A thread on organizational culture...

With time it has become easier to start a company, raise funds, get press, a fancy office, free lunches, a Foosball table and beans bags.

What remains hard (and has gotten harder) is to build an institution where people love to come to work.

And in my experience, the money, the title, the position and even the responsibility to some extent, very quickly becomes commonplace.

It becomes oxygen - something critical, but we don't acknowledge it every second. Its just there.

What then makes people love to come to work?

IMO, how people FEEL at the end of everyday.
How are they made to feel, at the end of everyday.

And that comes down to this rather hard to explain thing called culture.

It is culture that dictates how people operate, how they behave and how they feel.

I have 3 heuristics to explain the culture of an organization

1. What happens when the boss leaves the room?
2. What do people do when no one is looking?
3. What happens when a tissue paper is lying on the office floor?

At nearbuy, when it came to articulate the culture, I made the classic mistake of making it verbose, elegant and inspirational rather than implementable.

We called it the 10 Commandments (creativity, much!)

It was clear, very early on, that this won't work.

So we changed it to something simpler, easy to remember, and easy to understand.

We called it R.O.P.

Respect.Ownership.Performance.

RESPECT
It doesn't matter who you are, how you look, how much you earn, how you speak, where you studied, what your title is or how long have you been with us.
You will be respected.
And you will respect everyone accordingly.

This was the cornerstone of our functioning...

Respect does not come from titles.
It comes from conduct.

When someone truly respects you, they respect you even when you are not around.

OWNERSHIP
Ownership isn't doing what you are supposed to do. That's your job. That's what you are paid for.

Ownership is going beyond.
It means not taking what the organization lays out for you, as the only benchmark. Instead finding your own levels and benchmarks.

"So what if this is not my job. It is someone's job and if I am aware of it, I will either help them do it, or I will do it myself. Because I can."

This is precious.
Not something that money can buy.

I recall during Groupon times, when we used to sell products too, our head of warehouse operations drove from Delhi to Jaipur to deliver a package. It was a birthday gift for the customer's daughter and won't have reached on time through shipping.

No one told him to do it.

PERFORMANCE
At the end of the day, it all comes down to performance.
Not what you were meant to do.
Instead, what you were meant to achieve.

The outcome. As against the output.

Always asking, "Why am I being asked to do what I am being asked to do?"

Doesn't matter how popular you are, how much people love you, how late you stay in office or how you are always on time.

There is only one thing that mattered - did you achieve what you had set out to do.

There were 2 ways of setting this culture

1. Talk about it.
Over and over again.
Paste it on walls.

2. Exhibit it daily.
In your actions.
Through your words.

While we followed 1, it is 2 where I think we scored.
Here are a few things we did...

But before that, a short side story...

When I started Groupon India in 2011, I had a rather fancy image of how to build a strong culture.
It was based on my understanding of the west - Google, Facebook and the likes
A flat open office, lots and lots of autonomy, open doors...

..and because of this feedback will flow. People will share what is right, what is wrong. Will make each other better.

And so we did that. Built really nice happy offices. Kept saying, "our doors are open. talk to us whenever you want"

Nothing happened...

And I realized why.
We are not the West.
We are India.
We are culturally very different.

We are trained to be complaint. To be subservient. To not question authority.

We are fearful of the reactions to our feedback.

One evening, I am reading and come across Oscar Wilde's famous quote

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

AHA!
This was it.

I care about the truth.
Not the source of the truth.

I care about what needs to be fixed, or improved, or challenged.
I do not care about who feels this way or said it.

What we needed was anonymity.

And that's what we did.
We built our culture on the foundation of anonymity.
And obsessive transparency.

Anonymity + Transparency

Which made us consistent in our actions. And predictable.

And thus gave people the most important thing we all care for...

A sense of security

Anonymity + Transaparency = Consistency + Predictability = Security

1. The "Why the fuck" form

An anonymous Google form
If you see anything in the company that makes you go "why the fuck?"
"Why the fuck are we doing this"
"Why the fuck are we not doing this"

Ask on the google form.

here is the fun part...

People asked
And I answered

And the answers were shared with the entire company.

The questions, and the responses were public for everyone to see.

It was fascinating!

I recall a question one day
"WTF are we supposed to wash our coffee mugs if there is no office help"

"Sorry for this. The help was on leave. You should know though when we started, I was the one opening and closing the office shutter everyday for the 1st year. That's who we are"

2. Lunch with warikoo
I had lunch with an employee everyday.

It was one of the most special things I did. And it worked like magic.
I spoke about this on a TEDx talk

3. Anonymous questions during All-hands, where I would answer them live in front of the entire company, irrespective of what they were.

4. Managers were to have 1:1 with their teams at least once every month.
Mandatory.
No exceptions to this. I was brutal when it came it

5. Letters to the families of top performers
(Something that I learnt from @IndraNooyi, as a tradition she followed at Pepsico)

The most emotional time of the year - receiving responses from the families and employees ("I have seen my parents so proud of me!")

6. Personally sending a welcome email to new joinees and then checking on at the end of the 1st month, if they were doing ok.

7. Using @infeedo as my sentiment gauge (thanks @tanmaya17) - an HR bot that chatted with employees on how they are doing.

There are so many such wonderful experiments we conducted, most of which I am proud of, even if they failed.

If you ask anyone who has left nearbuy, what do they recall the most - almost all of them will say "one of the best cultures I have worked in."

And that stemmed from the belief that setting the right culture is no one's except the leader's responsibility.

And each time they accept a new standard they set a new culture.

Here is something I have never admitted in public

I often feel sad that nearbuy is not a success, in the socially accepted definition of success.
You know - unicorn and shit.
Because it often leads people to believe that this form of leadership and culture building doesn't work

Its a hope that one day it can be shown how one doesn't have to be an asshole and build a ruthless organization, to be a successful one.

An institution which makes people say, "It's possible to build an immensely successful workplace where people love to come to work."

Fin.