Our key takeaway from recent virtual group discussions was that “no crisis should go to waste.” COVID-19 can be used to your business's advantage and equip you with the foresight to avert future ones. How? Read on till the end to find out more.

A TIME TO SURVIVE? NO! 

Our key takeaway from recent virtual group discussions was to embrace the work from home model and keep it partially active post COVID-19 pandemic. Why? Because of its immense cost saving potential and it's surprising effect on employee productivity. Read to the end to find out why you need to continue working from home.

As pandemic measures is gradually lifted across the world and the global economy is jumpstarted back into action, we realize things are not the way they used to be. We’ve seen a great deal of perseverance and innovation from global companies we serve with varying degrees of success. The world of business has changed for good, whether we like it or not.

Our key takeaway from recent virtual group discussions was adopting a millennial mindset by being willing to change old systems and reinvent processes. How else can businesses stay agile during this unpredented period? Read till the end to find out how you can be a leader who thinks on their feet and embraces change.

The key takeaway from the recent virtual group discussions was that supporting employee welfare is a holistic process that involves not only a reachout, but also developing programs and initiatives to help upskill and reassure the employee and support their families in the process. Read till the end to find out how you can be a more empathetic leader with a super productive team. 

The key takeaway from the recent editions of inFeedo's virtual group discussion was how HR KPIs and KRAs are being completely restructured to fit the needs and expectations of remote work, the workforce, and organization. Read till the end to find out how HR becomes the new workforce enthusiast.

From having virtual meetings over Zoom to water cooler conversations on Houseparty, Covid-19 has forced millions to work and connect from the confines of their homes. 

The good news? Studies¹ have suggested employees that work from home can be more productive and can lead to a positive impact on mental and physical health. But these studies weren't conducted while there was an on-going pandemic. While working from home can be a boon, its downsides are employees working longer hours at a more intense pace leading to significant stress in their lives.²

Our key takeaway from this week's virtual group discussions was that HR KPIs now have to aligned with moving key business levers. Read through to the end to find out how you can restructure your KPIs to sync with organizational goals. 

Our key takeaway from recent virtual group discussions was that building a COVID-19 playbook or Single Source of Truth for all matters related to the pandemic is the best way to keep your team aligned and focused on shared goals. Keeping everything in one place cuts down on confusion and provides a beacon of stability in a time of chaos. Read till the end to find out how you can build a kick ass playbook.

Our key takeaway from recent virtual group discussions was trusting your employees and monitoring outcomes rather than inputs is the best way to boost business during and following the pandemic. A disconnect between management and employees will cause a business to fail. Read on to the end to find out how you can be a leader who fosters a community of trust and gets the best out of your team.

Trust is an essential factor in ensuring your team members respect you and buy into the vision of the company. As a manager you are their first line of contact with the organization and are largely responsible for providing the face of upper management, especially in larger firms.

“Worst since 2008.”

That’s a phrase that keeps popping up as the global economy witnessed a massive downturn due to the spread of COVID-19. With stock markets in freefall, supply chains broken, travel bans enforced, and millions in self-quarantine, it’s clear that most businesses will be negatively affected by the crisis. But just like the 2008 crisis, this too shall pass and businesses must prepare accordingly. 

So how did businesses cope last time? What are the lessons that can be learned from the past?

Jason Lemkin, CEO/Co-founder of Saastr and Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight answer these very same questions in their recent webinar.

COVID-19 is here, and there's no escaping the effects that have already impacted our planet. Remote work is at an all time high as city after city locks down. The stock markets of the world are reflecting this uncertainty in the business sphere, with companies across the planet reeling and trying to fill the gaps.

One of the largest impediments to preventing the international spread of COVID-19 is fundamental miscommunication and uncertainty between nations of the world. All of these sovereign nations are beholden solely to themselves and their own group of experts, and while organizations like the United Nations (UN) and World Health Organization (WHO) have sought to rally the world together countries just still aren’t on the same page. Whether it was squandering valuable time to prepare, assuming the virus would never reach their nation, using COVID-19 to leverage political gains or failing to communicate and collaborate, the governments of our world have, collectively, left something to be desired with their response to the crisis.

