What crosses your mind
when you think about HR in start-ups? Is it the absence of it? Or a bright
coloured office and casual dress code? Startups are mostly run by a founder and
his core team, who care the least about structures, functions and policies.
That's why entrepreneurial HR is a system that works mostly on the basis of
mutual agreement and unwritten rules.
"HR in start-ups is
a lot more than free beer in the fridge and the ping pong table," says
Kanchan Kumar, Founder, Emportant, a payroll processing firm. Start-ups, being
nimble-footed, have the luxury of disrupting the HR function. And they are
doing just that. When your employer spends his revenue to build your net worth
and not merely to pay you a take-home salary, or when the founder himself
delivers the induction programme to explain the companys culture right on day
one, you know that the HR function is too mature to be called frivolous. Bring
Your Own Device is now Bring Your Own Cloud, showing the transparency and the
trust in employees that these start-ups are pioneering.
Blending roles and
diminishing boundaries calls for the founder to deliver on HR responsibilities.
The first priority is managing people rather than managing a product. "We
don't have a traditional HR person. I double up as the HR manager, among other
things," says Anand Jain, Founder, Clever Tap, a mobile technology
start-up.
Let us look at each HR
process and how it is being disrupted at start-ups.
Hiring: Set the ball
rolling
Social seems to be the
unanimous choice for hiring with referrals leading the way. A twist or two
paves the way for integration of the new hires.
"All my employees
were hired through referrals. The induction is informal. Since new employees
come through referrals, they hit the ground running as they have the knowledge
of the company and the product," says Jain.
Ankur Agarwal, Founder,
PriceBaba, an online price comparison site, echoes this. "The biggest plus
of social recruiting is that the candidate is vetted much before joining. We
also have a good history of getting interns to join us full time after they
complete their education. That loop is priceless. Once someone joins full time,
he helps us recruit more good candidates from his college."
Crowd Fire, a social
media product marketing company, approaches talent sourcing differently. It
organises meet-ups for brainstorming design ideas and pools in talent for
future hiring. WebEngage, a company that provides online marketing tools for
ecommerce firms, flies down the interviewee to its office in Mumbai for several
rounds to find the right capability, with minimal mismatch between expectation
and delivery.
Instamojo, an instant
payment solutions provider, focuses on direct hiring through sources such as
the Career page, AngelList, Referrals and Instahyre. Referral bonus becomes a
lump sum if the employee facilitates joining of five or more people. Media
Magic pays Rs 10,000 to the interviewer once the candidate completes three
months in the organisation. This builds ownership and expertise among the
leaders in the firm.
FreeCharge also depends
on referrals. Employee referrals are enhanced with gamification, which is
interesting, fun and rewarding. As part of the programme, there is an online
portal which helps employees share the jobs available on social networking
sites and relevant forums. 'Tech Carnival' offers a Goa vacation after every
successful referral.
New Hire Integration POCE
(Post Offer Candidate Engagement) at FreeCharge offers a platform for
candidates to interact and integrate and get to know the workplace culture,
norms and expectations. New hires are invited for informal meets and greet
lunch sessions with the hiring managers. New laptops are sent even before they
come on board.
Big Basket invests in a
strong cultural orientation with focus on integrity, speed and urgency. Growing
at a whopping 200 per cent, deepening the vision and the mission of the founder
remain imperatives. Creating the best last mile for the customer requires each
and every employee to deliver on the core culture. Managing employees on
payroll and on-demand labour requires rigorous training on the core culture and
mission along with skill-based programmes.
Time Management
The focus at start-ups is
on productivity and attendance is secondary. "We dont track vacation or
work hours. If an employee is thinking about attendance, he is not thinking
about the product or tech," says Jain of Clever Trap.
Work arrangement that
works best for the talent is offered, and this goes beyond work-from-home.
Agarwal of PriceBaba offers traffic-friendly work hours. "We never measure
attendance. We ask team members to declare their leaves to their managers over
email. We recently did away with timings altogether. Our previous policy was
that employees could come in any time between 9am and 11am. We have now left it
to the individual. So, employees choose the timings, and most of them have
their creative ways of beating the Mumbai traffic."
Training: Passing the
Ball
Developing skills
requires a similar focus. WebEngage, being a small and fast-growing company,
doesn't have enough slack and structure to put employees through a training
programme. So, the employee, after joining, is given a solo task. For techies,
it is a problem they wanted to solve for long but couldnt focus on, due to
various reasons. Sales guys attend a number of sessions with the CEO and the
sales team where they decode the process they follow and note down points to be
kept in mind while approaching the clients.
Instamojo combines
various forms with hands-on training and interactive methods such as townhall
presentation, role-playing, facilitation along with mentoring, and e-learning.
