The Official inFeedo Blog

Before 2020, VUCA was another management jargon, something fancy we said on a stage or put in that slide to turn a few extra heads. Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous. Looking back at the year, everyone can agree: 2020 is VUCA personified for the modern world, a truly global crisis of our times.

2020 has been an incredible litmus test for us all when it came to quickly adapting to change. More so for HR as a function, once largely associated with nurturing soft skills, which has now most definitely become a central strategic force across businesses and a key bridge between employees and the larger organization mission.

One region that bares closer examining is South East Asia (SEA) as trends in HR tech slowly gain momentum. While digital transformation as a larger concept has been in talks for quite some time, organizations in SEA are now investing heavily in technologies that not just improve business processes but also employee experiences. We've worked first hand with many such leaders from the region who are not only passionately employee-first but continue to champion the use of technologies like AI in HR. 

Today we focus on 10 such HR Leaders who are shaping the HR thought leadership landscape not just in concept but also in action across Singapore and Malaysia, setting a remarkable employee-first trend as we enter 2021.

CHROs today no longer want top talent attrition to be an unexpected and unpleasant surprise in their organizations. Thankfully, heavy deployment of tech in HR to the tune of $145 billion dollars in 2020 has enabled HR leaders to predict turnover and take action proactively before it's too late.¹ Further, the HR tech sector is only continuing to grow in order to fight attrition, as 74% of companies are also planning on upping their investment in HR tech in the next few years beyond the average 310 dollars per employee they already spend.² 

It's not everyday you get 3 HR leaders from LI Top 10 Startups to be in the same virtual room, but it's 2020 and anything's possible. We had the pleasure of hosting a dream panel of Anuradha Bharat, VP People Operations at Razorpay, Tina Balachandran, VP People Operations at Unacademy, and Romita Mukherjee, Global HR Director at Whatfix for our recent HR Leaders Connect on “Building High-Performance Cultures at Growing Startups,” hosted by our very own CEO, Tanmaya Jain. So, what did these kickass people leaders have to share with us as keys to ensuring continuity in positive company culture during rapid growth and hiring? We’ve broken it down into six key takeaways that you can plug into your organization today.

For Mark Heap, CEO, MediaCom Asia Pacific and Sonia Fernandes, CHRO, the issue of solving low employee engagement was a crucial part of creating a people-first culture. Lack of a business partnering team in 12 of 15 APAC countries and over 2000 employees meant that individualized reach outs were impossible, and the annual surveys Mark, Sonia and their team were running were yielding low response rates and not providing actionable insights. This lack of insights prevented the organization from living up to the “People First, Better Results” philosophy that they had strived to implement in real time.

So what did Mark and Sonia do? They implemented Amber.

I think we can all agree that the 2020 workplace is as unique and unprecedented as it gets. Being caught without warning and forced into a completely unprecedented style of working raised several logistical and procedural changes for employees and HR departments alike, but also presented us with a unique opportunity to adapt, improvise, and evolve! The key focus of almost all of our pandemic efforts? HR agility.

We were proud to host Tanmaya Jain, CEO inFeedo, Sonia Fernandes, CHRO MediaCom, and Rajeev Bhardwak, CHRO Sun Life Insurance for an HR power panel on the three key tenets of the 2020 workplace: Innovation, Agility, and Productivity.

“When I look at engagement surveys I honestly felt they are very outdated. One big reason is they’re not real time. By the time you get the results it’s already just too late.” said Aditya Kohli, CHRO Clix Capital.

If we were to go back by a decade or so, mental health was THE elephant in the room - both boardrooms as well as living rooms. People chose to not talk about it, and even if they did, the listeners often did not know what to do about it! But over time, through reinforced awareness and mainstream coverage, people have started warming up to such conversations. 

In recent news, BBC (England) covered an interesting piece on the role artificial intelligence (AI) has to play in the workplace. While we are now familiar with how this is helping transition the average HRBP's role from transactional to strategic and providing insights on employee sentiment for leaders to act on, AI engagement tools like Amber are also actively positioned as a digital friend at the workplace. 

Last week during a CNBC “@Work” segment Tiger Tyagarajan, CEO and President of Genpact, was asked “How do you judge the mood and morale of your workforce when your workforce is distributed?” His response? That the Amber product suite has allowed Tiger and his team to engage with, track the morale of, and work to improve the work lives of the over 95,000 members of team Genpact. Let’s take a look at how he put it.

For Rajeev Bhardwaj, CHRO, Asia Service Centres, Sun Life Financial, and his team building an employee-first culture within the organization has always been one of their utmost priorities. It’s always been about providing a safe, comfortable work environment where employees feel their voices are heard and recognized.

