The Big Billion well-being: Caring for employees during festive season

From laughter yoga to stand up comedy, ecommerce firms go to great lengths to ensure the well being of their employees during the crucial festive season sales.

The festive season saw the launch of Flipkart’s Big Billion Days and Amazon India's Great Indian Festival Sale this month. While millions of Indians went on a shopping spree for millions of things, ecommerce players were on another kind of spree-a hiring spree to service the festive season demand.

Flipkart added 30,000 direct jobs in its supply chain and logistics arm and estimated its seller partners to have added an estimated 5 lakh plus indirect jobs at their locations. Meanwhile, Amazon India also expanded its teams and makes way for over 50,000 seasonal employees. The seasonal jobs have been created for all its network of fulfillment centers, sortation centers, delivery stations and customer service sites in cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, Pune, and others.

Keeping the fervor high and the enthusiasm up in those high-pressure days is not an easy task for these organizations. How do they motivate and energize their employee during these crucial days to keep up the momentum during these crucial days?

Flipkart becomes a second home to its employees during Big Billion Days

While the new staff gets trained in supply-chain processes, in line with the government’s National Skill Development Mission, for Flipkart and its sellers, the Big Billion Days mean extensive preparation, seller trainings, infrastructure scale-ups and hiring, raising flex warehouses and checking system resilience for peak traffic hours. 

For the older thousands of employees, Flipkart’s Bengaluru headquarters becomes a second home to its employees. Because those five days entail hundreds of hours put in, sleepless nights at spontaneous war rooms, and long brainstorm sessions. The best way to keep the momentum going is to ensure that everyone is well taken care of, well fed, and well rested.

 

Since the sheer scale of an event like this means round-the-clock work for many at Flipkart, Flipkart goes the extra mile to ensure the well-being of its employees. 

Midnight snacks to Standup comedy-all @office

 In such high-pressure days, food should be the last thing people worry about. Flipkart arranges for 24x7 tuckshops across the three buildings of its headquarters and breakfast, lunch and dinner is on the house. Late night cravings for a biscuit or a much-needed caffeine boost-midnight snacks are there to help with both. Not only this, to celebrate victories and make memories, cake, and wine are also on the house through the days.

 From bedding to bunker rooms, the ecommerce giant also takes care of the sleep requirements of its employees. Those in need of stress-busting can choose between massage chairs, Zumba, gaming zones, or a quick pick-up game of basketball on the roof. Flipkart even arranged for a stand-up comedy session from Vaibhav Sethia, along with cotton candy and live music. In addition, employees can even participate in on-the-floor games to unwind a little.

Meanwhile, to ensure employees’ safety during this crucial and high-pressure time, there are ambulances on site at all times along with organized late night drops, security guards and escorts for female employees.

 For the organizations, the Big Billion Days bring out the best of working at Flipkart.

Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO Flipkart aptly sums this up, “We work and come together like a family for these five days, deal with challenges together, lean-in while ensuring everything goes smoothly. There are times when it feels like a big party and times when it feels like a high-level strategic meeting, but we’re all in it together, with the same goal.”

 For Amazon, associate experience is the key

 For Amazon, which has created more than 50,000 seasonal positions across its India network of fulfillment centers, sortation centers, delivery stations and customer service sites this festive season, the associate experience is key to Amazon. Which is why it emphasizes on recognizing and appreciating their work in enabling a great experience to our customers.

 Hiring is done basis a thorough-check of the candidate’s background, while also ensuring that the candidates hired are 18 years and above. To train the seasonal associates, the ecommerce giant conducts a day-long classroom training program that focuses on helping them develop requisite operational skills that help them perform their role better. Amazon employs a plethora of tools to train its associates spread across the country, which includes content and videos in regional languages focusing on formal customer interaction etiquettes, grooming, safety and overall delivering a positive customer experience.

Just as through the year, it has customized recognition programs at its fulfilment centres, sortation centres and delivery stations recognizing its associates and their contributions to the delivery experience, similarly during the busy festive season, there are a number of engagement programs for the associates that keep the energy high and enable them to have fun while at work. These could be games, music and entertainment, poster making competitions, face painting, and thank you cards to name a few.

Laughter yoga to the rescue

With employees putting in extra efforts during Great Indian Festival, the company makes sure there is no compromise on health. In order to do this, recreation activities such as Desk Yoga, Pranayama and Laughter Yoga are extensively promoted. These are specifically designed to act as stress busters and help employees keep their body and mind healthy. Employees are also encouraged to do head to toe stretches that can be done while being on the desk itself that instantly helps release the tension built in the muscles and joints because of lack of physical movement throughout the day. 

