At such an early stage, why does Sier Education emphasize organizational ability so much?
For a startup company, what is the most important thing in the eyes of the founding team?
Regardless of model, growth, scale, flow, financing, whatever the answer is, “organizational capabilities” are most likely not in the vision of a company with a scale of about 100 people.
Because for startups, growth is almost the only proposition in the early stage of entrepreneurship-growth data is a key indicator to bring financing, and financing can help companies accelerate their run. In addition, start-up companies are flexible and light in the early stage. Organizationally, they usually respond to problems and adjust mechanisms after discovering problems.
So when the vocational education company “Sier Education”, which was just established in 2019, spent a lot of energy in restructuring its “organizational capabilities” in 2020, it seemed a little special. In the past year, Sear, which has been established for less than two years, has spent two months updating the company’s values, performance structure, and organizational structure.
The result of the “renewal” of the organization is to ensure that the middle-level staff of Sier Education have decision-making power in their respective areas of responsibility, and many decisions do not even need to be reported to the management; on the other hand, it has also achieved a few results : Values are no longer limited to a slogan, but are reflected in every decision.
At such an early stage, why did Sr emphasize organizational ability so much?
“This matter has nothing to do with scale. When the company gradually grows and the number of people increases to 500 or 1,000, it will be more difficult to change the reporting mechanism. Our starting point is to become a middle-level person and make independent decisions as soon as possible. People are trained. Although it seems that the company’s business is determined by the people in the business, the organization is the infrastructure.” Saier Education CEO Guo Jinnan told.
How important is organizational ability in early stage startups? How should the company’s values be implemented? What is the difference between OKR and KPI? After the interview with Sier Education, they gave us a reference sample of how startups keep open and innovative.
How to implement values?
What is organizational capability? In one sentence, it refers to reducing the management cost of an enterprise under the premise of the same management results and efficiency. In management, the biggest cost comes from the redundancy caused by multi-level reporting and the barriers to collaboration caused by departmental walls.
So the two core elements to reduce management costs are: 1) Decentralize power to allow the team to make independent decisions and “run on its own”; 2)Break the information wall between departments.
Let’s first look at the first point: Why is it difficult to achieve efficient and autonomous decision-making? Because the difference in values will lead to different inclination of decision-makers: for example, bosses emphasize word-of-mouth, responsible persons emphasize profits, and salesmen pursue growth. This difference can easily lead to different directions of decision-making.
To solve this problem, we must rely on a unified “value ranking”. Guo Jinnan explained to the formation process of Sear’s self-worth ranking: “The management team has jointly extracted a set of logic for making decisions on their own, and then synchronized this set of ideas to everyone to help everyone understand how to make decisions. More specific Looking at it, for a company that values mid-to-long-term development and is not short-sighted, the first question to consider before every decision should be, what is the value created by this plan?”
This is the first item of Sier Education’s values: “value creation”, which includes: whether value is created, what value is created, and for whom? The subject of value is the user, not the company.
“It’s not enough to create value alone,” Guo Jinnan said, “because every company exists because it creates value, and only by creating differentiated value can it run longer than others. So Sier The second line of values is: “open innovation”.
“Innovation is often talked about, but not often. Empty talk slogans are actually meaningless. The bottom layer of innovation is that information is sufficiently open and transparent. Therefore, we added two words before innovation called openness, taking open innovation as our The second value is that we hope that everyone will maintain transparency and openness in communication and find differentiated values.”
“When you find the point of innovation, you must’dare to be the first’. This is our third value. When the value creation and innovation points are clearly judged, you must do this immediately.” Guo Jinnan told.
Although the value system has completed the construction from 0 to 1, there is still 99 meters to go from the viewpoint of construction to implementation. Sier chooses to implement the implementation of values from the management team.
In Sier Education, the management team will make topic speech every quarter, taking the difficult problems encountered by the management as the entrance, and reviewing how to use this set of values to make decisions.