Now more than ever Rajeev is also looking to the future of how we work, or what he calls the “New Code of Work,” in regards to flexible and agile thinking as technological  breakthroughs, demographic shifts, rapid urbanization, shifts in global economic power, resource scarcity, and climate change. Further, the COVID-19 pandemic has only spurred and accelerated our push towards creating the “New Code of Work.”

And who does Rajeev see as a key ally alongside him and his team as they pursue employee engagement best practices? Amber.

Recently, the team at inFeedo organized a power panel with Dinesh Ramamurthi, CHRO at OYO, Rohit Thakur, CHRO at Paytm, Pooja Kapoor, Head HR at OLX, and Nitin Nahata, Head HR at Udaan.com, where they discussed building and maintaining employee first policies in startup unicorns during the time of COVID-19. 

COVID-19 is an unprecedented crisis and has made work from home, which was often a monthly or bimonthly “privilege,” earlier, the new normal. From resizing to process workarounds, HR professionals have been leading and defending the corporate frontline in this war that none of us saw coming! Read on to find out how these startup unicorns in the spotlight are tackling the crisis to sustain and survive in current times. 

“How do we make a better employee experience? In today’s world, if you’re running a mid to large size company it’s just not possible to do that without technology,” says Bhavana Kandari, VP-HR at Evalueserve and prominent Amber evangelist.

Our key takeaway from recent virtual group discussions was that making your employees feel like they own their work is a key way to keep them productive and engaged. By being a proactive stakeholder in their work rather than merely accountable, increases purpose and sense of accomplishment at work. Read to the end to find out more about how to get your workers into an ownership mindset.

As quarantine measures around the world are gradually lifted, we must begin the process of reintegrating our remote workforces back into the office. Only you can determine if your employee can return to office safely and efficiently or dangerously and ineffectively. Do you have an actionable plan in place?

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. 

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. We’ve all heard about the difficulties of a quick change to work from home culture. What about the employees who don’t have conducive work environments? Or those who relied on daily human interaction to drive them forward at work and in their own lives? With such a disruptive event we’d assume that most employees would be miserable, right? But guess what? The data might just surprise you!

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.

24 March 2020. 

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

“…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.”

The Current State of Employee Engagement in the Banking Sector

As we well know, the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) industry had a particularly volatile 2020. While eCommerce platforms boomed, traditional banking firms suffered as a result of global financial issues and the disruption of normal banking practices. However, we cannot forget how the BFSI industry contributes a significant percentage of the global GDP, and in turn employs several million people around the globe. Further, companies in the sector are in a pivotal role in regards to post-COVID bounceback, and hiring should resume (or never suffered at all!) now that the global economy begins to roar back into form. But the biggest issue? Our intensive, psychology driven research has shown that when it comes to the people who work in the sector, they seem far from engaged and happy as our 2020 state of engagement in the industry shows.

'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. 

In July 2019, Glassdoor’s Diversity and Inclusion Study (1) uncovered 49% or nearly half of the employees surveyed across US, UK, Germany, and France have experienced some form of negative bias be it:

10 years ago, Vineet Nayar, former CEO of one of the biggest IT service companies in the world, turned organizational hierarchy on its head with four simple words: Employee first, customers second. 

In the modern pursuit of a positive workplace culture one topic has risen above the rest: employee experience. As the primary driver of an employee-first culture, companies have begun building out employee experience strategies and frameworks, as well as creating employee experience surveys and employee experience platforms. 

This is reflected in the numbers alone: 92% of HRs across organizations1 worldwide see employee experience as even more critical to the business in 2021 than ever before, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, an alarming majority of 71% of employees surveyed by Gartner2 stated they felt HR didn’t prioritize employee experience!

The last time we spoke, we mentioned the 5 agents of change that can help you enable a super flexible workplace. Implementing these five steps can help you develop a positive workplace culture and ensure your employees are engaged and proactive. Once you have steadily introduced changes to your workplace culture with the help of these agents of change, you need to check off these 10 telltale signs that confirm your Organization Culture is adaptive and employee-first as defined by our research framework to make sure your changes really made a difference.

You may have heard that HR chatbots are revolutionizing the way global HR teams operate on a day to day basis. Whether it’s rapid and actionable data aggregation (which takes up 50 percent of the average HRBP’s day without a tool!), enabling proactive reach outs through sentiment analysis, or allowing employee inputs to shape their goals and growth patterns AI and HR chatbots are allowing HR teams to completely revamp the way they work.

“Work a short time, rest well, and learn a lot.” That’s what Microsoft Japan CEO Takuya Hirano noted on the company’s official website after successfully rolling out their Work Life Choice Challenge 2019. The firm has been making headlines ever since they offered 2,300 employees 3-day weekends for a month to experiment and analyze the impact of a 4-day work week on bringing about a positive work culture.