At times, employees are
allowed to interact with mentors outside the firm."One of our biggest
challenges is that our young team lacks the experience of setting up processes
or dealing with tricky management issues. So, we have a set of mentors to help
us out. We have empowered our team members to directly speak to these mentors.
For instance, Jain of Clever Tap and Aditya Mishra of SwitchMe, a loan
switching platform, are directly accessible to several people in our team as
mentors. We have internal Barcamp-like unconference sessions, delivered by
individuals within the company, and the topics can range from 'productivity' to
'spirituality', says Agarwal of PriceBaba.
FreeCharge organises
'bugathon' and 'hackathon' before the launch of any new product.
Teaming up
Structures are designed
according to work and responsibility. Sampad Swain, Founder, Instamojo, says,
"Considering that we are a very small group, we have no designations or
hierarchies. This way each person focuses on his responsibilities, working as a
team and learning. This also reduces corporate politics."
Kunal Shah, Founder,
FreeCharge, says, "We follow a flat structure and this has helped us build
a great work culture. We give our employees a lot of freedom to implement their
ideas and access senior leadership teams."
But growth fuels
structures. WebEngage, being at that stage, has leads to teams, including
development, design, support, marketing and sales. "Timely execution of
things demands ownership and, hence, the leads, but other than that we prefer
no hierarchy as such and follow an open culture, both physically and
philosophically," says the founder, Avlesh Singh.
The tools that are mostly
used are JIRA for project management and Salesforce for the sales team. Trello,
Slack and Google Docs remain the next favourites.
Measuring for a match win
Startup employees engage
better with their employers, thanks to flexible HR policies
Media Magic's svadhyaya programme requires that
employees review and rate themselves. It's a 100 per cent self-review system
where the manager comments only on the ranking and not on the review. Founder
Kapil Agarwal believes no one can own your success or explain what you
delivered. "Often, this self-review makes the employee contemplate where
he should have focused more. Hence, he can plan the goals for the next year
even better." Jain of Clever Tap approaches it differently: "The
speed of feature releases is a good indicator of output and efficiency."
Balancing act
When passion drives
performance, the work-life balance is re defined. Jain agrees. "While
there's no organised attempt at employee engagement, we try to have fun as a
team as much as we can. We took the team out for an IPL match and called in an
astronomer for a star-gazing event." At times, the absence of budget helps
employees gel better. Kushal Agarwal, Co-Founder, Gift XOXO, shares an
incident. "Our old office building required painting and decoration. Since
we did not have a big budget, we announced a 'paint your wall' programme that
became a hit with the employees. Everyone went beyond painting and decorated
the office with captions and favourite cartoon characters. In no time, our
office started looking swanky, with far greater sense of ownership among
employees." Instamojo had a 'bring your pet to work' day. But it's the ease
of work it focuses on more with work-from-home options, no rigid swipe in &
out time and flexible work hours. There is also no restriction on the number of
earned leaves as long as this does not harm the business/key deliverables.
There are no defined work stations and employees can sit wherever they want.
FreeCharge takes it a step ahead with flexible work hours and extended
maternity leave.
Salaries, Not an Issue
Deciding compensation is like walking on a
knife and requires maintaining a balance between being profitable and creating
value for employees. Clever Tap offers market or above market salaries apart
from stock options. The goal is to make sure that the employees are not worried
about salaries in the short term. Stock options are issued to encourage them to
build something they will be proud of in the next few years. This takes care of
long-term wealth generation. A similar trend is followed at PriceBaba, where
the employee can decide the distribution of cash and equity. "We never try
to retain someone for money. That is a race we cannot afford to run and do not
want to run. We offer leadership and growth to people. The key takeaway for
them is the learning. At the same time, we offer a combination of equity and
cash. The candidate can choose if he wants more equity or more cash," says
Agarwal.
Disrupting the Game
Blending roles calls for the founder to deliver
on HR responsibilities. The first priority is managing people rather than
managing a product.
HR functions in startups run in the vein of
every other process as managing people is deeply integrated with the
development of the product. Segregation and defining of functions is secondary.
The founders are
disrupting the process without often realising the maturity that they have
achieved. The stickiness of disruptive functions in startups should help them
solve bigger business problems as they grow.
Are such disruptions
possible at large corporations? Big firms have better platforms and bigger
budgets, with often the best brains, to innovate. Is it possible to have lean
workflows with high degree of transparency where the employee will know his
performance with every delivery and not with the year-end appraisal ranking?
Can large organisations sustain the holographic structure where the core
culture of the founder gets imbibed in each of its parts?
What would it take for
the firm to orient and align the new leaders in the firm to continue with the
legacy? Can large firms function like a hologram where every employee and
vertical is exactly a copy of the whole?
Citation from Business Today :http://goo.gl/dfaJRm
