AuthorHE Yueyang,EditZhao Yuan.
In the business world, there is no eternal strategy for success, and the "environment" will force every business to develop a keen sense of business. "Change" is the first priority to survive in this business jungle.
In a more turbulent and unpredictable world, business reorganization, structural adjustment, organizational optimization and reform are all appearing more frequently than ever in the past in those enterprises that still need to climb upward.
In the year 2023 that has just passed, vigorous strategic adjustments and organizational changes abound. Alibaba underwent the largest organizational change in its 24-year history, ByteDance made a strategic realignment of its gaming business, and Meituan decided to abandon its own ride-hailing business.
However, the change is not only happening in a few leading giant enterprises, in China's Internet industry, almost every enterprise, regardless of size, is seeking and polishing its best form in order to match the needs of the times. For example, the audio giant Ximalaya, which has been founded for 11 years, will also launch a systematic change project called "end-to-end process reengineering" in the second half of 2023.
The core of this project is to start from the target source point of creating customer value, where "customers" include users, creators, and business partners who extend the audio ecosystem.
With the advancement of change, the most intuitive thing is to break the organizational model of Himalaya in the past based on functional division of labor, and require it to carry out a comprehensive adjustment of the organizational structure, which will naturally involve personnel changes.
In the Internet industry, personnel changes have always been a hot word, and the endless reports have inevitably amplified more people's anxiety and uneasiness. But there are also people who have a more rational attitude, believing that the situation in different industries should be analyzed in detail.
As expected, after the news of the organizational restructuring of Himalaya in November, various speculations and discussions poured in. However, the Himalayan side responded that there were no large-scale layoffs, just normal personnel replacement.
Now, nearly five months have passed since Himalaya initiated organizational change. Will this major change lead Himalaya to a better future?
To gain insight into the impact of this change, we interviewed several Himalaya employees at the center of the change, hoping to see and analyze the profound impact of this change on employees and the company through their perspectives.
2023 is the second decade of the Himalayas.
In the first decade, Ximalaya has grown from a small team of a dozen people in Zhangjiang Town, Pudong, Shanghai, to a content company serving hundreds of millions of users. The founder and CEO said in an internal sharing that Ximalaya is a technology-driven content company, technology is the means, and culture is the goal.
At the end of the first decade, Himalaya achieved quarterly profitability for the first time.
In the second decade, Himalaya has also set itself a more long-term business requirement: to create sustainable customer value and profitability.
What will the Himalayas look like in the next decade? Much depends on the magnitude of the change.
It involves a large number of people, a wide range of influences, and a fast pace of promotion", is Zhang Qiqi's perception of this change in the solution department. In the past, Himalaya has also had some adjustments, generally the optimization of job responsibilities, or some small divisions and mergers at the architecture level, which have never basically affected all employees like this time.
Yang Ke, who has been with Himalaya for 6 years, told us that this end-to-end organizational change is unprecedented.
In order to meet customer needs, a process will connect multiple departments, which is a closed-loop of the whole process of a business, and functions and processes are complementary to each other.
*: Yiou Think Tank Report).
End-to-end management is mostly seen in the project-based management of some IT enterprises, and most of the organizations that adopt this organization method in China are to B enterprises, such as Huawei, JD Cloud, and Cloud.
I was looking down on end-to-end at the beginning, and I felt that we were doing to C, iterating and responding quickly, and learning end-to-end might be a kind of regression", this is Janke's first impression of end-to-end.
At that time, Yang Ke and most of the employees did not understand that the context in which the end-to-end process was generated had many similarities with the environment that Himalaya is facing today.
International experience shows that in the 30 years after the end of World War II, resources and materials were scarce, and consumer goods were in short supply. At this time, the first principle of the enterprise is to quickly expand the scale to meet the needs of the market, so there is a unified design, mass production, batch delivery model, such as Ford Motor's automatic assembly line to make the United States the world's first.
Business needs determine the effectiveness of a functional organization.
During this period, Adam Smith's idea of the division of labor to increase productivity was also taken to the extreme.