Our Content Specialist told me not to start most of my write-ups with Dilbert so I left Dilbert out of Dilbert. While I won on a meta technicality with this one, a lot of organizations might not when it comes to their recognition charters. Their “technicalities” are archaic rewards and recognition platforms, mandates for managers and departments, and gatherings that lose their meaning due to a lack of focus and meaningful recognition.

There are few moments that define inFeedo as a team. This Diwali, we acknowledged our privilege and decided we bring light and happiness to those who may not seem as blessed as we are but are certainly wiser, stronger, and richer in spirit...something we learned and went back home with in the process. :) 

If you had been following the ride-hailing giant (valued at $70B) recently, you’d be aware of the turmoil it’s went through. From Susan Fowler’s blog post complaining about sexual harassment and an environment rampant with sexism and discrimination, multiple lawsuits, top executives leaving and finally CEO’s leave of absence leading to a resignation, Uber has been all over the news because of its notoriety.

Why do some well funded/big companies miss business targets? Companies tend to focus 80% of their analytics effort on analysing “Historic Indicators” versus identifying “Leading Indicators” to grow business. This is biggest mistake I see with respect to how some companies leverage analytics.

One of Amber’s core mission is to have people open up to her, be honest with her — trust her. Building trust is hard, even harder when you’re a chatbot in digital space asking people to share openly and freely about their experience at their company without fearing repercussions.

What we’ve learnt is that digital trust pivots upon transparency.

“40% employees think that Amber is real . She [Amber] genuinely becomes a way of interacting at scale. ” — Ankur Warikoo, Founder, Nearbuy

Nearbuy is India’s very first hyper-local online platform present in 35+ cities and 18+ categories with over 50,000 merchants across 100,000+ unique locations.

Employees: 300+ | Industry: E-commerce/Retail | Region: India

A study done by Gartner(*1) confirmed that organisations are removing annual surveys from their employee engagement strategy after realising they’re not enough to capture the voice of the employee.

Much like the sweltering heat that refuses to subside, the team at inFeedo has been persistent, going all in in the last couple of months to address feedback you’ve shared overtime on Amber’s dashboard. The result? Two kickass dashboard feature upgrades that are guaranteed to blow your mind!

‘Lo and behold! Technology will change the way we think, breathe, smell…'  If one were to summarize this ongoing media frenzy around digital technology, this image would be fitting.

“None of the problems that HR are facing are usual. We have no anecdotal evidence, no brain trust, no think tank to fall back on.” 

For Mark Heap, CEO, MediaCom Asia Pacific and Sonia Fernandes, CHRO, the issue of solving low employee engagement was a crucial part of creating a people-first culture. Lack of a business partnering team in 12 of 15 APAC countries and over 2000 employees meant that individualized reach outs were impossible, and the annual surveys Mark, Sonia and their team were running were yielding low response rates and not providing actionable insights. This lack of insights prevented the organization from living up to the “People First, Better Results” philosophy that they had strived to implement in real time.

So what did Mark and Sonia do? They implemented Amber.

In recent news, BBC (England) covered an interesting piece on the role artificial intelligence (AI) has to play in the workplace. While we are now familiar with how this is helping transition the average HRBP's role from transactional to strategic and providing insights on employee sentiment for leaders to act on, AI engagement tools like Amber are also actively positioned as a digital friend at the workplace. 

“Employee first is the new Customer first”, and improving employee experience and satisfaction is now amongst the top priorities of HR managers in companies around the world. This stems from the increasingly accepted view that happy employees always lead to happy customers. Yet, according to the recent Gallup 'State of the Global Workplace' report, 85% of employees are not engaged or actively disengaged at work. 18% are actively disengaged in their work and workplace, while 67% are "not engaged."

As quarantine measures around the world are gradually lifted, we must begin the process of reintegrating our remote workforces back into the office. Only you can determine if your employee can return to office safely and efficiently or dangerously and ineffectively. Do you have an actionable plan in place?

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.

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. 

"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 Current State of Employee Engagement in the Banking Sector

As we well know, the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) industry had a particularly volatile 2020. While eCommerce platforms boomed, traditional banking firms suffered as a result of global financial issues and the disruption of normal banking practices. However, we cannot forget how the BFSI industry contributes a significant percentage of the global GDP, and in turn employs several million people around the globe. Further, companies in the sector are in a pivotal role in regards to post-COVID bounceback, and hiring should resume (or never suffered at all!) now that the global economy begins to roar back into form. But the biggest issue? Our intensive, psychology driven research has shown that when it comes to the people who work in the sector, they seem far from engaged and happy as our 2020 state of engagement in the industry shows.

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. 

In July 2019, Glassdoor’s Diversity and Inclusion Study (1) uncovered 49% or nearly half of the employees surveyed across US, UK, Germany, and France have experienced some form of negative bias be it:

10 years ago, Vineet Nayar, former CEO of one of the biggest IT service companies in the world, turned organizational hierarchy on its head with four simple words: Employee first, customers second. 

