@Harish Bhamidipati Starting at the beginning to build up culture and engagement. What can companies do that can be a big hit in the early stages?

Thanks for the q, @Varsha Singh “Starting at the beginning”- I’m wondering if you mean beginning of the company, i.e. early days of a startup or early days of an employee (could be in a young startup or an established 100 year-old company for that matter). In the early days of a startup, there is inherent energy of the young. Everyone is out to change the world; they’re cracking tough/never-solved-before problems and in most cases, people will genuinely be engaged. In this situation, the challenge is to harness this energy and sustain it for as long as possible. This is where the founders and key stakeholders should get together and try to codify the company culture and employee value proposition as early as possible. It’s impossible to eliminate the think-say-do gap (of what founders think is important for their culture, what senior leaders end up saying and what eventually happens on the ground). Codifying the culture that all the key stakeholders buy into (not just the founders) that is grounded in reality and will help the company scale and make their dreams a reality is extremely important. In the absence of a codified culture manifesto/ handbook that expands culture and values to actual expected behaviors at all levels, it will be like The elephant and the blind men. No one is wrong about the company culture but no one is right as well; every leaders means well but the company is not pulling in the same direction. Once you have articulated your employee value proposition, you can start thinking about the tactics and tools of engagement. Everyone doesn’t need to copy the fancy engagement app that’s in the news. Think about what your team wants - depending on their context, stage of lifecycle, your domain/ geography and then pick tactics/tools. And be ready to change them as long as you know why you’re choosing your tactics. Coming to new employees in an established company (even if you didn’t ask about this context, I thought I’ll address it anyway 🙂 ). The biggest challenge for established, mature (usually highly profitable!) companies is that everything seems a bit jaded. People have seen it all; been there, done that. They have seen umpteen initiatives and campaigns by HR and are typically cynical about them (I know I’m probably making a broad generalization). My suggestion here would be to apply the marketer’s lens that I spoke about in my answer to the question about employee journey. The needs of different segments of your employees are different. Treat them differently. E.g. when we helped a product company design their hackathon, we saw that they had fresher Engineers who were ready to put in all-nighters through the weekend. The company had also grown in India via acquisitions - these were 30-35 year-olds who have been there and done that, won earlier editions of the same hackathon. Now they have families at home and even if they want to, may not be able to pull an all-nighter. But they can make up for the lack of time with quality of customer insights that the freshers lack! So we appealed to the ‘senior’ folks to be mentors for the participating teams. We asked them to think of themselves as angels (investors) and make the right connections with people in the system (customer facing sales folks/ senior architects in the CTO’s office etc.). The freshers needed the thrill of putting an all-nighter because that’s what geeks do. The senior folks added value to the idea by bringing in market insights and making the right connections. That’s how they’re giving back and helping further the company’s objectives. And there will be some people who can just applaud/ be cheerleaders because they have a tough release or were traveling. Enable them to be part of the same hackathon in some way (judges/ audience) - they’ll play a more active role in the next edition of the hackathon. This is the kind of segmentation and appealing to the aspirational identity of people that needs to be tapped into, to genuinely improve engagement for all (as against thinking that a hackathon with lots of fancy prizes and food is great for engagement for all)

Yes . Thanks Varsha .👍👍