Virtual Start-Up Company Dynamics
The organization I am interning at this summer, Limitless Minds, is a small startup company. As an intern, I am reporting directly to the COO and President of the company. As a startup, the company is also very small, and when they brought on five interns for the summer, their company almost doubled in size. As far as how work is directed in the company, we are given quite a bit of autonomy. The interns and the staff have “daily check ins” where we report what we are grateful for that day, the projects we are working on and what we need from our supervisors to complete those projects. The projects we have are assigned to us and usually a few pointers, or comments are given on how they want us to do each project, but other than that we are given pretty much free reign and creativity to do each assigned project as we would like. Timelines are not always exact or hard deadlines, but it is expected that we get things done in a timely fashion. We present our projects to the COO and President of the company and they provide us with feedback, questions and comments and we adjust each project accordingly. I believe that the autonomy we have as interns reflects the company as a whole. At a smaller company, there is less need to micromanage or have each person follow directly standardized procedures because you are able to really get to know each of your employees and build trust in them.
Limitless Minds is also a virtual company, and has been since before the COVID pandemic. In this respect, the “move to virtual” has been relatively easy for them in respect to company dynamics. Work is structured in relatively the same nature as it was before, with daily update meetings (the interns do this at 9 am everyday with our direct supervisor Ana and the rest of the company does it 4 pm daily). As a virtual company, we are able to have employees from all over the world, which is another bonus to help diversify the company! One of our supervisors Ana is from Guatemala and many are from the west coast area (mainly Washington). This means that we all operate on different time zones, which is a struggle the company deals with but overcomes with ease, most likely due to the small number of employees. Those working on the west coast are known they may have to get up a bit earlier and us on the east coast know that we may not hear from the west coast employees until a bit later in the day.