In the modern pursuit of a positive workplace culture one topic has risen above the rest: employee experience. As the primary driver of an employee-first culture, companies have begun building out employee experience strategies and frameworks, as well as creating employee experience surveys and employee experience platforms. 

This is reflected in the numbers alone: 92% of HRs across organizations1 worldwide see employee experience as even more critical to the business in 2021 than ever before, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, an alarming majority of 71% of employees surveyed by Gartner2 stated they felt HR didn’t prioritize employee experience!

Some time ago, Heinz had decided to take the talent and employee innovation displayed by its workforce seriously as it really was the most unused asset in any company. The improvements suggested was worth $250 million a year. Immersed in strategies and innovation we forget to ask ourselves a very basic question...

Today, we'll be talking about toxic work cultures. But before we do that, remember the United Airline fiasco where a passenger was yanked from his seat to make room for airline crew members? Let me recap it for you. The airport security forced a United Airline passenger off of his seat, causing his face to hit an armrest and bleed. 

Our Content Specialist told me not to start most of my write-ups with Dilbert so I left Dilbert out of Dilbert. While I won on a meta technicality with this one, a lot of organizations might not when it comes to their recognition charters. Their “technicalities” are archaic rewards and recognition platforms, mandates for managers and departments, and gatherings that lose their meaning due to a lack of focus and meaningful recognition.

If you had been following the ride-hailing giant (valued at $70B) recently, you’d be aware of the turmoil it’s went through. From Susan Fowler’s blog post complaining about sexual harassment and an environment rampant with sexism and discrimination, multiple lawsuits, top executives leaving and finally CEO’s leave of absence leading to a resignation, Uber has been all over the news because of its notoriety.

Here's what we found out about the real reasons why employees leave the organization...

Much like the sweltering heat that refuses to subside, the team at inFeedo has been persistent, going all in in the last couple of months to address feedback you’ve shared overtime on Amber’s dashboard. The result? Two kickass dashboard feature upgrades that are guaranteed to blow your mind!

‘Lo and behold! Technology will change the way we think, breathe, smell…'  If one were to summarize this ongoing media frenzy around digital technology, this image would be fitting.

Ever wondered what makes Amber empathetic while helping HR across 100 organizations in 50 countries be employee first? Our People Science team through years of primary research has built a framework that fuels Amber's AI engine to touchbase with every employee at the right time and moment in the organization. 

In recent news, BBC (England) covered an interesting piece on the role artificial intelligence (AI) has to play in the workplace. While we are now familiar with how this is helping transition the average HRBP's role from transactional to strategic and providing insights on employee sentiment for leaders to act on, AI engagement tools like Amber are also actively positioned as a digital friend at the workplace. 

Last week during a CNBC “@Work” segment Tiger Tyagarajan, CEO and President of Genpact, was asked “How do you judge the mood and morale of your workforce when your workforce is distributed?” His response? That the Amber product suite has allowed Tiger and his team to engage with, track the morale of, and work to improve the work lives of the over 95,000 members of team Genpact. Let’s take a look at how he put it.

“40% of an HRBPs time is spent collecting and analysing feedback, while only 15% of that is spent on engagement. It should be vice versa, right?” asks Geetha Thiagarajan, Head of HR at Finastra.

As quarantine measures around the world are gradually lifted, we must begin the process of reintegrating our remote workforces back into the office. Only you can determine if your employee can return to office safely and efficiently or dangerously and ineffectively. Do you have an actionable plan in place?

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. We’ve all heard about the difficulties of a quick change to work from home culture. What about the employees who don’t have conducive work environments? Or those who relied on daily human interaction to drive them forward at work and in their own lives? With such a disruptive event we’d assume that most employees would be miserable, right? But guess what? The data might just surprise you!

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.

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.

"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. 

“…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.”

The Current State of Employee Engagement in the Banking Sector

As we well know, the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) industry had a particularly volatile 2020. While eCommerce platforms boomed, traditional banking firms suffered as a result of global financial issues and the disruption of normal banking practices. However, we cannot forget how the BFSI industry contributes a significant percentage of the global GDP, and in turn employs several million people around the globe. Further, companies in the sector are in a pivotal role in regards to post-COVID bounceback, and hiring should resume (or never suffered at all!) now that the global economy begins to roar back into form. But the biggest issue? Our intensive, psychology driven research has shown that when it comes to the people who work in the sector, they seem far from engaged and happy as our 2020 state of engagement in the industry shows.

'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. 