For example, the first sales channel of Sear was the official website. At the quarterly meeting, the management team began to discuss the possibility of e-commerce live broadcasting. At that time, e-commerce live broadcasting was popular in various industries, but in the field of adult vocational education, No large-scaleApplication, so there are risks: Although students are accustomed to buying books on e-commerce platforms, will live broadcast “selling classes” have any effect? Can the new category of vocational education be supported by platform resources? Can students accept that teachers step down the forum to “carry goods”? Will it affect the pragmatic image of the vocational education brand?
The management team was arguing over several key issues and was unable to draw conclusions. Finally, they decided to reorganize their thinking through the company’s values: Sear’s course is based on live broadcast throughout the course, and the e-commerce live broadcast model allows users to have a better product experience. It is tangible and has the meaning of “value creation”; letting Sr’s young teacher directly communicate with users in the live broadcast room, and act as the first person to eat crabs in the industry. It is also “open innovation” and “dare to be the first.” In the end, the team decided to try, and Sier became a dark horse in vocational education. In the first year, he participated in “Double Eleven” and achieved nearly 3,000w in sales. Education also became an increase in Taobao’s “Double Eleven” last year. One of the fastest vertical categories.
“In this process, we want to show everyone how values are used, so that everyone feels that the’virtual’ things are concrete, perceptible, and can actually help us make decisions in our daily work. “
After this set of values gradually landed, Guo Jinnan noticed an obvious change in Searle: “Most things before, required to be reported to the management layer by layer to make decisions, but now everyone can basically make decisions on their own. Although. Not every decision is guaranteed to be correct, but we also consciously try and tolerate errors so that everyone will not be afraid to make decisions.”
Openness determines innovation
In a company with a heavy emphasis on education products and services, any business going online requires the effective cooperation of operations, products, technology, design, marketing, finance, and legal affairs. If the coordination is good and the departments are as close as gears, the smoother the business will be. Once the gears are loosened, it will cause shock and noise, and even affect the life of the machine.
The department wall is an obstacle when gears bite.
When Sr rethinks “organization” based on new values, information transparency once became the focus of controversy.
“In fact, the management team always has some concerns, because conventionally, many things are kept confidential, such as financial data, such as e-commerce data. Do you really want everyone to see these?”
“In the end we decided to open up the knowledge base becauseFor the long-term, if we really want the team to be able to make independent decisions, the most important thing is to let them get the most adequate information. If the internal information support is not enough, the decisions made will often be problematic. “
With this consensus, Sier’s information is transparent to all employees to the greatest extent at the company level. At the same time, Sear uses Feishu as a basic productivity tool to make the experience of information sharing and collaborative office better. In addition, employees can freely choose to participate in meetings of almost all departments, even the regular meetings of the finance department. “The value of the finance department should not be the “department that card budget” that people often complain about. It can fully play to its own strengths. It provides real help to the business department,” Guo Jinnan mentioned.
E-commerce has now become Slr’s main conversion channel, generating tens of millions of income every year. It is worth mentioning that Slr’s e-commerce department has only 3 people, all of whom are born in 1995 and 2000.
One of the founders of Sier Education told that after the implementation of new values and organizational structure, he finally changed from going home at 2 a.m. every day to being able to leave work at 7 or 8 o’clock, and occasionally at 5 or 6 o’clock Can end a day’s work.
There are also some interesting examples: Sier will regularly hold “OKR Awards Referendum”, all employees can declare various awards independently, and the final winners are also voted by employees. An HRBP of Sier once won the “OKR Most Promotion Award” for innovation at work. The reason for the award was that she spontaneously added practical issues such as afternoon tea, lunch break and electric car parking in the induction explanation.
She said, “I believe in the values that the company has been advocating. For small things like electric car parking, because the park property has not clearly delineated the parking location, the frequency of inquiries from colleagues is very high, so we took the initiative to do it with the property Negotiate, fix the parking space, and ensure that everyone understands it in the first time in the introduction. Although it is a trivial matter, we have jointly completed an internal “value creation” process. For the HR department, Every candidate and post-employment colleague who come to the company for interview are users we need to pay attention to and serve. To enhance the experience in details is also our practice of the value of “value creation”.”