From functional to process-oriented, there are three forces driving this shift: a buyer's market, increased competition, and change becoming the norm.
After the production capacity of physical consumer goods reaches a certain level, the supply will definitely exceed demand, the competition between the supply side will be more intense, the consumer side will also have deeper demand, and changes in external technology policies will add to the uncertainty.
The background to the Himalayan change is also that the audio market is changing.
In 2023, WeChat will increase the audio track in a high-profile manner, and recently it is doing a grayscale test of "listen to it"; Niche podcasts become democratic; More and more people are studying in college by "listening", and the demand for content is deeper; AI technology is reshaping the way content is produced, and whether it can be combined with AI is related to the user's experience; "Listening" connects a wide range of life scenarios, such as driving, so how to combine content with hardware has become a new topic ......
Change is on the way, and all kinds of uneasiness caused by this also permeated the Himalayas in the early stage of change, with anxiety, confusion, curiosity, and some employees being relatively optimistic.
Through interviews, we learned that employees' uneasiness can be broadly divided into two aspects: the company and themselves.
After starting the end-to-end transformation, Ximalaya needs to sort out the main process, each process has a process owner, and the process owner will disassemble along the goal, and then assemble a one-stop team to achieve the delivery of results.
A process combing, discussion site).
Change is a process of crossing the river by feeling the stones, and Himalaya is no exception, and it is still exploring, such as how many main processes should be there. For whether the change can lead to an ideal result, at the beginning of the change, employees have no confidence in their hearts.
From the perspective of employee positioning, there are only three roles in the company in the future: experts, cadres and one-stop managers. Experts need to have insight and influence from one field to the next; Cadres are responsible for goal decomposition, training, training, and support for other partners; One-stop managers organize battles on the front line, the most typical example is product managers.
Before the change, Yang Ke was in the middle office department, and the job content at that time was simply how much content could be successfully distributed to how many people every day. After initiating the end-to-end change, Yang Ke was recommended to serve as a "one-stop manager" of a process, with the goal of improving the satisfaction and stickiness of the corresponding user groups.
The shift from "what was done" to "what was achieved" is the embodiment of "customer orientation".
Roles have changed, goals have changed, content has changed, and the requirements for work ability have changed.
For front-line employees, "the perspective of work should be aligned, and the customer value should be returned, and in addition, it should be changed from the original local insect view thinking to bird's eye view, and the relationship between individual work and team organization should be examined in the whole link," Zhang Qiqi said.
Correspondingly, the ability to solve the "subsection" problem should be upgraded, the familiar working mode should be changed, and the inertial thinking should be broken. This is no small challenge for employees.
And the most important thing for change is to work together.
According to our observations, the attitude of friends towards this change is mostly curious and confused at first, and then they will take the initiative to embrace the ...... changeWe are relatively early to embrace change, believing that end-to-end is the right thing to do and a battle to win. But in other words, whether you succeed or not, it is a rare workplace experience, and you can get to know customers, partners, and even yourself more deeply", Zhang Qiqi replied when it comes to the change in the team.
A week after the one-stop team was assembled, Yanke's view of "end-to-end change" changed.
Gao Xiangyue belonged to the minority, and he was very optimistic about end-to-end reform from the beginning, but his optimism at that time mainly came from the fact that there were too many shortcomings in the original process.
Gao Xiangyue has always been responsible for the docking with anchors and creators, and the original process of developing an anchor is relatively cumbersome, such as business communication, signing, settlement, planning, launch, promotion, operation, and commercialization.
For anchors, it is often the case that several waves of people have not yet been implemented, and there will even be situations where the anchors are lost due to the resignation and handover of employees.
Employees like Gao Xiangyue have different goals, some people's goals are the number of anchors introduced, and some people's goals are as long as one anchor successfully attracts investment, which leads to the strength is not to be used in one place, in Gao Xiangyue's words, the goals are not aligned.
Gao Xiangyue's work often needs to be coordinated across departments, and under the original process, when encountering problems, it may take five or six people to ask to find the direct person in charge, "that is not collaboration at all, it is just passing the word", and doing a lot of inefficient work is a pain point felt by many respondents.