In July 2019, Glassdoor’s Diversity and Inclusion Study (1) uncovered 49% or nearly half of the employees surveyed across US, UK, Germany, and France have experienced some form of negative bias be it:

10 years ago, Vineet Nayar, former CEO of one of the biggest IT service companies in the world, turned organizational hierarchy on its head with four simple words: Employee first, customers second. 

In the modern pursuit of a positive workplace culture one topic has risen above the rest: employee experience. As the primary driver of an employee-first culture, companies have begun building out employee experience strategies and frameworks, as well as creating employee experience surveys and employee experience platforms. 

This is reflected in the numbers alone: 92% of HRs across organizations1 worldwide see employee experience as even more critical to the business in 2021 than ever before, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, an alarming majority of 71% of employees surveyed by Gartner2 stated they felt HR didn’t prioritize employee experience!

The last time we spoke, we mentioned the 5 agents of change that can help you enable a super flexible workplace. Implementing these five steps can help you develop a positive workplace culture and ensure your employees are engaged and proactive. Once you have steadily introduced changes to your workplace culture with the help of these agents of change, you need to check off these 10 telltale signs that confirm your Organization Culture is adaptive and employee-first as defined by our research framework to make sure your changes really made a difference.

“Having a great sales team is a much stronger (and far lasting) competitive advantage than having a great product.” That's Neil Rackham, a pioneer in “consultative selling” and author of SPIN selling, in a London conference. He went on to explain why good, innovative products fail to take off. 

You may have heard that HR chatbots are revolutionizing the way global HR teams operate on a day to day basis. Whether it’s rapid and actionable data aggregation (which takes up 50 percent of the average HRBP’s day without a tool!), enabling proactive reach outs through sentiment analysis, or allowing employee inputs to shape their goals and growth patterns AI and HR chatbots are allowing HR teams to completely revamp the way they work.

The word “mindfulness” was rarely used in my vocabulary; this is coming from someone who has worked as an editor and writer for the last 7 years. It’s critical we ask what it means to be mindful in today’s hyper-competitive world. More importantly, to understand how this fits into the narrative of a mindful leader in a corporate setup.

Don't do this if you wish to create a culture of diversity and inclusion in the workplace

You must have seen the news recently. Abhijit Banerjee won the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, along with Esther Duflo (who happens to be Banerjee's wife) and Michael Kremer. Notice some of the news headlines I came across.  

Today, we'll be talking about toxic work cultures. But before we do that, remember the United Airline fiasco where a passenger was yanked from his seat to make room for airline crew members? Let me recap it for you. The airport security forced a United Airline passenger off of his seat, causing his face to hit an armrest and bleed. 

“Work a short time, rest well, and learn a lot.” That’s what Microsoft Japan CEO Takuya Hirano noted on the company’s official website after successfully rolling out their Work Life Choice Challenge 2019. The firm has been making headlines ever since they offered 2,300 employees 3-day weekends for a month to experiment and analyze the impact of a 4-day work week on bringing about a positive work culture.

Our Content Specialist told me not to start most of my write-ups with Dilbert so I left Dilbert out of Dilbert. While I won on a meta technicality with this one, a lot of organizations might not when it comes to their recognition charters. Their “technicalities” are archaic rewards and recognition platforms, mandates for managers and departments, and gatherings that lose their meaning due to a lack of focus and meaningful recognition.

I have been a part of the HR function for over a decade now. In the larger scheme of things, it doesn’t sound like much but believe me, empires have risen and fallen in littler times. I was with nearbuy.com the first time I heard about inFeedo. There was some buzz around the company as an idea generation platform but that was it.

Here's what we found out about the real reasons why employees leave the organization...

Why do some well funded/big companies miss business targets? Companies tend to focus 80% of their analytics effort on analysing “Historic Indicators” versus identifying “Leading Indicators” to grow business. This is biggest mistake I see with respect to how some companies leverage analytics.

Why do many companies go into ICU mode after a bad quarter?

One of Amber’s core mission is to have people open up to her, be honest with her — trust her. Building trust is hard, even harder when you’re a chatbot in digital space asking people to share openly and freely about their experience at their company without fearing repercussions.

What we’ve learnt is that digital trust pivots upon transparency.

“40% employees think that Amber is real . She [Amber] genuinely becomes a way of interacting at scale. ” — Ankur Warikoo, Founder, Nearbuy

Nearbuy is India’s very first hyper-local online platform present in 35+ cities and 18+ categories with over 50,000 merchants across 100,000+ unique locations.

Employees: 300+ | Industry: E-commerce/Retail | Region: India

A study done by Gartner(*1) confirmed that organisations are removing annual surveys from their employee engagement strategy after realising they’re not enough to capture the voice of the employee.

Much like the sweltering heat that refuses to subside, the team at inFeedo has been persistent, going all in in the last couple of months to address feedback you’ve shared overtime on Amber’s dashboard. The result? Two kickass dashboard feature upgrades that are guaranteed to blow your mind!

