Undercover Boss is coming to an end tonight but it’s going out with a bang – or hopefully not actually, as we go undercover with Narin Ganesh, the FD charged with the financial workings of international relocations company, Crown Worldwide Group. The company literally packs up the belongings of people and moves them anywhere – for example, in the episode, Narin packs for a family moving to Australia to set up a B&B on the beach.

He’s the new kid on the block, and early on was prepared to be the ‘undercover boss’  – this way he could more easily avoid detection in an organisation he describes as ‘not stereotypical’.

“We have quite an unusual structure because the structure is very flat,” he explained. His role as regional Finance Director for Crown Relocations in the UK, Ireland and Scandinavia was a new one. Crown bought Pickfords record management in 2006 and inherited a lot of their current staff from there. Despite this acquisition, morale does not seem to have dampened the atmosphere: the staff reportedly describe working for the company as ‘being part of a family’.

So a happy family – why would such an organisation want to take part in the Undercover Boss exercise? Narin explained it was a mixture of profile raising and discovering if Crown Group’s people management was really all it made itself out to be: “By and large we are a B2B company, we move private customers, but we wanted to raise our profile and this was a great opportunity to get our business out to a very large audience. That was very attractive and it kind of went from there.”

After the first episode with the calamity of communication issues Best Western discovered, Narin felt confident this wouldn’t be one of the issues for Crown. “We think we are pretty good at communicating within our company; people speak of a family culture in the organisation,” he said.

The company has had the same owner since 1965. Narin added: “We like to think that we put people first. It’s one of our core values but we wanted to see if we are really walking the walk.”

As Narin is an FD it can be expected that his hopes for what he might find might be slightly different to a CEO or a HR director. In reality however, the concerns of the FD were not that different: “I expected to find people doing a good job, “ he said, adding, “With our growth, maybe the line of sight from the top to the bottom has become too stretched – were we out of touch?  I wanted to find out if that was the case. Also I wanted to see how our customers reacted as well, the customer experience is essential, so to see that happening with my own eyes was very valuable,” concluded Narin.

Narin’s cover story did, by his own admission, stretch the truth ‘an awful long way’, and mindful that a picture had gone on a round-robin email to the office staff, he was seriously concerned: “I had a genuine fear, every day I had a genuine fear that I would get spotted,” he said.

And it seems he was nearly discovered: “The production manager got a call asking who that bloke was, asking if I was a spy for the competition, and another one asking if I was a professional actor, because I was just too good. Nobody seemed to twig I was an employee with the company, which was good. People smelled a rat, but they didn’t know what kind of a rat they smelt,” he said.

He also struggled to leave the boardroom behind. “The temptation is to be too probing. My job is to ask questions, you have to act a bit dumb, be a bit nonchalant about it and ask the kind of questions you would if you were new to the job – and then some –  but not too many,” Narin explained.

As someone used to working in an office, Narin did find an appreciation of the hard labour involved: “It’s physically hard work. You are on your feet for two days solid near enough, you are there early in the morning, you’re under time pressure: you’re also in the customer’s home so you’ve got to be ever so careful. Sometimes when we turn up customers can change their minds about moves, or they can be very emotional or very difficult about it all so not only are we providing a packing service, we’re also providing a counselling service it would appear. So there’s a lot more that meets the eye.”

The one negative thing Narin did uncover was an issue with the methodology at one of the plants. He explained: “There was an element where there was a lack of thoroughness about what we believed we were doing in terms of handling training and what was actually happening.”

He added: “It’s been proved subsequently when the particular guy joined the company he did have some training right at the very beginning so something happened between then and later on.”

Other than that, the FD insists it was a great experience: “Sincerely, everything else I was really happy with. I felt really positive about the whole thing, it re-affirmed my personal faith in the business, why I thought I’d joined, and I was pleasantly reassured. Maybe I didn’t appreciate how physical the job can be, stupidly enough. The mere act of making it happen is a big deal. I came away feeling very positive about Crown and still do,” he said.

Narin seemed particularly moved by the engagement of his staff. Although he had noticed that turnover was low, he realised there was something else to be proud of in his people. He said: “It wasn’t just working, it wasn’t just a job. I think people felt genuinely part of something, part of the Crown family. Wherever I went, people enjoyed being part of the Crown family. Is that unusual these days? I don’t know but it’s certainly nice to see.”

• Find out how Narin dealt with his UCB experience tonight on Channel 4 at 9pm
• Watch Undercover Boss with us on Twitter by following the hashtag #undercoverboss and HRzone