With an intense and busy environment all around the workplace, Amazon motivates its employees to stay happy and free their mind of unnecessary stress through Laughter Yoga. During these stressful days, Amazon falls back on these age old practices to ensure productivity and maintain an employee friendly environment. So while the two giants rough it out in the battlefield to delight their million customers, they also ensure that they take care of their thousands of employees in the festive season.

With the onset of festival season, People Matters brings you a series of articles based on massive hiring in ecommerce. Stay tuned for the next article in this series.

Source: People matters

HR Goes Agile

Agile isn’t just for tech anymore. It’s been working its way into other areas and functions, from product development to manufacturing to marketing—and now it’s transforming how organizations hire, develop, and manage their people.

You could say HR is going “agile lite,” applying the general principles without adopting all the tools and protocols from the tech world. It’s a move away from a rules- and planning-based approach toward a simpler and faster model driven by feedback from participants. This new paradigm has really taken off in the area of performance management. (In a 2017 Deloitte survey, 79% of global executives rated agile performance management as a high organizational priority.) But other HR processes are starting to change too.

In many companies that’s happening gradually, almost organically, as a spillover from IT, where more than 90% of organizations already use agile practices. At the Bank of Montreal (BMO), for example, the shift began as tech employees joined cross-functional product-development teams to make the bank more customer focused. The business side has learned agile principles from IT colleagues, and IT has learned about customer needs from the business. One result is that BMO now thinks about performance management in terms of teams, not just individuals. Elsewhere the move to agile HR has been faster and more deliberate. GE is a prime example. Seen for many years as a paragon of management through control systems, it switched to FastWorks, a lean approach that cuts back on top-down financial controls and empowers teams to manage projects as needs evolve.

With the business justification for the old HR systems gone and the agile playbook available to copy, people management is finally getting its long-awaited overhaul too. In this article we’ll illustrate some of the profound changes companies are making in their talent practices and describe the challenges they face in their transition to agile HR.

Where We’re Seeing the Biggest Changes

Because HR touches every aspect—and every employee—of an organization, its agile transformation may be even more extensive (and more difficult) than the changes in other functions. Companies are redesigning their talent practices in the following areas:

Performance appraisals.

When businesses adopted agile methods in their core operations, they dropped the charade of trying to plan a year or more in advance how projects would go and when they would end. So in many cases the first traditional HR practice to go was the annual performance review, along with employee goals that “cascaded” down from business and unit objectives each year. As individuals worked on shorter-term projects of various lengths, often run by different leaders and organized around teams, the notion that performance feedback would come once a year, from one boss, made little sense. They needed more of it, more often, from more people.

Coaching.

The companies that most effectively adopt agile talent practices invest in sharpening managers’ coaching skills. Supervisors at Cigna go through “coach” training designed for busy managers: It’s broken into weekly 90-minute videos that can be viewed as people have time. The supervisors also engage in learning sessions, which, like “learning sprints” in agile project management, are brief and spread out to allow individuals to reflect and test-drive new skills on the job. Peer-to-peer feedback is incorporated in Cigna’s manager training too: Colleagues form learning cohorts to share ideas and tactics. They’re having the kinds of conversations companies want supervisors to have with their direct reports, but they feel freer to share mistakes with one another, without the fear of “evaluation” hanging over their heads.

Teams.

Traditional HR focused on individuals—their goals, their performance, their needs. But now that so many companies are organizing their work project by project, their management and talent systems are becoming more team focused. Groups are creating, executing, and revising their goals and tasks with scrums—at the team level, in the moment, to adapt quickly to new information as it comes in. (“Scrum” may be the best-known term in the agile lexicon. It comes from rugby, where players pack tightly together to restart play.) They are also taking it upon themselves to track their own progress, identify obstacles, assess their leadership, and generate insights about how to improve performance.

In that context, organizations must learn to contend with:

Multidirectional feedback. Peer feedback is essential to course corrections and employee development in an agile environment, because team members know better than anyone else what each person is contributing. It’s rarely a formal process, and comments are generally directed to the employee, not the supervisor. That keeps input constructive and prevents the undermining of colleagues that sometimes occurs in hypercompetitive workplaces.