Over the years, this was a question we were asked frequently by our customers. We finally reveal the big secret behind naming our product ‘Amber’.

About 2 months ago, the team at inFeedo assembled for our mid-quarter checkpoint. Among the many questions raised, one that didn’t see immediate resolution was whether we should be calling the organizations we serve ‘clients’ or ‘customers’.

One Monday morning, right when the coffee machine was booting up, our alert and monitoring system went way out of whack! Amber’s systems were almost at the brink of crashing. Unlike us, she doesn’t take the weekends off and high performers like her are always at the risk of burning out.

‘Lo and behold! Technology will change the way we think, breathe, smell…'  If one were to summarize this ongoing media frenzy around digital technology, this image would be fitting.

I think we can all agree that the 2020 workplace is as unique and unprecedented as it gets. Being caught without warning and forced into a completely unprecedented style of working raised several logistical and procedural changes for employees and HR departments alike, but also presented us with a unique opportunity to adapt, improvise, and evolve! The key focus of almost all of our pandemic efforts? HR agility.

We were proud to host Tanmaya Jain, CEO inFeedo, Sonia Fernandes, CHRO MediaCom, and Rajeev Bhardwak, CHRO Sun Life Insurance for an HR power panel on the three key tenets of the 2020 workplace: Innovation, Agility, and Productivity.

Our key takeaway from recent virtual group discussions was that making your employees feel like they own their work is a key way to keep them productive and engaged. By being a proactive stakeholder in their work rather than merely accountable, increases purpose and sense of accomplishment at work. Read to the end to find out more about how to get your workers into an ownership mindset.

Our key takeaway from recent virtual group discussions was on two metrics that has showed significant shifts within employee dynamics and engagement since working from home. Read till the end to discover what these factors were that positively impacted the business since the pandemic hit.

Our key takeaway from recent virtual group discussions was that going the extra mile for field workers is the only way to sustain a non-office workforce. So many of our conversations have revolved around companies with an exclusively office bound workforce, but this week’s sessions brought new perspectives from a variety of participants in different fields. You don’t want to miss these; read to the end!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Meet Nico Mallillin, employee experience advocate and one of the biggest names in the HR industry in Southeast Asia. Nico is a Certificated Professional Coach and a Senior Certified Professional under the Society of Human Resources Management. He is considered one of the founding members of Society of Human Resources (SHRM) Executive Network, that brings together the HR profession’s most experienced leaders to help them meet the strategic and organizational challenges of an increasingly complex business landscape. 

At a young age, he had already received multiple recognitions such as Philippines' Most Talented HR Leaders in 2018, as part of the Top 100 Global HR Heroes and Top 100 Global Coaching Leaders during the World HRD Congress in 2019. Recently, he was recognized as one of the Most Talented Coaching Leaders in the Philippines during the 2019 Philippines Best Employer Brand Awards.

We sit down with Nico to understand his upward journey in the HR world till now, his learnings and vision for the future and the power of employee experience in transforming a business. Read on.

“None of the problems that HR are facing are usual. We have no anecdotal evidence, no brain trust, no think tank to fall back on.” 

Our key takeaway from recent virtual group discussions was that going the extra mile for field workers is the only way to sustain a non-office workforce. So many of our conversations have revolved around companies with an exclusively office bound workforce, but this week’s sessions brought new perspectives from a variety of participants in different fields. You don’t want to miss these; read to the end!

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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. 

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.

'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. 

In July 2019, Glassdoor’s Diversity and Inclusion Study (1) uncovered 49% or nearly half of the employees surveyed across US, UK, Germany, and France have experienced some form of negative bias be it:

In the modern pursuit of a positive workplace culture one topic has risen above the rest: employee experience. As the primary driver of an employee-first culture, companies have begun building out employee experience strategies and frameworks, as well as creating employee experience surveys and employee experience platforms. 

This is reflected in the numbers alone: 92% of HRs across organizations1 worldwide see employee experience as even more critical to the business in 2021 than ever before, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, an alarming majority of 71% of employees surveyed by Gartner2 stated they felt HR didn’t prioritize employee experience!

The last time we spoke, we mentioned the 5 agents of change that can help you enable a super flexible workplace. Implementing these five steps can help you develop a positive workplace culture and ensure your employees are engaged and proactive. Once you have steadily introduced changes to your workplace culture with the help of these agents of change, you need to check off these 10 telltale signs that confirm your Organization Culture is adaptive and employee-first as defined by our research framework to make sure your changes really made a difference.

“Having a great sales team is a much stronger (and far lasting) competitive advantage than having a great product.” That's Neil Rackham, a pioneer in “consultative selling” and author of SPIN selling, in a London conference. He went on to explain why good, innovative products fail to take off. 

