The document summarizes a case study about improving customer service culture in the housing sector. It describes how the organization previously had siloed departments and a complex, time-consuming process for customers. A lean team was formed and identified issues like limited cross-team knowledge sharing and lack of transparency. They recommended simplifying processes, increasing communication across departments, and focusing on providing efficient, customer-centered service.

1. Organizational Behavior
ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
Case Study
Report
Submitted To:-
Vijayshri Tiwari
By
Shashwat Shankar
IMB2018017

2. Organizational Behavior
Topic
Service providing culture for customers in Housing Sector
Reason for this tittle is,
1) This allows us to find the service mismanagement happening in the housing sector due to
some or the other reason.
2) The development of the culture which would abolish the silo culture in the organization.
Summary
 The year 2008 saw Barnet Council to launch a worldwide project named, “Future Shape”.
This was the project to provide high-quality and joined-up services for housing schemes
and also new ways of delivering services which would improve quality and also reduce
the cost.
 In the same year, Pam Wharfe joined the group as new Assistant Director of Housing &
Environmental Health and came up with a handsome amount of experience in improving
the quality of service in housing.
 She immediately spends 3 months talking with the staff people and the frontline
employees. An open meeting with the employee was also done where the discussion was
done on bringing a lean approach to the service provided.
 Many said their views were often not heard and they came to the agreement that the
improvement of the quality of service should be at most priority.
 With the help of council members & some traditional expertise in the lean system,
department formally started the lean project in Sept. 2009.
 The main aspect for the development was to provide an efficient and effective service.
Another aspect was to understand the customer’s point of view, i.e., what it is like to use
the housing service.
 If someone has to come for the housing service for the first time then he had to pass
through various staff. The poor customer might have to come at 9:00 AM and might not
leave till 5:30 PM.
 The typical journey was captured in the photograph and shown to the staff. The
conclusion was found out that the process was time-consuming, frustrating and involved
a huge amount of resources.
 Twelve volunteers mainly from front line were taken and they were given responsibility
for the involvement.
 The team identified the procedure was messy, complex and time-consuming. They also
find out that due to the historical ways of doing work it was delayed & had limited
knowledge of how other teams work done to silo working culture where information is
not shared to the other groups.

3. Organizational Behavior
 The key of the lean experiment was the experiment started monitoring the effects on
customers of housing properties in more generous and holistic way than the old culture.
Problem Statement
 According to me, the problem was in providing the customers’ service for the housing
sector. The customer has to go through various departments for the service. It was very
time-consuming and frustrating for the customer and also it was the waste of resources
for the company.
The reason for the same was the procedure to be very complex, messy; lacking
transparency and also the departments present would not share information with the other
departments which would create a situation of misunderstanding between the customer &
departments and vice-versa.
 Also, the problem was the staff people were not that knowledgeable about how other
teams work.
 The problem was also related to not listening of the staff of front-line present.
 It was also to understand the situation according to the customer’s point of view “What
service they want?” in the housing sector.
Assumptions
 The customers were not satisfied with the service and they were suffering the loss.
 The resources were not available at that extent to provide the housing schemes to the
customers.
 The communication gap between the new customer and the staff would be the reason for
taking so much time in the allocation of the services.
 The gap of communication between the higher post of employees & lower one would be
the reason for the not listening of what they were saying.
 With time the situations changes and also the thought process of the customers as well as
the staff, so they have to adopt new ways of working, which they didn’t.
 Maybe there was not one person to take bold decisions or we can say decisions which
would help in getting the customer satisfied, all were looking for their personal benefits
as an individual.
 The silo mentality will reduce the efficiency of the overall operation, reduce morale, and
may contribute to the demise of a productive company.

4. Organizational Behavior
Possible Solutions
 More meeting like this should be taking place in interest to understand the mindset of the
staff as well as the customer.
 The company recruiting the head should not be corrupted & should work in the favor of
the company’s profit.
 The communication gap between the workers and the customer should be lessened by
providing them full support in the easier manner.
 As the service provided is in a messy and very complex manner, it should be made more
systematic and less complex, i.e. should be applied in a simpler and organized way.
 As in silo culture, it is not accidental or coincidence that organizations struggle with
inter-departmental turf wars, so if we look deeper it is because of the conflicted
leadership team. So this should be avoided.
 The company could provide benefits and increase the time to time wages of the people
working so that it would help the staff members to prosper and persevere.
Most Appropriate
 As the lean team was formed of 12 volunteers, they found that the process of house
allocation was far too messy, complex, and time-consuming and lacked transparency.
They often found that staff had the limited knowledge of other teams and worked in the
‘Silo culture’.
As the service provided should be more of the easy to understand for the customers,
should be less time-consuming and homogeneous in nature. The ‘silo culture’ should be
discarded as it decreases the working efficiency of the staff and also makes them less
interested in the work that they are doing. The culture due to the conflicted leadership
team would be the cause that leads to the service to be more complex and time-taking.
Managerial Implications (Pros & Cons)
 Have a single clear mission and strategy for the organization.
 Rotate people between teams regularly. This will cause knowledge, techniques,
culture, and ways of doing things to automatically be shared across the teams.
 Keep everyone on the same goal/planning/build/release cadence. It's very hard for
teams to collaborate when they are on different schedules.
 Make sure people get to know other people across the organization informally. Have
people eat together, do all-company events, or set up other programs that encourage
this.
 Do regular performance reviews consistently across the organization, and make sure
to collect peer feedback, including peers from the other potential "silos" that
employees need to collaborate with.
 Have a clear set of values and make sure that they are adopted across the
organization and influence hiring and promotion decisions.

5. Organizational Behavior
 Make sure people are all compensated in a similar fashion. Everyone's incentive
should be for the whole organization to succeed, rather than for their particular team
or project to succeed.
 Make sure the people in charge of big parts of the organization or major projects
have good working relationships with each other. Often silos can develop as a result
of bad relationships or tension or distrust between members of leadership.
 Be careful about putting an extreme amount of pressure on a team to hit their goals,
because it will often cause them to sacrifice collaboration with other teams.
 In general, a functional organizational structure will lead to less siloing than a
business unit structure because cross-unit staffing changes will be much easier and it
will be easier to set up and enforce a single way of doing things within each
function.
 Have everyone in the company in a single location. Remote individual workers are
ok but a remote office is an easy way for a silo to develop.
 Technically: Try to have a single way to do things across everyone who writes code.
Have a single codebase, a single code repository (possibly even a single branch), a
single deployment and test system, and use as few languages as possible.
 Objectivity fails for multi query consumer as time consumption increases.
Conclusion
 The culture of the working staff should not be ‘silo’ and would be like that they share
information with the other departments too. The communication gap between the
customers and the staff and vice-versa could be decreased by making the service easier to
adopt. The regular meetings should be arranged between the front line members and the
head of the department so that issues related to service is not left out, but are heard.
 The service could be made simpler by not involving various departments as ex-like,
housing adviser, a homeless person’s officer, a registration officer and allocation officer,
etc., but to use the approach where the various works are given to the same department
office. This would lead to an increase in the work of the staff; but would make it easier
for a new customer to work or to attain the service.