Organization Behavior Analysi: Pluralsight - Case Study Example

ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOUR ANALYSIS-PLURALSIGHT By Introduction Pluralsight is an online education company based in Farmington Utah, which was voted as a number best company to work with. The company started as an offline company in 2004 before switching to online in 2007. Their old mission statement was: “But this is no hand-out, its hard-core education.” However, the current mission statement is: “To publish high-quality online training courses for professional developers, IT admins, and creative artists every day.” They are a fun, exciting growing company and as I visited it, I looked around as they had beautiful criteria with all the free food you want, they have massage tables, big bean bags, and I actually witnessed a few employees gathered around one as he played the guitar, kind of cool I would say.1 When Pluralsight opened as a provider of classroom-based training for developers, coders, and computer science techs, they slow but surely realized that serious professionals wanted continuous training as the tech world is always evolving; you much have good on-going education to keep up, keep your job.2 Moreover, they mentioned that by going online, they aimed to create the most comprehensive library of professionally impressive courses available, at an affordable cost to the student. At the start of 2013, they had 400 developer courses, made by the top 200 current industry experts. It is all about the culture, nothing more, nothing less; the people are what drive the ship, the business, not me. I only can look ahead and plan for the future, I do not have the time or the availability to manage all my people and they must manage themselves and have that passion of an entrepreneur in everything they do. I realized very fast that I must stop, and somehow carbon copy this culture, and so we can transfer it to all those that follow years to come3 (Hernes, 2014). The paper has assumed the star model whereby we are going to elaborate each element of Pluralsight. Organizational Strategy According to the star model the strategy of an organization should include the following components; mission statement, vision, values, strategies and goals of that particular organization. The firm’s mission statement is: “To publish high-quality online training courses for professional developers, IT admins, and creative artists every day.” Pluralsight is inspired by the vision of being a centre of excellence in the provision of training courses that are meant to revolutionize the information technology sector. Service at the institution focuses on maintaining high standards of ethical and moral values to enhance equality. Pluralsight has grown to be what it are today through acquisitions and partnerships. The company’s last acquisition was Smarter, a Boston-based skills assessment start-up company for a whopping $75M. Thus, through these acquisitions the company intendeds to expand the company’s library that currently have about 3500 online video-based courses for IT professionals and other IT learners.4 The company adopted an aggressive acquisition strategy to accelerate growth around course content in order to consolidate online based education start-ups to increase its market share in the market for IT training professionals’ shifts to digital.5 Organizational processes Based on the star model Pluralsight is very fortunate to have developed a critical team of players to guide and propel it into the future. Aaron Skonnard, President/CEO at Pluralsight, Cofounded the company and was just announced to be their CEO a few months back. Aaron is one of the Cofounders and is a person of high character and has built this company around the ideology of “it’s all about the people that work for you, nothing more, and nothing less. It’s all about your people and how they love working for you and take on that owner vs. renter’s mindset.”6 The organization engages in a number of work processes including formulation of standard online courses being administered to students online. The employees of Pluralsight are hired based on the best recruitment criteria thus creating a team of dedicated individuals ready to tackle challenges in the environment. Teamwork is an important aspect of this organization with a clear chain of command that ensures directions are passed effectively to the employees. Since much of the work involves on teamwork, the workers have developed an interpersonal relationship with each other thus promoting cohesiveness. Internal communication is enhanced due to the bond that exists among the personnel thus ensuring easy administration and management of the firm. Organizational structure The star model indicates that each organization’s structure much include four major components namely; job design, use of teams, departmentation and the structure. Each aspect of the elements of the star model needs to be incorporated into an organization’s structure to analyze the organization actually.7 A CEO heads Pluralsight; the organization structure hierarchy includes; COO and CFO before now the structure assume departmentation. Pluralsight has four main departments that include; marketing, finance, accounts and human resource. The four departments are headed by managers who are answerable to the CEO. Despite the existence of various ministries, the organization encourages teamwork among its employees through team building exercises where the employees are trained and refined on how to work as teams. Pluralsight intends to cater the advancing needs of the modern technology and the need for continuing education for the best in the industry. They are there for producing and delivering high-quality services to our valuable customers.8 The world believes in technology, and hence, also invites people to participate openly in the efforts to transform the dreams into reality or to retain that hope by keeping on the fount of technology, and always learning better ways of doing what they are curtly doing it.9 They just raised $27.5 million dollars in funding, as well just finished their brand new world-class office building. In 2013, the company through a round of Series A financing and three acquisitions that further established our dominant market position by adding IT admin and open source training to their library. In April 2014, the acquired creative skills training platform Digital-Tutors in a $45M deal that brought their course total to 3,000. Additionally, in August 2014, Pluralsight through one of Utah’s biggest minority funding rounds to raise $135 million dollars, this making Pluralsight’s valuation to almost $1 billion. It has many regional and intercontinental offices and hubs based in different parts of the world.10 People Based on the star model Pluralsight recruits its employees through an iterative hiring process that is value-based where individuals who meet the prerequisite requirements are given a chance to join the organization. Selection is open and fair whereby everyone is given an opportunity to participate but then the individuals who emerge the best are the one that are going to join the team. Once the employees have been selected, they are inducted on how the organization works by being taken through the various departments and systems. The exercise is meant to familiarize them with the job environment at Pluralsight to ensure they readily adapt to it. Since the firm has unique ways of operation, the new employees will have to undergo training for about a month to ensure they got the required skills and knowledge to work for the company. Pluralsight believes in value addition to its personnel thus it incorporates vocational training to its staff members throughout their career to improving their skills that will translate to enhanced output.11 Performance management is an issue of great importance since strict measures are enacted to ensure individual employees performs. It is done through periodical evaluations that rank the performance of persons and departments and also recognizing the best performing teams with awards. Pluralsight adopts an organizational model that merely involves centralized level decision-making.12 The decisions made by the management are passed on to the regional management and offices that ensure a further look at the implementation statistics. Organizational Reward Systems It is imperative that you have your company’s strategy aligned with how you pay your employees and set up the overall reward system. The paper is going to analyze reward systems for Pluralsight based on the star model. Compensation in Pluralsight is determined by the job description together with provisions from the labour laws regarding employees’ compensation. The company implements a fixed salary policy whereby each task group has its own range of pay that is accompanied by other benefits. The benefits, in this case, include; medical cover and house allowance. The amount of advantages payable to employees’ differs depending on the job group that one belongs. That notwithstanding the firm has a policy that allows its employees to receive bonuses yearly based on the financial performance of the company. However, individual and team efforts are also recognized but not in a monetary form. When the organization’s report is compiled individuals who made outstanding performance in the course of the year are recognized with certificates of excellence and also treats to destinations of their choice to boost the morale in the firm. Pluralsight is a real example of how a company is aligned with its overall strategy and its reward system is based all on their employees and how it drives them, rewards them to accomplish more for the overall company and feel that they have that ownership mentality and actually then care how well the company does and about the bottom line.13 Often turns out that low team morale, cohesion, and productivity are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how humans work. When talking about others, though, you’re making one of the most common and destructive human errors in judging other people’s actions. We all perceive ourselves as responding to a situation while we see others as motivated by their character.14 Organizational Culture What Pluralsight is designed to do is change that system. Instead of looking for blame and fault, it rewards positive behavior by focusing people on working together and getting things done.15 Perhaps the most famous demonstration of this human reaction to systems was the Mailgram experiment on obedience to authority figures, which was done in the early 1960s at Yale University. What Pluralsight does accept this reality, and, instead of seeking someone to blame, it tries to examine the system that produced the failure and fixes it?16 (Alvesson and Berg, 2002)? Time is the ultimate limiter of human endeavour, affecting everything from how much we work, to how long things take, to how successful we are. The relentless one-way flow of time fundamentally shapes how we view the world and ourselves. We know our time is limited. While I have nothing against promotions, sales, or projects, it’s just a fact that humans are absolutely terrible at working that way. I only wanted to gather together all the research that had been done for decades on how people work best and emulate that. I wanted to incorporate best practices and steal any better ideas I came across. Right before the first real Pluralsight at Easel in 1993 I was working at a company just blocks from the MIT Media Lab, and I stole an idea from the lab that has become the core of Pluralsight the Sprint.17 Conclusion Based on the above analysis of Pluralsight the star model indeed fits in the organization since every element of the design has been included. However in some instances the components of the star models were not iteratively exhausted the firm needs to work on such areas to ensure a perfect realization of the star model. The overall analysis of the organizational aspects about the Pluralsight based on the star model indicates the fact that this marketing entity has