Some time ago, Heinz had decided to take the talent and employee innovation displayed by its workforce seriously as it really was the most unused asset in any company. The improvements suggested was worth $250 million a year. Immersed in strategies and innovation we forget to ask ourselves a very basic question...

The word “mindfulness” was rarely used in my vocabulary; this is coming from someone who has worked as an editor and writer for the last 7 years. It’s critical we ask what it means to be mindful in today’s hyper-competitive world. More importantly, to understand how this fits into the narrative of a mindful leader in a corporate setup.

Don't do this if you wish to create a culture of diversity and inclusion in the workplace

You must have seen the news recently. Abhijit Banerjee won the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, along with Esther Duflo (who happens to be Banerjee's wife) and Michael Kremer. Notice some of the news headlines I came across.  

Today, we'll be talking about toxic work cultures. But before we do that, remember the United Airline fiasco where a passenger was yanked from his seat to make room for airline crew members? Let me recap it for you. The airport security forced a United Airline passenger off of his seat, causing his face to hit an armrest and bleed. 

“Work a short time, rest well, and learn a lot.” That’s what Microsoft Japan CEO Takuya Hirano noted on the company’s official website after successfully rolling out their Work Life Choice Challenge 2019. The firm has been making headlines ever since they offered 2,300 employees 3-day weekends for a month to experiment and analyze the impact of a 4-day work week on bringing about a positive work culture.

Our Content Specialist told me not to start most of my write-ups with Dilbert so I left Dilbert out of Dilbert. While I won on a meta technicality with this one, a lot of organizations might not when it comes to their recognition charters. Their “technicalities” are archaic rewards and recognition platforms, mandates for managers and departments, and gatherings that lose their meaning due to a lack of focus and meaningful recognition.

I have been a part of the HR function for over a decade now. In the larger scheme of things, it doesn’t sound like much but believe me, empires have risen and fallen in littler times. I was with nearbuy.com the first time I heard about inFeedo. There was some buzz around the company as an idea generation platform but that was it.

If you had been following the ride-hailing giant (valued at $70B) recently, you’d be aware of the turmoil it’s went through. From Susan Fowler’s blog post complaining about sexual harassment and an environment rampant with sexism and discrimination, multiple lawsuits, top executives leaving and finally CEO’s leave of absence leading to a resignation, Uber has been all over the news because of its notoriety.

Here's what we found out about the real reasons why employees leave the organization...

Why do some well funded/big companies miss business targets? Companies tend to focus 80% of their analytics effort on analysing “Historic Indicators” versus identifying “Leading Indicators” to grow business. This is biggest mistake I see with respect to how some companies leverage analytics.

Why do many companies go into ICU mode after a bad quarter?

One of Amber’s core mission is to have people open up to her, be honest with her — trust her. Building trust is hard, even harder when you’re a chatbot in digital space asking people to share openly and freely about their experience at their company without fearing repercussions.

What we’ve learnt is that digital trust pivots upon transparency.

“40% employees think that Amber is real . She [Amber] genuinely becomes a way of interacting at scale. ” — Ankur Warikoo, Founder, Nearbuy

Nearbuy is India’s very first hyper-local online platform present in 35+ cities and 18+ categories with over 50,000 merchants across 100,000+ unique locations.

Employees: 300+ | Industry: E-commerce/Retail | Region: India

A study done by Gartner(*1) confirmed that organisations are removing annual surveys from their employee engagement strategy after realising they’re not enough to capture the voice of the employee.

Much like the sweltering heat that refuses to subside, the team at inFeedo has been persistent, going all in in the last couple of months to address feedback you’ve shared overtime on Amber’s dashboard. The result? Two kickass dashboard feature upgrades that are guaranteed to blow your mind!

‘Lo and behold! Technology will change the way we think, breathe, smell…'  If one were to summarize this ongoing media frenzy around digital technology, this image would be fitting.

Meet Nico Mallillin, employee experience advocate and one of the biggest names in the HR industry in Southeast Asia. Nico is a Certificated Professional Coach and a Senior Certified Professional under the Society of Human Resources Management. He is considered one of the founding members of Society of Human Resources (SHRM) Executive Network, that brings together the HR profession’s most experienced leaders to help them meet the strategic and organizational challenges of an increasingly complex business landscape. 

At a young age, he had already received multiple recognitions such as Philippines' Most Talented HR Leaders in 2018, as part of the Top 100 Global HR Heroes and Top 100 Global Coaching Leaders during the World HRD Congress in 2019. Recently, he was recognized as one of the Most Talented Coaching Leaders in the Philippines during the 2019 Philippines Best Employer Brand Awards.

We sit down with Nico to understand his upward journey in the HR world till now, his learnings and vision for the future and the power of employee experience in transforming a business. Read on.

