NATALIA LIZCANO LOPEZ

VEJA: SNEAKERS WITH A CONSCIENCE

Have you ever worn VEJA sneakers? Would you wear them now? What is the
public targeting these sneakers?
Based on our last PPT and everything that we’ve discuss in previous classes,
analyze this case, don’t overthink, give your best organizational answers.
Remember that you are future leaders and managers for your country!
Demonstrate knowledge in HRM, OB, and ethics. Think your answers from a
managerial perspective. Use your analytical, strategic, and humane skills to
answer each question.

1- What is OB, tell me its importance of this not so new field for companies.
Think about the impact in organizations and the impact on people’s
behavior.
OB is the studies the relationship between individuals within an organization, it
can help improve attitudes and behavior of employees and groups because it
focuses on why they act the way they do and how this affects them in a working
atmosphere. The importance of OB is that it helps the organization have a good
working environment which will make the employees feel motivated, improve
costumer service, improve cooperation in teams and cross collaboration between
different teams in a company, helps managers solve conflicts in the best possible
way and have effective leadership in the company. In general, OB helps the
company have good performance because it keeps employees happy and satisfied
not only with their job but makes them happy to work for a organization that
cares about them.
2- What was the biggest challenge for Kopp and Mosillion? What can you read
or infer about these friends, what was their vision? Tell me also what they
learnt about employees, and if that could be the reason, they created a
different company. Explain.
The biggest challenge for Kopp and Mosillionn was to create a ecological company
that could flourish in such as harsh industry (fashion) introducing a completely
new concept of vegan ecological sneakers that later on would be inspiration for
other companies to copy. These two friends had a very straight forward vision,
they wanted to generate an impact in the fashion industry with an ecological and
environmental approach. Since Kopp and Mosillion were used to a very different
working atmosphere that the one they created at VEJA, they were used to seeing
people being not so happy at their corporate but happy they were making a lot of
money, because of this, their culture is completely different, making sure that
theres a balance between work and private life so no matter what, people
enjoyed their job and also feel passionate about the company and its values
3- Where do we see implemented corporate social responsibility in the case,
and, also, what is the impact on their employees.
We see a lot of corporate social responsibility in the case, first of all, we can see
VEJA cares about their employee’s dignity at work since their factory workers
earned 16% more than Brazil’s minimum wage and they also paid overtime and
annual bonifications to ensure every employee earned what they deserved. In
addition to this, employees had 4 weeks of paid holidays, didn’t have to work on
bank holidays could only work a maximum of 2 hours per day on peak seasons. All
of this corporate social responsibility actions make the employees feel motivated
and happy to do what they are doing.
4- Motivation, sense of belonging, what can you tell me about this in the
case?
With a company with such strong message as VEJA, we can see that employees
will always feel motivated, not only because of their economical remunerations
but because they will want to be part of the change that VEJA is doing, making
their sense of belonging come from inspiration to have an impact in the planet
and help the environment.
5- On our classes I’ve said, that one of the challenges we face today as
companies is retention of employees, convincing them to stay! Where can
we picture this topic at VEJA.
For VEJA having happy employees is very important, so retention of employees
will always be important, the enforce this by for example having a close relation
with their workers, when a new member of the VEJA team joined the company,
they were given the opportunity to travel to Brazil to get to know the producers,
so that they could feel completely involved in the VEJA story, which was essential
to them.
I love this case for so many reasons. Tell me what you’ve learn about these
two amazing leaders, that had a vision, and translate it in a profitable and
sustainable business.