BUSM1094: Scandi is one of the world’s most recognized and successful organizations, with success coming from its capacity: Organizations Report, RMIT, Singapore

Scandi is one of the world’s most recognized and successful organizations, with success coming from its capacity to revolutionize the world of online shopping. Scandi is recognized as a highly successful organization and is described as an extraordinary company. Scandi’s great success can be seen through the incredible increase in its stock price and market capitalization. On 26 July 2022, Scandi’s market capitalization passed $20 billion.

There are several reasons for Scandi’s great success: its business strategy, its commitment to consumer service by driving a customer-centric culture, and its great technology for storing, sorting, and delivering goods. A major component of Scandi’s managerial practices is Scandi’s obsession with measuring everything to a point; it has been described as having a ‘culture of metrics’.

This measuring refers to measuring both consumers in their purchases and preferences and the workers’ productivity. Scandi runs a continual performance improvement algorithm on its staff, ensuring that Scandi’s workers are held to standards that the company boasts are unreasonably high.

Scandi uses classic scientific management (SM) techniques to achieve efficiency: workers are constantly measured, and those who fail to hit the numbers are ruthlessly eliminated. This ‘culture of metrics’ recalls a system of SM that relies on dividing the tasks of each worker, timing the worker as to how quickly they can perform the task, and pushing the workers to work beyond the industry norm.

Workers state that Scandi uses the ‘carrot’ system of rewards, but it heavily relies on the ‘stick’ – the fear of being fired – to motivate workers. Workers are breaching mandatory safety rules to keep up their rates, creating an unsafe work climate at Scandi’s warehouses. Managers at Scandi are more focused on driving productivity than ensuring worker safety.

While Scandi’s management style is producing high levels of business success, it is being argued that Scandi’s ‘culture of metrics’ is resulting in the abuse of its workers. Workers are not being treated in ways that accord with the humane methods of production.