Reorganizing a Weak Start-Up

In a conversation with Prisila, correspondent, Asia Business Outlook Magazine. Edward shares his views on the strategic human resource management. During the conversation he also discussed brainstorming techniques to unlock great ideas.

What is the process of allocating resources of the company to achieve the company goals and portray us about the strategic human resource management?

In November 2019, four months prior to Covid-19 first case in Indonesia, I joined a chaotically designed company. Each director focused on fulfilling their internal process while the HR was not able to see repetitive functions and properly set a proper arrangement. Human resource management was not functional while it was covering only the administrative side. Without tuning in the organization structure, many similar processes are duplicating in each divisions. At that point, cost of manpower was around 90% of revenue of the company. As the new CEO, I could not do much on improving immediately the revenue. My game plan was to stabilize the company from going sinking. Founders were calm and confident the company would be sailing as they are expecting investors would be injecting additional funds.

Bad structure organization should be corrected. I started assessing quickly, by spending 1 on 1 discussion with random employees. Most of them were saying that their utilization was around 20%. I started designing on the drawing board: 1. Identification of redundancies; 2. Centralization Planning; 3. Formation of new processes with SOPs & form ready to support the centralization.

When the Covid-19 hit, we were slimmer by 31%. And we continued redefined the best functioning structure of manpower, on the 9^th month of my arrival, we were operating at 34% number of original employees, doing the same business level. A month after that, the company reached the EBITDA positive. Covid-19 was never my reason to fix the manpower. Regardless the company founder was not too happy when I started to fix the manpower issue as his close allies and friends got sacked, the company survived the storms.

How would you optimize and discover chances for improvement in your present flow and processes, and what are some common process improvement blunders to avoid?

I am sitting in the position of strategist and I find the best people to discover first-hand problems are my operators on the ground. I delegate my managers to make detail incident reports, and they propose solution(s). Existing processes may have a hole, a wasting of time, or an uncalculated risk. We put up a KPI (Key Performance Index) specifically for this, that each department must get 1 new SOPs or upgrade existing ones per month. A panel consisting of all stakeholders must review the newly proposed SOP. Comparing notes among stakeholder, incident reports, and data will reduce weaknesses in the new process. We have to believe that any process can be upgraded. A customer or vendor or employee complaint(s) may result in a process improvement.

"A panel consisting of all stakeholders must review the newly proposed SOP. Comparing notes among stakeholder, incident reports, and data will reduce weaknesses in the new process."

Portray us with brainstorming techniques to unlock great ideas as a group?

For most of Indonesians, brainstorming in a group is not common. The view is not too being seen disrespectful as showing off or being smarter than his/her direct superior, unless a person is directly asked for this opinion. Foreign companies operating in Indonesia may feel that any brainstorming meeting is a waste of time as the audience is perceived as passive. The huge the gap of ranks present in a room will discourage even further.

This is what I do to avoid less contribution and fear of judging: we opened a session of brainstorming with 2 notes that everyone is expected to share his personal and professional opinions freely and writes down the opinions. All the written ideas then will be passed to the next person. Then this next person will read the idea(s) as if it is his. Smaller group not more than 10 usually is more productive. Then the chairperson of the meeting will do a drawing (like mind-mapping) to list out all ideas. Some ideas then may be examined and have the subtopics. Elimination process will take place as the final few ideas are selected. Debating which good or bad will not be too fruitful in this timid culture, especially if an idea from a staff regardless how good it is then is attacked by a director. Thus we will ask again the participants to write again their opinions on how good or how bad of the selected ideas, and they pass it over again to the next person.

When the discussion reaches to the end, the chairperson then acknowledges the contributor(s) after the chosen idea(s) is selected.

I personally practice and believe in brainstorming session as it is a simple tool from the internal to help improve the company. However, we have to be prudent in understanding the cultural sensitivity as preparing eating an apple is different from preparing eating a pineapple.