Company culture: what do we think of employees?

Animesh » Blog Archive » Who is your employee?
Animesh has an interesting post on it. I've added my thoughts here:

I think the family model is very well suited to a startup, mostly
because it is almost a necessity: in a startup, the boundary lines
between work and home and not well defined. In my experience, it is
true even if not all employees are white collar workers.

But keeping the same model as the company evolves into a bigger
organisation is probably not suitable and not feasible. You *want*
people to clearly delineate their professional and personal lives for a
better balance. And the returns to all stakeholders from the family
model become much lower.

Treating employees as customers is definitely the way to go. To me,
there is no other option. At least for the support functions, it should
be obvious that the rest of the organisation is their customers,
because, well, what else are they supporting?

Unfortunately, at least in India, that is often not the case.
Support functions often run as their own fiefdoms, and I think that
often goes on because the executive team doesn’t pay much attention to
them. I think the way to resolve this is to measure performance based
on customer feedback, as for the ‘core’ function. (But that’s
digressing…)