Finally, with a little bit of scepticism and a lot of hope, I started my internship on April 1, 2019.
Dressed in formals, I reached the office a few minutes early. HRs redirected me and other interns to a conference hall and asked us to wait there until further instructions. While I waited, I got myself familiarized with interns from other B-schools and filled the usual checklist of knowing someone. (You know, their name, where they are from, their college, their CAT score...kidding!!)
After some time, the HR manager came back to the conference room and we had a formal introductory session. She told us about Freightbro and what are it's general policies, dress codes, leave policies, etc. She explained to us how the company followed a startup culture. Since the office was in an incubation centre, we were told (in a rather humorous tone) we would be sharing space with other employees of the organization and maybe, occasionally, would have to borrow/steal chairs from others.
By the way, that's not me complaining, I knew I had come to a startup where you need to hustle every day; you cannot crib and cry about every little issue. You need to give your best with whatever limited resources you have and I had come mentally prepared for that. Later that day, the founder of our organization came to meet us.
As you climb the ladder of age, the first thing that you do when you meet a new person is to try and guess their age. The founder of Freightbro looked like he was in his mid-30s; he had already founded an organization and here I was, 27 years "old", and still interning (Time to re-think my life decisions). Shrugging that thought aside, I shifted my attention to the founder.
He ran us through the freight industry in general and what problem the product was trying to solve. It was interesting to know about his startup journey, the conception of the idea and how far the company had come from its original idea. By the time this discussion got over, it was evening already. We packed our bags and called it a day; a good one indeed.
The next day, I came in casuals. We were told to wait until our mentors contacted us. So, I waited. Minutes turned to hours and hours into a day. I spent an entire day doing nothing and the words of my seniors "you'll have fun in internship" echoed in my ears. This wasn't my definition of fun, and I got scared and restless.
The very next day, I came prepared with a mindset that I wouldn't be wasting my time. I would do something/anything productive. Hence, I started doing that one thing every person who is selling or making a product should do - learn about the product. I started reading about the freight industry and the product. I read all the documents I could get my hands on, used the product as much as possible in order to gain better knowledge on how the product could be marketed, who are the competitors and what is the parity between them. I was still not doing anything for the organization but at least I was learning something.
Finally, after a couple of days, my mentor, Mr. Karthik, called me. He was working from the Chennai office and I was working from Mumbai. We were supposed to collaborate over the phone. I had my doubts if this long distance relationship was going to work.
Karthik told me that he went through my profile and he thinks I would be best suited for a role in Process Management. If you are thinking about what's Process Management, you aren't alone. Let me break it down for you based on what I learned.
- An organization contains many departments. the responsibility of process management is to facilitate all these departments with proper process structure so that they can function smoothly and help them achieve their KPIs easily.
- It facilitates seamless communication of data between different departments so that they can work together as one.
- It requires a lot of automation and knowledge of the working of various departments in an office.
Karthik left the choice to me to choose either process or marketing with an assurance that I would be dabbling in marketing as well if I chose process management.
I came to Freightbro with the mindset of pursuing marketing, as it would be my major in MBA but process management sounded challenging and interesting. So I let destiny take an upper hand on this one and agreed with process management.
After I decided my domain, I was given my first task - designing and coding a chatbot. As soon as I heard this, my first instinct was to scream "Are you kidding me! First, you change my domain and now you want me to code? Why would I leave my old job if I still had to code! My father always told me that every time you are about to take a decision in anger, sleep on that decision for one night and the next day if you still feel the same, do it. So, I decided to go with my dad's advice and did not react that day.
The next morning, my mind had somehow changed. I knew it was a basic chatbot, coding it wouldn't take much time. I decided to finish it up as soon as possible and get it over with. I'm glad I took that decision. Designing the chat bot did two things for me:
- It allowed me to see the product from a user's perspective. Use the product like a user and not like an employee. Ask questions about what would make the user experience better.
- It helped me rediscover my love for coding and how I could be an MBA graduate who can still code.
Post designing the bot, I was given a variety of works from various departments. These tasks helped me learn a lot about how the entire organization worked. What does each department do and how do they do it. I wasn't restricted to just one department; I got to taste every chocolate in the box.
Some of the many tasks which I did were:
- Understanding various roles and responsibilities in the office and assigning each person different permissions in the CRM app based on the kind of access they might need.
- Data analysis to remove redundancy.
- Automation which made sure anyone who contacted our organization were recorded as leads in CRM system.
- Integrating various apps the organization is using to make sure that communication flow is seamless.
- Email marketing and marketing automation( Yes!! I worked in marketing as well).
- Understanding the incentive structure of salespeople and creating dashboards for the same using SQL.
- Testing various apps to check which one would give the best ROI while fulfilling the most business requirements.
I did a lot of work but I noticed that a lot of my work was not being used by other employees. Many employees were following some other processes and did not want to shift to my process. This made me feel like my work was not being appreciated. I confronted Karthik about this and thus came the biggest learning of my internship.
People love the comfort of the known and will always resist change. Forcing them or preaching them philosophy seldom works. Our best bet is to show them some quantifiable benefits of changing.
Karthik told me to wait and let them see the benefits of choosing my process. This made a lot of sense. Turns out not taking OB&HR subjects seriously in the first year wasn't a good idea. Human behaviour is really important in an organization.
My internship was about to get over and I had used most of the days productively. Oh, by the way, I did have some fun as well. I was surrounded by a good diversity of personalities. There were some Game of Thrones fans, some followed politics like their life depended on it (which in many ways did), there was a hardcore non-vegetarian who would throw up if asked to order vegetarian with his own money, some kick-ass TT players and a pretty awesome PUBG squad. Turns out, the enmity between B-school students exists only on social media. All interns were friendly and the feeling of competition wasn't overpowering ( I'll let you decide if that's good or bad).
In hindsight, it feels like a long internship but days passed by in the blink of an eye. Just like that, the last day of internship was there and I found myself packing my bags. During the course of the internship, I had met my manager/mentor only once. I was really looking forward to his feedback which I asked over the phone call.
He said, and I'm paraphrasing here, "If there's one thing that I would want you to take away from this internship, it would be that you made my life easier for two months". This was the nicest thing someone had told me and was going to be with me for the rest of my life.
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