Manners maketh man, culture maketh company
Things I love about being in good culture.
You join a new company and when you are asked “How are you doing?” Do you say “You are doing excellent” or you want to scream 😱 “Every day feels like a week”. The answer completely depends on how well you are being taken care in the company. Every new company you join, you experience a new versatile culture. Different subset of people bring different set of culture on table and make it company’s culture.
After spending close to six years in tech industry 👩💻 as a developer, I collected a lot of learnings along the way. All of these come from the rich experience of handling different situations, releasing high priority features, and working with different team sizes and stakeholders. I give myself a pat on back and say “Super proud of myself! I handled it better and in right way”. Here are few things I loved about being in good culture and well taken care.
(1) Buddy System : This is something very impressive I experienced in Glance. I had the best experience with my buddy. He enabled me to give my best during initial weeks. Every new associate needs an onboarding buddy. If you are not aware of buddy system, A buddy is an existing employee who guides the new associate through the first few weeks or a month on the job. Buddy will be the first point of contact for new employee.
Few responsibility for buddy:
▶ Meet and greet new hire personally or over virtually.
▶ Introduce them to the team and other stake holders
▶ Help them to start by arranging Product KTs and set up their system
▶ Encourage them to attend company wide fun meeting and activities.
Traits of a buddy:
▶ Is a peer of the new employee.
▶ Has a willingness and ability to mentor others.
▶ Has the time to be accessible to the new employee.
▶ Has good communications and interpersonal skills.
We love the culture of Buddy system at InMobi and also work towards making new hire experience simply awesome with the help of teams and HRs!
(2) Super You : You are great at what you do, but you don’t have clear path for your growth. You can’t figure out what growth should look like for you or may be you are confused 😕
▶ Is it hike
▶ Is it promotion
▶ Is it moving to completely different role
▶ Is it always stay on IC role
▶ Is it people management
Do not worry and let me try to help you here. All you need is a cup of coffee ☕️ and a meeting with your manager to set personal/professional goals. A glimpse of what we follow at InMobi & Glance to have frank growth conversation with self and manager.
Company’s growth = Employees’s growthSample goals:
Action Plan: Now it is time to come up with growth plan and bring your goals into action. How about having a path :
Milestone ▶ Action plan ▶ Enablement required [Skill enhancement, Coaching/Mentoring, Workshops, Certifications etc) ▶ Timeline ▶ Measure
Hoping you have a clear growth path to look forward now. If not, it is ok because it is a continuous process and you can repeat these steps again.
“An organisation can grow only when its associates are growing and associates can grow only when its organisation is growing.”
(3) Kindness initiative : None of us could have ever imagined 2020–21 to have so much impact on our lives physically, emotionally and mentally. Health, social, and economic crises have brought sweeping changes to how we live, work, and lead. These changes have also made having a strong, positive org culture more critical than ever and call for company initiative focused in kindness.
▶ Communicate internal or external milestones and org wins.
▶ Regular reward and recognition 🏆 for employees.
▶ Celebrate promotions and team achievement.
▶ Have some fun. A team that can help you unwind and have some laugh 😆
▶ When giving constructive criticism , always give “compliment sandwiches” (compliment, criticism, compliment)
▶ Assign work based on people’s strengths to set everyone up for success.
(4) Effective Communication: It is exciting when your team is growing fast and you have more hands to build and ship features fast. But it also brings some growing pains. One of the most common challenges a team face is effective communication in an office culture and it become more challenging in an office-less culture of work. Here are my learnings from past experience.
▶ Provide context: Don’t just say ‘hi’ ✋ and wait for response from your colleague. Add some context and necessary data to make it easy for other person to come back with meaningful reply or with information.
▶ Calling it out: If you have too much on your plate and have no room for additional work, call it out to your lead or manager. They will appreciate your honesty. My manager surely does 😃
▶ Fear not: Don’t fear to speak up. Have questions ask them. Feeling something is not right, raise your voice. Need more time ⌚️ to finish your task, ask for it.
▶ Communications guidelines : You could use Microsoft Teams or Slack for chatting or discussions but make sure all decisions or official matters are noted by email.
▶ Your Presence: I have faced this personally. We all want to be a good teammate. We want to reply to messages promptly and help colleagues. Being too available at work becomes problems — falling behind with your own work being just one. You do not want to do it. You can have 70–30 or 50–50 rule where you block your calendar 📆 for yourself or finish your task.
Here is Naveen Tewari, our InMobi founder talking about culture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdaNx5XRLXU
Few words from Sahil Mathur, Sr. VP of Global HR, Glance -
“Culture is made up of shared values and beliefs about how we as a people behave and interact, how decisions are made and how work activities are carried out.”
When you are growing in a great culture and being well taken care, you do not mind going above and beyond to achieve organisation’s goals.
At the end of the day, we all are family working towards one goal “Come up with Solutions for real problems faced by Human beings in real world”
🙏 Thank you for taking the time to read this article. Feel free to comment if you have any idea to discuss to improve culture and make new hires feel awesome!.
Resources you can look:
1. Must read on Effective Remote Communication
2. https://www.humorthatworks.com/how-to/one-of-the-easiest-ways-to-be-funny-even-if-you-are-not/
3. https://www.humorthatworks.com/how-to/the-5-skills-of-work/
4. https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidsturt/2017/08/16/6-ways-to-know-its-the-right-company-before-you-accept-the-job/?sh=6a833317319c
