With the US Federal Reserve raising interest rates and predictions of a recession looming large, most companies who were on a hiring spree, have begun freezing and reducing recruitment to a large extent. As a result, recruiters predict that the Great Resignation Trend is going to slowly taper off into a period of layoffs. In fact, many tech companies including Microsoft have already begun lay-offs.
However, this hardly means employers can take employees for granted. With us still at the fag end of the Great Resignation Trend, it is important for growing companies to take care not to lose crucial, well-performing employees.
People make a company
I have always believed that it is the people that make a company, and honestly as an entrepreneur managing people has always been my biggest challenge. In fact, I have witnessed first-hand, how wrong handling of a situation has led to the loss of a crucial employee and that has led to delay in the development or release of product features and enhancements.
In fact, one of the reasons I chose Coimbatore to be my India base, was the possibility of more employee attachment to the company. I think that decision has paid off. I am proud to say that seven or eight of our first employees in India, remain with me nine years later.
Whatever trend we witness, my people policy has always been simple. If I can keep my people happy and look after them well, things will happen magically. I start off by believing that every employee who joins Kovai.co will remain with us until their retirement. So, it is my responsibility to ensure that they achieve their financial and career goals with me.
Employee Centric Policies
We also try keeping my company’s policies as employee centric as possible, while ensuring that their productivity does not get affected. In fact, in a bid to ensure we have the best office in Coimbatore, we invested $1.3 million on just the interiors so that the workplace looks fun, exhibits positive vibes, and employees feel motivated & comfortable.
Flat Organizational Structure
Easy work culture is also something we constantly strive to achieve. We have an extremely flat organizational structure, where I speak to everyone right from the interns to the housekeeping staff and everyone else. We are also very transparent regarding the internal workings of the company including declaring how many customers have been acquired and how many of them we have lost every quarter. We also declare how much money we have set aside for their incentives. Most other companies may feel that this information is only for the management.
Opportunities For Employee Growth
We also want our employees to be proud of the work they are doing. There are a few reasons why an employee leaves any organization. While financial reason is one where an employee leaves after getting a better offer, money is never everything. In fact, one of the reasons we moved from a single-product company to a multi-product company, was because I knew I had built a great team of engineers. They were talented, so if we didn’t do something new, work would become monotonous and boring for them. Being an engineer myself, I would feel the same way.
So, we came up with the novel idea of keeping some core people in the team and recruiting a new set of engineers to work on their first and most successful product—BizTalk360, while moving some of the existing core members onto the building or working on newer products. It was this idea that led to us building more products like Serverless360, Atomic Scope, and Document360 amongst others.
Prioritizing Care and Happiness
I have always believed that an employee’s happiness is crucial to them being able to contribute to the company’s growth. In Kovai.co, we constantly work on a culture that focuses on employee welfare and growth, including keeping them happy and balanced. So, if someone is not performing well, we go deeper and try to understand what the core problem is. It could be something in the family or they may need help with something. By doing this, you build trust.
Switching Chair Policy
The policy also involves constantly trying to identify an employee’s true talents to bring out their best performance. Jim Collins in his book called “Built to last”, he says a company is like a bus. Different people are occupying different seats, sometimes people find their seats not suitable and need to switch. And once they switch, they become comfortable. I have used this policy on multiple employees through the years, and it has worked wonderfully. In fact, we once switched a girl recruited for talent acquisition to sales, because she did not like her previous role and suddenly, she began performing extremely well.
Building Trust
It is most important that people trust me as a leader that I would be able to grow the company in the right direction and create a bright future and wealth for them. If we manage to do this, we don’t need to concern ourselves with any global trend.