The "problem" that Gao Xiangyue sees is the "consolidation effect" that is common in large companies.
Microsoft in 2014 had a similar problem. Every employee wants to prove that they are right, even if someone else's plan is more suitable; Be only responsible for performance and goals, and do other things, the principle is to do less and make fewer mistakes; You have to follow the process, even if it misses out on business opportunities; You can't do things that are overstepping, even if you are in a hurry; If it leads to cross-departmental conflicts, even the best ideas will be stopped ......
If it weren't for the firm implementation of the "product-to-customer" and "breaking down departmental barriers and comfort zones" at that time, and the shift from a Windows-centric PC strategy to a cloud-centric mobile strategy, Microsoft would probably not be the Microsoft it is today, and it may not have been able to invest in a company like OpenAI.
So when recruiting the "Podcast Successful One-stop Team", Gao Xiangyue took the initiative to sign up.
Under the one-stop process, a podcaster is in charge of one employee from start to finish, but different people are responsible for different types of anchors. Gao Xiangyue found that after the implementation of the new process, the process that was originally as short as one month can now be shortened to 2 weeks, and he also found that the update frequency of the platform's core anchors has become higher, and the willingness to invest in business on the platform has also increased significantly.
Set up a special team to efficiently and quickly eliminate the bad experience).
Efficiency improvement doesn't just happen in high-level teams.
Xiao Yan of the solution department mentioned that it used to take 25 hours to deal with customer problems such as high-risk reports and failure to enjoy the rights of the event page, but now the front-line staff have followed up the entire process independently, and the time to solve customer problems has been reduced to 2 hours.
Yang Ke has a project in his hand to make some of the membership content available to non-members through incentives, which was previously very difficult to promote, because his eyes were always on "what was done".
After taking over the project, Yang Ke thought clearly that "achieving a longer user lifecycle" should be the first principle, and adjusted the project from this point of view.
In the more than two months since November, the incentive program has achieved more than a year.
Yang Ke's "overlook" is reduced little by little, from the training meeting at the beginning of the change, to the dismantling of the team's goals and strategies with the leadership after becoming a one-stop manager, the face of the end-to-end change is gradually clear. The progress of the incentive program completely changed Janko's "prejudice" at that time.
Dai Qian from the Talent Development Department also mentioned that the company's end-to-end offline reading club and online thematic sharing activities were very helpful in dispelling the confusion and apprehension at that time.
On the subject of understanding change, Himalaya has gone through the most difficult initial stage.
However, employees' end-to-end understanding cannot always be pulled to the same level all at once, and there are bound to be some stuck points in the middle. It will take time to overthrow the old order and establish a new one. Especially for the Himalayas, there is no ready-made homework to copy.
The most optimistic Gao Xiangyue saw more aspects of change in the process of advancing the work. He saw that after the end-to-end change, the "territorial awareness" of some employees was significantly reduced, and he also saw that some employees were too familiar with their positions and work content to break through their comfort zone, which was inconsistent with the pace of change.
Gao Xiangyue does not think that problems are bad, he said that only when you see challenges can you solve them, and he made some suggestions. In the "one-stop podcast success", employees originally had strong single-point capabilities, such as content planning and business, but now they need to be upgraded to systematic and complex capabilities.
Compared with the optimism at the beginning, Gao Xiangyue's current optimism is more rational. Compared with the rush to rush around "things" before the change, Gao Xiangyue prefers to think deeply about how to do business and why to do this strategy now.
Dai Qian also told us that in the recruitment work, more attention was paid to the hard power of candidates, such as educational background and existing successful experience, but now they have also begun to pay attention to cultural adaptability and potential.
Yang Ke's focus has been on "how to fit functional and process-oriented organizations" and "how to better apply end-to-end to Internet enterprises", and now he also has a new thinking: one-stop design is very important and needs to be more prudent.
Yang Ke believes that the one-stop lock-in of manpower is based on the life cycle of the dragon, if the goal of the one-stop team is set unreasonably, it will produce some unnecessary demand, and then cause the competition for human resources, resulting in the illusion of "manpower tension", if the decision to supplement manpower is made accordingly, it is contrary to the original intention of reform.