Frontline decision rights. The fundamental shift toward teams has also affected decision rights: Organizations are pushing them down to the front lines, equipping and empowering employees to operate more independently. But that’s a huge behavioral change, and people need support to pull it off. Let’s return to the Bank of Montreal example to illustrate how it can work. When BMO introduced agile teams to design some new customer services, senior leaders weren’t quite ready to give up control, and the people under them were not used to taking it. So the bank embedded agile coaches in business teams. They began by putting everyone, including high-level executives, through “retrospectives”—regular reflection and feedback sessions held after each iteration. These are the agile version of after-action reviews; their purpose is to keep improving processes. Because the retrospectives quickly identified concrete successes, failures, and root causes, senior leaders at BMO immediately recognized their value, which helped them get on board with agile generally and loosen their grip on decision making.

Complex team dynamics. Finally, since the supervisor’s role has moved away from just managing individuals and toward the much more complicated task of promoting productive, healthy team dynamics, people often need help with that, too. Cisco’s special Team Intelligence unit provides that kind of support. It’s charged with identifying the company’s best-performing teams, analyzing how they operate, and helping other teams learn how to become more like them. It uses an enterprise-wide platform called Team Space, which tracks data on team projects, needs, and achievements to both measure and improve what teams are doing within units and across the company.

Compensation.

Pay is changing as well. A simple adaptation to agile work, seen in retail companies such as Macy’s, is to use spot bonuses to recognize contributions when they happen rather than rely solely on end-of-year salary increases. Research and practice have shown that compensation works best as a motivator when it comes as soon as possible after the desired behavior. Instant rewards reinforce instant feedback in a powerful way. Annual merit-based raises are less effective, because too much time goes by.

Patagonia has actually eliminated annual raises for its knowledge workers. Instead the company adjusts wages for each job much more frequently, according to research on where market rates are going. Increases can also be allocated when employees take on more-difficult projects or go above and beyond in other ways. The company retains a budget for the top 1% of individual contributors, and supervisors can make a case for any contribution that merits that designation, including contributions to teams.

Recruiting.

With the improvements in the economy since the Great Recession, recruiting and hiring have become more urgent—and more agile. To scale up quickly in 2015, GE’s new digital division pioneered some interesting recruiting experiments. For instance, a cross-functional team works together on all hiring requisitions. A “head count manager” represents the interests of internal stakeholders who want their positions filled quickly and appropriately. Hiring managers rotate on and off the team, depending on whether they’re currently hiring, and a scrum master oversees the process.

To keep things moving, the team focuses on vacancies that have cleared all the hurdles—no req’s get started if debate is still ongoing about the desired attributes of candidates. Openings are ranked, and the team concentrates on the top-priority hires until they are completed. It works on several hires at once so that members can share information about candidates who may fit better in other roles. The team keeps track of its cycle time for filling positions and monitors all open requisitions on a kanban board to identify bottlenecks and blocked processes. IBM now takes a similar approach to recruitment.

Source: HBR

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11 Entrepreneurs Share Their 'Secret Weapon' For Business Success

"What's the secret to your success?" It's one of the most commonly asked questions in the business world, and no matter who you ask, you're going to get a different answer. Some entrepreneurs say they rely on their industry knowledge or a technical skill set, while others credit their intuition or sense of humor.

We asked 11 members of Young Entrepreneur Council about their own "secret weapons" as an entrepreneur. Whether it's a personality trait, a mindset, or a specific behavior, here's what these business leaders keep in their back pockets at all times, and how they've used it to succeed.

1. Intuition And People Skills

The best startups solve really big problems by developing a theory then executing on it based on intuition and available technology. If you believe this, then the most important thing you can do as a non-technical founder is to constantly develop a deep understanding towards the needs and habits of human beings (your users). Talk to people. Find out their underlying assumptions, how they think, and what they believe. Do this enough, and you’ll be able to offer the best insight toward what direction your product should go. - Raad Ahmed, LawTrades

2. Curiosity And Resilience

Before anything else, I ask why, how, or what. Read between the lines: A customer or employee might make a simple statement, but what is behind that statement? I experiment and ask, "What would happen if..." If it doesn't work, have the resilience to bounce back, ask more questions and try again. Trying again is key; I probably fail more than I succeed, but I learn from what didn't work and tweak it. - Alisha Navarro, 2 Hounds Design

