HR, not funds, big
headache for startups
Find It Tough To Keep
Employees Engaged | Deploy Tools To Build Culture, Get Feedback
Fund-raising may have come
easy for startups.It's the people matters that appear to be rather tricky . For
some, establishing a unique culture is proving to be tough, while for others
it's about ensuring new hires remain as engaged as those who began their
careers at the start of the company's journey .
Simplilearn, a professional
certification provider, has a practice called `Free Look Period', which allows
the employee to understand the role, team dynamics and work culture. It's an
opportunity to ensure that the new hire and the company are a perfect fit. The
firm is now creating a new post for head of culture. The objective, said COO
Gerald Jaideep, is to link the core values and vision of the company with
business goals and to replicate behaviours in people to ensure they deliver.
At Belong, on the other
hand, engagement of new employees starts much before their actual joining
dates. A few weeks into accepting the offer, respective teammates start
engaging them at multiple levels by inviting them to attend in-house events.
“We believe greater a Belonger's exposure to the company and its people during
their early days, higher their ability to bring their best. By the end of the
first week, all of them would have attended at least one customer and one sales
meeting and shared their learnings, met each team in Belong and understood how
we are all aligned,“ said Vijay Sharma, co-founder & CEO, Belong, which
uses data analytics in hiring. Every alternate Friday , Belong has `demo days',
where teams demonstrate what they are currently building or shipping. The
company believes this creates a sense of ownership among new members and gives
everyone a sneak peek into what's getting launched and how it's going to impact
customers.
To measure engagement of
teams on a regular basis, mobile payments platform Paytm has developed a tool
called `Pulse'. It's an anonymous survey which is looked upon as an important
mechanism by the manager and the team to get honest reviews.
The objective is to deep
dive and resolve issues wherever the scores are below organizational average.
Amit Sinha, VP-business planning and people, Paytm, said given the chaos in
which startups operate -putting in 10-12 hours of work daily -the tool is
essential to gauge employee engagement levels. With a staff strength of 4,000
and growing, Sinha said while the older employees are in sync with the company's
culture, it's for the new hires that such tools are more useful. The tool has
helped in identifying some gaps in the induction process which the company is
working to fix.
B Mohan Kumar, founder
director & chief evangelizing officer of iAccept Softwares, uses special
training imparted to its employees as a tool to make them feel valued. “This
makes them feel privileged for getting a chance to get trained in areas where
even their peers have not got an exposure,“ said Kumar.
Vinaya Bansal, co-founder,
The Predictive Strategy Group, who has worked in a startup for six years, said
early employees can also be the ones who are most likely to become disengaged
after the company enters a growth phase. “With VC funding coming, a startup
tends to grow overnight from a toddler to adolescence and then to middle age,“
said Bansal.
Processes and structures
give rise to hierarchy . Soon, formal appraisal processes are put in place and
suddenly , the early joiners find that the very reasons of joining a startup
don't exist. But it's a phase all startups must go through, if they wish to
grow.
|
NamrataSingh
|
|
Mumbai:
|
TOI11apr16
No comments:
Post a Comment