In: Operations Management
Do you think that thenew feature of secrecy described at Snapchat would allow teams to be optimally successful? Why or why not? What two recommendations would you make to for Snapchat to either maintain their success or improve the way they engage in teamwork?
Solution:
The new feature is designed in a way to ensure that the sharing of data is restricted and is conducted only at the discretion of the user. Hence, this feature helps in maintaining the privacy of the user and allows the user to decide on the information that she wishes to share. Hence, it allows the privacy for the users as well as to the teams who are operating in the Snapchat environment. Hence, I believe with the importance of information security and the increased risk of information theft are some of the factors that make this feature very much useful for the teams to be successful in their operations.
Also, a similar feature has been introduced in their workplace where the sharing of information between the departments is restricted making teams operate in silos without any feedback from the other teams. This is a good strategy because it will make every team to come up with solutions to the issues they are working on and hence provide multiple solutions to Snapchat which it can leverage to develop further solutions. The issues of a copy of work will be significantly reduced and the efficiency and effectiveness of the teams will improve to a new level.
Snapchat can introduce team competitions which can make the teams work hard for internal competitions to get their rewards. This team competition has proved to be beneficial for many organizations around the world and it improves the competitiveness among the teams which ultimately benefits the company as a whole. Another way to improve engagement and teamwork is to introduce the concept of cross-functional teams which will make the different teams come together for a single project which can help all the teams get the essence of the work done by other teams. This tactic has proven record of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the teams.
Hence, these are the recommendations to Snapchat in order to improve their team engagement and teamwork.