we incorporate that into our work. Team leader does also get an additional vote in a situation where votes are split 50-50. Goals are something which once achieved are changed, so how are the goals made known to the employees working in the organisation? Each of the teams are assigned specific goals that they need to achieve in a certain time frame. Team leaders also have access to goals assigned to other teams to ensure that they know what other teams are working on and can relay necessary information with their own team. We also conduct quarterly meeting of our staff where we try to convey our strategic business objectives to everyone. Team leader focuses on helping their relevant team members in achieving the necessary goals and once achieved move on to the next goal. Team leader also ensures that each of the team member knows who will be accountable for which tasks in achieving the goals and everyone involved understands what is expected from them as clearly as possible and their responsibilities. What is the role of teamwork in your organisation? Do all the tasks involve teamwork? Teamwork is a backbone of our company. It allows each of the employee to effectively communicate within the team. We have divided some of the core business areas in different teams (i.e., sales team, support team, operations team, product creation team, product quality management team, product implementation & training team). Most of the tasks in our organisation involve teamwork. Each of the team is responsible to carry out tasks assigned to them. Each employee within the team knows what is expected of him/her. Though each of the team work independently of each other there are tasks which require one team to work in conjunction with the other team(s). How do you ensure that each of employee or the team have most up to date information and all of the staff members have required competency level to carry out necessary tasks? We have created repository and portals of knowledge base for each of the team. This allows all of the employees to acquire necessary information to perform the tasks. This repository and portals are managed by Team leaders. It is a responsibility of Team leader to ensure that information available in there is most up to date. Employees gets notified when new set of information is available so they can review it. Team leader also conducts quarterly competency tests of all of the team members. This covers the core areas of the projects or the products that they are working on. If the gaps are found in the knowledge of the employee then he/she needs to undergo a small training session to fill the missing gaps. Does the organisation experience identity conflicts between the employees or the team. If yes, how is it solved? Yes this does happen due to the nature of the business we are in. For example, the staff from our product quality management team needs to occasionally help our support or product implementation team when there is shortage of staff due to employee being sick or on leave. This in turn causes the employee who is working on multiple teams question his/her role or what his/her focus should be. This may also cause delay in product quality management team’s projects which then leads to team blaming others for the delay. This does gets solved mostly on its own when the full staff comes back but we also occasionally hire temporarily contractors to join product quality management teams. In your opinion, do you think this organization promotes diversity in employees? Yes definitely. We have a lot of people working from diverse set of countries and cultures in our organisation. One of our small but important tradition is where staff following certain festivals cook/share specific food related to festival with everyone in our office. We believe in providing a friendly working environment to everyone regardless of where they have come from. We also believe that in today’s world if a business has to survive and prosper then it needs to understand/respect different cultures and what better way to do that by having the same in our own company! Due to high level of diversity in your organisation, are there any conflicts in your organisation and if yes how do you resolve it? Yes there are occasional conflicts that do arise due to diversity but they are manageable. Most of these conflicts arise due to English not being the first of language of some of the employees. Occasionally employee who has English as their first language uses a slang or a lingo which is misunderstood by the employee where English isn’t their first language. In a same way occasionally two people from same culture speaks in a language which is alien to everyone else in a company and others find that disrespectful. Such conflicts are normally resolved by the employees involved with occasional help from team leaders. We prohibit the religious/political discussions in our company thus the conflicts related to this don’t arise.