I think we can all agree that the 2020 workplace is as unique and unprecedented as it gets. Being caught without warning and forced into a completely unprecedented style of working raised several logistical and procedural changes for employees and HR departments alike, but also presented us with a unique opportunity to adapt, improvise, and evolve! The key focus of almost all of our pandemic efforts? HR agility.

We were proud to host Tanmaya Jain, CEO inFeedo, Sonia Fernandes, CHRO MediaCom, and Rajeev Bhardwak, CHRO Sun Life Insurance for an HR power panel on the three key tenets of the 2020 workplace: Innovation, Agility, and Productivity.

In recent news, BBC (England) covered an interesting piece on the role artificial intelligence (AI) has to play in the workplace. While we are now familiar with how this is helping transition the average HRBP's role from transactional to strategic and providing insights on employee sentiment for leaders to act on, AI engagement tools like Amber are also actively positioned as a digital friend at the workplace. 

“Employee first is the new Customer first”, and improving employee experience and satisfaction is now amongst the top priorities of HR managers in companies around the world. This stems from the increasingly accepted view that happy employees always lead to happy customers. Yet, according to the recent Gallup 'State of the Global Workplace' report, 85% of employees are not engaged or actively disengaged at work. 18% are actively disengaged in their work and workplace, while 67% are "not engaged."

“How do we make a better employee experience? In today’s world, if you’re running a mid to large size company it’s just not possible to do that without technology,” says Bhavana Kandari, VP-HR at Evalueserve and prominent Amber evangelist.

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

In July 2019, Glassdoor’s Diversity and Inclusion Study (1) uncovered 49% or nearly half of the employees surveyed across US, UK, Germany, and France have experienced some form of negative bias be it:

10 years ago, Vineet Nayar, former CEO of one of the biggest IT service companies in the world, turned organizational hierarchy on its head with four simple words: Employee first, customers second. 

In the modern pursuit of a positive workplace culture one topic has risen above the rest: employee experience. As the primary driver of an employee-first culture, companies have begun building out employee experience strategies and frameworks, as well as creating employee experience surveys and employee experience platforms. 

This is reflected in the numbers alone: 92% of HRs across organizations1 worldwide see employee experience as even more critical to the business in 2021 than ever before, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, an alarming majority of 71% of employees surveyed by Gartner2 stated they felt HR didn’t prioritize employee experience!

The last time we spoke, we mentioned the 5 agents of change that can help you enable a super flexible workplace. Implementing these five steps can help you develop a positive workplace culture and ensure your employees are engaged and proactive. Once you have steadily introduced changes to your workplace culture with the help of these agents of change, you need to check off these 10 telltale signs that confirm your Organization Culture is adaptive and employee-first as defined by our research framework to make sure your changes really made a difference.

The word “mindfulness” was rarely used in my vocabulary; this is coming from someone who has worked as an editor and writer for the last 7 years. It’s critical we ask what it means to be mindful in today’s hyper-competitive world. More importantly, to understand how this fits into the narrative of a mindful leader in a corporate setup.

Don't do this if you wish to create a culture of diversity and inclusion in the workplace

You must have seen the news recently. Abhijit Banerjee won the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, along with Esther Duflo (who happens to be Banerjee's wife) and Michael Kremer. Notice some of the news headlines I came across.  

Today, we'll be talking about toxic work cultures. But before we do that, remember the United Airline fiasco where a passenger was yanked from his seat to make room for airline crew members? Let me recap it for you. The airport security forced a United Airline passenger off of his seat, causing his face to hit an armrest and bleed. 

“Work a short time, rest well, and learn a lot.” That’s what Microsoft Japan CEO Takuya Hirano noted on the company’s official website after successfully rolling out their Work Life Choice Challenge 2019. The firm has been making headlines ever since they offered 2,300 employees 3-day weekends for a month to experiment and analyze the impact of a 4-day work week on bringing about a positive work culture.

One of Amber’s core mission is to have people open up to her, be honest with her — trust her. Building trust is hard, even harder when you’re a chatbot in digital space asking people to share openly and freely about their experience at their company without fearing repercussions.

What we’ve learnt is that digital trust pivots upon transparency.

“40% employees think that Amber is real . She [Amber] genuinely becomes a way of interacting at scale. ” — Ankur Warikoo, Founder, Nearbuy

Nearbuy is India’s very first hyper-local online platform present in 35+ cities and 18+ categories with over 50,000 merchants across 100,000+ unique locations.

Employees: 300+ | Industry: E-commerce/Retail | Region: India

A study done by Gartner(*1) confirmed that organisations are removing annual surveys from their employee engagement strategy after realising they’re not enough to capture the voice of the employee.

‘Lo and behold! Technology will change the way we think, breathe, smell…'  If one were to summarize this ongoing media frenzy around digital technology, this image would be fitting.