been active in exploration of marketing specific operations.18 The marketing specific activities suggest the seriousness and commitment of the organization’s top management to bring the marketing organization at the highest possible level. There are many weaknesses noted after the exploration of detailed facts about the organizational structure and its design. The body is not trying to not adopt an aggressive, structured management and traditional organizational structure.19 There can be an argument presented in support of this policy since the services line offered by the Pluralsight has a particular class and high quality as compared to the rest of market players. The dynamics associated with the physical presence should be considered and applied appropriately at all the marketplaces. Pluralsight lacks a proper planning with regards to the marketing development at the regional level. The marketing strategy mainly focuses on the territories of North America and Europe. Pluralsight is trying to move on to other parts of the world with same the strategy, but its not the right way.20 In a nutshell, the analysis of Pluralsight to a high percentage fits the star model since most of the elements are satisfied by the organization. Recommendation  The organization needs to work on the matter of dealing with cultural aspects and multinational dimension in the real sense. It is an area that seemed not to comply with the elements of the star model since some of the elements are left out. The organization’s management can focus on the policy of launching the product line that can address the local culture needs and demands. It is a matter of fact that lifestyle and culture consideration is an important factor for all nations and communities around the world. Customer relation’s development is another important factor that can improve the organizational development and marketing spreading for any services-based organization.21 The cross-border mobility is much easier now-a-days, and, as a result, the figure that indicates about migration or displacement of people from one country to another has increased significantly. The concept of integrated teams is becoming more common among multinationals and large organizations. The international management literature has also identified this fact and started to give more importance to the management of integrated teams as part of human resource management. Studies have pointed out toward the positive sides of using integrated teams in an organization.22 Bibliography Alvesson, M., & Berg, P.O., 2002. corporate culture and organizational symbolism: an overview. Berlin, de Gruyter. Aquinas, P. G., 2010. Organization structure and design: applications and challenges. New Delhi, Excel Books. Baligh, H. H., 2006. Organization structures theory and design, analysis and prescription. New York, Springer. http://www.myilibrary.com?id=45962. [Retrieved 4 Feb 2015]. Becker, B. E., Huselid, M. A., & Ulrich, D., 2006. The HR scorecard: Linking people, strategy, and performance. Harvard Business Press. Bhaskara Rao, D., 2001. Organizational structure of science. New Delhi, Discovery Pub. House. Branson, R., Kelleher, H., Co-founder, C. E. O., & Airlines, S., 2001. JetBlue Airways: Starting from Scratch. Cameron, K. S., & Quinn, R. E., 2011. Diagnosing and changing organizational culture based on the competing values framework. San Francisco, CA, Jossey-Bass. http://www.books24x7.com/marc.asp?bookid=40994. [Retrieved 4 Feb 2015]. Cheung-Judge, M.-Y., 2014. Organization development: a practitioners guide for od and hr. [S.l.], Kogan Page. Collis, D. J., & Rukstad, M. G., 2008. Can you say what your strategy is?. harvard business review, 86(4), 82-90. Flamholtz, E., & Randle, Y., 2011. Corporate Culture the Ultimate Strategic Asset. Palo Alto, Stanford University Press. Gomez-Mejia, L. R., & Balkin, D. B., 2002. Compensation, organizational strategy, and firm performance. Cincinnati, Ohio, South-Western Pub. Co., College Division. Hemel, G., 2007, Sep. 10. The Future of Management: Building innovation democracy. Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA. Hernes, T., 2014. A process theory of organization. Judge, Q.W. 2011. Building Organizational Capacity for Change. Business Express Press. Kates, A., & Galbraith, J. R., 2010. Designing your organization: Using the STAR model to solve 5 critical design challenges. John Wiley & Sons. Kotter, J. P., 1995. Leading change: Why transformation efforts fail. Harvard business review, 73(2), 59-67. Landry, Lauren. 2014. Smarterer Acquired for $75M By Developer Training Company Pluralsight. Available at: http://bostinno.streetwise.co/2014/11/19/smarterer-acquired-by-pluralsight-for-75-million/ [Accessed 19 Nov. 2014]. Marković, M. R., 2012. Impact of globalization on organizational culture, behavior and gender roles. Charlotte, Information Age Pub. Miles, R. E., & Snow, C. C., 2009. Organizational strategy, structure, and process. Miner, J. B., 2001. Organizational behavior: foundations, theories, and analyses. New York, Oxford University Press. Msoroka, M., 2013. Organizational culture: its implications to educational institutions. [S.l.], Grin Verlag. Nohria, N., 1991. Note on organization structure. Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston. Rollinson, D., 2005. Organisational behaviour and analysis: an integrated approach. Harlow, Prentice Hall Financial Times. Schein, E. H., 2010. Organizational culture and leadership. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass. Strategy: Create and Implement the Best Strategy for Your Business. (2006). Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA. Takahara, Y., & Mesarovic, M., 2003. Organization structure: Cybernetic systems foundation. London, Kluwer Academic/Plenum. Tosi, H. L., & Pilati, M., 2011. Managing Organizational Behavior Individuals, Teams, Organization and Management. Cheltenham, Edward Elgar Pub. Yammarino, F. J., & Dansereau, F., 2009. Multi-level issues in organizational behavior and leadership. Bingley [etc.], Emerald JAI. Read More