How to have more visibility and control on what happens in your company

Is it possible to know everything that happens in your company? Can you have a 360° vision that focus especially on the crucial aspects, overlooking eventually the less important ones?

The fake knowledge of the company proposed in realities

The answer is yes, even without recurring to ploys suggested by some well-known realities. Boss in incognito, for example, rendered famous in Italy the formula of the original American Undercover Boss. In both these cases, the boss (that often is also the founder of the business) wears the clothes of a common employee to find out what the last of his employee does. The trick of “going undercover” in the same company you detain control of it is almost always rewarded with a happy ending. Indeed, the boss ends up finding out that the employee is shadowing without his knowledge is not only worthy but often times even heroic in the fulfillment of his duties.

Another tv format Mystery Diners (known in Italy as Spie al ristorante) proposes a different approach: putting hidden cameras in all the rooms of a restaurant and get fake waiters and fake clients on the inside. As opposed to Undercover Boss, in this case, the owner of the business exposes the worker caught stealing or creating some other trouble fit for immediate dismissal. 

The company is a complex organism, not a set

Realities, though, despite their name are not actually reality. The two examples cited above, start from the premise that to have a complete vision and the subsequent control of the business it is enough to go on the field for a few days or set up an apparatus of CCTVs. But the company is not a set. It is an articulated organism the complexity of which, as an entrepreneur, you are very aware of. Particularly if you have seen it coming to life and growing up to a dimension in which its own architecture is enriched of functions and departments. So much to be “forced”, in time, to delegate to trustworthy people tasks that you once followed in person. The problem now is finding a balance between delegation and control, because having an overall picture of the various departments (marketing and sales, programming, production, finance, logistics, human resources etc) often results in: 

The digital hive to map the company

A method is needed. One of the most efficient, elaborated in recent times, is called Context Oriented Management, also called COM methodology and it is the one implemented in the digital hive of SweetHive. It is based on the premise that to understand the process, no matter how complex, it is necessary to, above all, position it in the right context. The COM contemplates a set of procedures and tools result from a synthesis between the discipline of business organisation and the digital technologies developed in the last decade.

To make an example, the first phase of the method consists in “mapping” the company. A task that at first would seem easy but only if you consider the company as the fake subject shown in realities. It is a lot more difficult if, on the other hand, the creation of the map would have to be based on the crossed analysis of organisational charts, processes, and functional areas.

So, before the control and even before managing to have a better view of what happens “in your own house”, we need to know well the life there and moves in that house, aka the company.

We speak of “life” exactly to highlight the organic dimension of the entrepreneurial reality, crossed by flows that move information daily, accelerating or decelerating the processes with consequences that are measurable in revenue, earnings, orders, etc… 

The digital hive SweetHive with the COM method poses itself as a holistic point of view that helps in the reaching of a vision of the system-business in which each part contributes to the functioning of the whole only if it carries on its own tasks correctly.