As the severity of the pandemic grows nations are starting to collaborate more effectively, but there’s still work to be done.

24 March 2020. 

"All great changes are preceded by chaos," someone wisely said and posted this on the Internet. 

I remember being so nervous for my first day of kindergarten at a small private school in Lower Manhattan my parents had selected. I was leaving the familiar confines of my preschool and the friends I had made for a whole new school. To me, it was the biggest crisis I had faced for most of my life. I remember waiting for the first day: September 11th, 2001.

As businesses around the world reel, information and disinformation spreads widely, and circumstances change in a course of hours creating a reliable, steady voice within your own company is crucial. Most every company worldwide has already gone remote, and while HRBPs and CXOs would normally be able to be the stabilizing force in person that’s obviously not possible. So what’s the answer to the conundrum of how to keep people safe, calm, and productive during this period? It’s simple: an in-house COVID-19 team.

“I’m probably working harder than Elon Musk.”  That’s my roommate Kevin who’s a robotics engineer at a tech startup in India. While Kevin might be exaggerating here, I think he’s not too far off. 

A couple of days before International Women’s day, Elizabeth Warren — one of the prime candidates for the 2020 US presidential elections — announced the end of her campaign. Following an underwhelming performance in the primaries, a disheartened Warren mentioned how sexism clearly played a part in how her candidacy was perceived - an opinion that is shared by most female candidates who ran for president. 

As representative Barbara Lee, who was one of Senator Kamala Harris’s campaign co-chairs, aptly sums up the problem, "“The narrative that somehow women are less electable than men seems to still be an issue. It’s very disgusting really,” 

"This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb, when it comes, find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. 

If you haven’t been following the news recently, work from home has become the norm across many offices and corporations worldwide as the private sector attempts to help do its part in preventing wider transmission of COVID-19. Either at governments’ urgings or as a result of their own analysis of the situation more and more companies are closing their front doors and telling their employees to stay home. Social distancing is the best way to “flatten the curve” when it comes to stemming the spread of the coronavirus. Take a deeper dive into this Livescience article if you want to know a bit more about how the infection curve plays out in a variety of situations. 

The gender pay gap is one of the most discussed workplace inequities of our time, appearing everywhere from The New York Times to Harvard Business Review to Forbes. However gender-inclusive organizations don’t just begin at equal wages, inclusivity needs to be built into the core of any organization’s DNA. It’s about instilling equity into the workplace, enacting larger policies that seek to even the playing field between men and women in the office. There’s no denying that because of preconceived notions about gender and gender roles that men and women will inherently, because of lack of awareness and mindfulness, be held to different standards at work. 

“…I felt like the world is falling apart. While I sat there on my desk with a coffee mug in my hand, I could see my surroundings running in fast forward motion and I was beyond confused with what was happening. I wanted to scream hard but no words came out and soon enough, another customer file was kept at my desk to work on. It is becoming a task to wake up in the morning every day. Heavy breaths, heart pounding to 100 miles an hour, heavy sweating, feeling choked have become more frequent. My friends tell me it is a phase and my colleagues laugh at me for being too sensitive.”

As a young company, we at inFeedo have always been hyperconscious about diversity and equality in the office.

Last week, I was at one of the product demo (trying to understand how Amber works better; part of our induction program) while researching on some data for an article on the wage gap in India when I started talking with a new team member in our Customer Success team. I discovered that she had done some non-profit gender equity work before joining inFeedo. When she saw the statistics in my research, she was unsurprised.

The banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) industries contribute a significant percentage to the global GDP, employing several million people around the globe. But when it comes to the people who work in the sector, they seem far from engaged and happy. 

About a month ago, I was fired. My former employer, after failing to meet expected growth numbers, liquidated approximately 90% of their total employees, essentially stripping the company down to the minimum amount of workers required to handle daily operations. 

'Customers do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they’ll take care of your customers.' A whopping 75%¹ of organizations surveyed agreed with this statement.