3. Adapting To Change

I learned early on that it's not the smartest entrepreneurs who survive. It's also not the ones with the most money, fame or even the best teams. The entrepreneurs who make it are the ones who are able to adapt to the most unexpected, difficult and seemingly impossible changes that occur every day. Knowing how to keep going when we are in an unpredictable world, and working with other humans who can change in an instant based on the circumstances in their lives is the best skill to have. If you know how to shift in an instant and adjust your services, your thinking, and your team to keep up with technology, the market and more, you will always succeed. - Beth Doane, Main & Rose

4. Knowing Yourself

It's easy to forget about yourself when you're building a business, but the irony of that is that when you aren't at your best, neither is your work or the outcomes you generate. The more time I've spent getting away from work to learn and grow, to be silent in meditation, or to have fun, the clearer the pathways have been for me to hear when my gut says yes or no to something. It also makes me clearer on who the authentic version of me is, which better helps me to relate to my team, our customers and our partners, and ensure the choices we make are in alignment. - Darrah Brustein, Network Under 40

5. A Diverse Perspective

As a woman, I bring different qualities to the table as an entrepreneur. It's helped me in various situations to better understand through intuition and emotional connection. I have a diverse knowledge set having filled various types of roles in life that male entrepreneurs may not have, which I then put into the work environment. This gives me an advantage because I see issues and situations differently, often finding solutions or unique perspectives. - Cynthia Johnson, Bell + Ivy

6. Taking Calculated Risks

I see a lot of time wasted trying to project for all possible negative outcomes. This is near impossible, and while it's useful and important when dealing with life-and-death situations, in most cases we’re not. At the end of the day, it’s about moving forward, making mistakes and correcting them quickly. The fear and inaction is what prohibits speedy progress and iterations that get you closer to your goals. If you’re in this fearful and anxious state, you’ll almost always be able to come up with a reason to not do the thing you might need to do the most. - Baruch Labunski, Rank Secure

7. A Non-Entrepreneurial Background

My path to entrepreneurship was an accident. I’ve always been more of a people-person than a business person, and that has proved to be a secret weapon. Because it’s so easy to remove my entrepreneur persona, I find that I don’t fall into some traps that other business owners might fall into, such as over-engineering or excessive fixation on the bottom line. My strengths as a non-entrepreneur are collaborating with my team members, not assuming I have to have all of the answers, and not getting too deeply attached to particular paths or outcomes. - Peggy Shell, Creative Alignments

8. A Constant Desire To Learn

I have made it a point to always be learning. It's scheduled on my calendar every day, and on Saturdays, it's the only thing on my to-do list. No matter how much you feel that you may know about leadership, business or anything else, the world is always changing, and there's always new research and ideas. To stay ahead, you have to constantly feed your mind. Reach out to mentors, ask for help, read books, listen to podcasts and always be ready to put the things you learn into action, even if it goes against something you thought you were doing right. Stay hungry and keep learning! - Adelaida Diaz-Roa, Nomo FOMO

9. Endurance Running 

As the owner of a few different businesses and someone who is naturally Type A and intense, I get stressed out quite easily and frequently. To have a clear head and maintain an even temper, I do 90-minute endurance runs two to three times per week. It's the best way that I blow off steam and keep stress at a manageable level. - Kristin Marquet, Creative Development Agency, LLC

10. Being My Own Customer 

My "secret weapon" is being the customer of my own businesses. Since we use the various plugins that we build across all of our websites, we can start sensing what features would be good to build to differentiate us from the competition. This helps us stay ahead. We go an extra step and give all of our employees our plugins for free to implement on their personal blogs. We want them to love the products, understand them, and help come up with new, innovative ideas for improvement of the products. We then take some of those ideas and implement them as features into the products. - Syed Balkhi, OptinMonster

11. Treating People Like Gold

Not enough people realize the importance of treating your staff as invaluable. If you felt replaceable, with no control over your next paycheck, would you come to work early with a smile on your face and do your best to perform? Hell no. You'd be looking for another job and trying to keep your head down. Treat your employees like they make you everything you are, because in reality, they do. An organization is judged by its weakest individuals, not its strongest. How many times have you called Comcast customer service and thought, "Brian Roberts seems like a really nice guy?" It doesn't happen. You blame the brand. I don't agree with Simon Sinek on much, but he fully understands the employee-employer relationship from the employee's perspective. Respect and love your team. - Ali Mahvan, Sharebert

Source: Forbes