The challenges exist objectively, but compared to the initial anxiety about the unknown, the front-line employees now have a "sense of faith".Not only because I saw the efficiency improvement brought about by process change, but also because I believed that the value orientation of "customer-centric" was correct and could bring business breakthroughs and innovations.
Zhang Qiqi mentioned that customer satisfaction and NPS improvement are the goals that the whole company should strive for. Based on the user's identity and experience journey, we have embedded several satisfaction evaluation portals on the app, such as when users search for content, after listening to live content, and when creators use the creation center, so as to collect user feedback in a timely manner and make optimization adjustments, including functions, content, activities, design, and services.
This is a quantifiable satisfaction rating, and there are some that cannot be quantified.
For example, last month, a well-known podcaster sent a pennant to a one-stop team of a certain process. This pennant, which can be hung on half a wall, is a sense of accomplishment that team members gain outside of work.
Himalaya is a platform that connects users, creators, and advertisers, and their satisfaction, stickiness, and loyalty to the platform determine Himalaya's competitiveness.
The essence of business is altruism. When the core goal shifts from "what we do" to "what value we create for users, creators, and advertisers", the satisfaction and loyalty of these stakeholders will naturally increase.
On the other hand, in the face of more and more extensive changes in the audio market, Ximalaya's transformation is to respond to changes and create increments.
For example, under the trend of podcasting, Ximalaya has strengthened the strategic position of podcasts as a key business layout, and has set up key project teams such as "one-stop podcast success" in the organization, and has also provided a series of support in policy; Another example is the establishment of a special voice technology research and development team to quickly implement the application of voice technology, so as to lower the threshold for audio content creation and broaden the direction of creation, etc.
From an objective point of view, market changes and changes in the Himalayas have brought incremental space:
According to the data, by the third quarter of 2023, the number of monthly active users of Himalayan Panoramic Audio will reach 34.5 billion, a year-on-year increase of 215%；
In 2023, there will be more than 240,000 podcasts with commercial value on the Himalaya platform, and the number of Chinese podcast listeners will also exceed 2200 million, that is, at least 2 out of every 10 Internet users are listening to podcasts in the Himalayas;
Himalaya has worked closely with more than 80 car manufacturers, and as of June 2023, more than 100 million car owners have enjoyed Himalaya's Internet of Vehicles services.
The improvement of users, content ecology, technology, and scenarios will be reflected in the profitability of Himalaya.
A deep understanding of the unmet and ambiguous needs of our customers will drive our ...... of innovationWe can't let any organizational boundaries get in the way of our efforts to bring innovation to our customers," said Microsoft CEO Satya Narad in an internal email in 2018, and Narad was a key figure in the aforementioned 2014 commitment to change at Microsoft.
This is a growth-minded culture.
The productive forces determine the relations of production, and the relations of production will react on the productive forces, and the adaptation of the two will promote the development of the productive forces, while the incompatibility will hinder the development of the productive forces.
At present, further breakthroughs in the productive forces need to be achieved through the improvement of production relations, and organizational change is also a kind of change in production relations.
Pinduoduo's internal personnel optimization in 2022 has brought about a continuous release of performance and a soaring stock price, and at the beginning of 2023, Byte's internal personnel optimization has brought another shocking ability to make money.
Good change can help companies find the most suitable mechanism for business innovation, unleash the vitality of employees, and deepen their insight into the industry. A good change should have a goal, a roadmap, and a consistent belief and a close partnership.
Himalaya released its latest internal letter on January 30 disclosing that Himalaya narrowed from a loss of 700 million in 2021 to a loss of 300 million in 2022, and achieved a full profit in 2023, which has just ended.
In the present, there must be more opportunities for change than for stubbornness, and the same is true for the Himalayas.
At the request of the interviewees, Yang Ke, Zhang Qiqi, Gao Xiangyue, Dai Qian, and Xiao Yan are pseudonyms in the article) 2024 Travel Guide