 All right. Welcome everybody to this edition of the Reboot Fest. What is Reboot Fest? Reboot Fest is essentially an idea that was floated by my colleague, Raghavendra Satish Peri who unfortunately is not here. He's currently in Hyderabad getting a dialysis done under pandemic but we had that discussion for another time. The idea of Reboot Fest was to talk about the changes that are coming for the current times. Some of these are not necessarily new ideas like for example remote work. We've had remote work before this pandemic struck us. Remote work has become a necessity as a result of this pandemic and of course there will be questions about whether we continue this or not. There are ideas from the past that are becoming important for the present. There are ideas from the present that will become important for the future and so Reboot Fest is essentially a festival to look at some of these ideas. At the moment Reboot Fest itself is an idea so we'll see how it kind of goes and moving beyond ideas let's talk about what we will be doing today. Funnily enough when I was trying to conceptualize this event I realized that running an event is like running a PhD thesis every time. It's like writing your PhD thesis where you want to think about the focus, you want to think about what the audience will take away, what is it that the resource persons will take away and so that's always a challenge but it's also very exciting and so therefore what are we going to do in this event today? We have a very large agenda saying that is there a framework we can arrive regarding work from home and this is an ongoing conversation we don't expect to have all the answers today but what will be useful is to kind of understand how some organizations have done it and we also have a very interesting mix of attendees who probably have been remote workers themselves, who are organizations who are trying to hire for diversity, who are trying to solve for these problems and we hope to bring them into this conversation and see what the expectations are both from an employer perspective as well as from a candidate perspective and what are the factors beyond employment which is societal that we have to consider and having said that is a really large agenda but we promise we will finish within an hour so you can get back to your Friday evening if a Friday evening is different under lockdown and what it was earlier. So without much ado this is what we intend to do today. The format of this event is that there will be a bunch of questions that we will be asking Ashok, Shipra and Rahul who we will introduce in a short bit. There will be participants who will chip in to answer questions. We're also watching the questions that are coming on YouTube live. If you're watching us from YouTube live we will incorporate your questions from YouTube live also into the into the discussion. Some of you as attendees we will unmute you so that you can ask questions in between and some of you may have to ask your questions in the Q&A tab or raise your hand so that we can unmute you. We have a few polls that we will also run during the event so let's see how we can make it interactive and a fun one for the Friday evening. So with that what I'd like to do is to ask each one of you to introduce yourself. Let's go in an alphabetical order so Ashok if you can introduce yourself and your organization a brief bit for about a minute or two and then we go with Rahul and Shipra. This is Ashok Hariharan and I have a company called Bugini Consulting which operates in the legal tech space so it's a very niche space dealing with legislation and technology and my company has been operating on a work-from-home basis right from the beginning. Our clients are they are all overseas they are all remote. All the people who work and worked for me they've all been remote. I myself am remote so that is that has been my overall experience so I've also worked as a remote consultant so it kind of made sense for me to keep everything remote so that's that's where I'm coming from. Rahul? Hi my name is Rahul Gumsalvesh. I run a design firm called Obvious. We've been around for about eight years now and yeah I well thank you for having us here for starters and Hasgeek and the rest of the attendees. We've been around for about eight years like I said and we started out pretty much at the same time that mobile started to be a thing in India and have moved from building out the first apps for companies like Flipkart, Mintra, Swiggy, Danzo and then have continued to be part of their growth stories and many other companies like theirs since then. I essentially I'm one of the three founders. I take care of setting organizational priorities and you know I'm a combination of a CEO slash janitor. One of the things that I look at very closely is the hiring aspects. In a previous life I looked at a lot of issues around accessibility in India, specifically electronic accessibility and while that doesn't have a direct correlation with today's panel, I think a lot of the principles that we dealt with and talked about in that point in time have significant overlaps with the way that we look at hiring at Obvious. Thanks Rahul. Shipra? Hi guys I'm Shipra Pandit. I'm working with Jospe. It's a digital payment solution platform and I'm heading the HR department at Jospe. So let's say from the last five years I'm working for Jospe and doing a lot of hiring and different working in different domains of human resources for them and diversity has been one of the part. I'm very excited to be here today and to talk about it. Thank you. Thanks Shipra. I would just take a minute to say that we have about 10 attendees here on Zoom. Some of who I know and some of who we will include and add you to kind of ask questions in between. So give us about 10 minutes to set this conversation rolling and we will add you in. In the meantime if you have questions please put them on the Q&A tab and those who are watching us from YouTube please put your questions in the chat link. We will pull your questions from there into this discussion. Okay so let's start over here and what we have here to set the context once again that we have two representations over here Ashok who has run a remote company and Rahul and Shipra who don't necessarily have a remote company but they have tried to solve for diversity. We will see how we can get both these conversations going into each other and also meet participant expectations here. Ashok maybe we'll start with you first where there are a few specific questions that I had. The first one being is that when you were hiring for Bunjani and you might want to just reset the context for Bunjani what was your messaging and you know what was it about remote work that you found that was appealing to candidates when you went about hiring and how did you find that pool of people in terms of who were interested in remote work and what were their concerns? Well you know I started in the normal way you know like you know you have these sites like you know you yourself the organization has a site has job and angel list and you know these job photos so I essentially advertised on these photos and I had a broad I had a broad sweep of people applying there so the the formula is I didn't know a formula because it was something new for me to start with so initially I was looking at the credentials and I was hiring on the basis of credentials so just to be honest I never did this with any idea of diversity or anything in mind you know so I was just looking at getting things done finding the right people for that you know at the most economical cost and that that is what motivated me but I ended up on the other side because I ended up hiring you know the classical formula you know you get a guy from IIT you hire him you get two people from IIT you hire him but it didn't really work for me because working from home was not compatible with some of these people they had different expectations they had been in large organizations they had been to offices so they had very different expectations you know so they were they were new to it and it didn't work out initially you know I hired people from these organizations and you know I had to fire them or they quit after two months because they could not understand what it means to work from home and they were not you know some people are not honest to start with then by accident I realized that there were quite a few women applying and there was there were at least you know there were there were people with other constraints like you know some kind of disability or you know who applied and I had actually rejected somebody in an interview because they had a speech disability so you know that it struck me that you know maybe there's because that person actually wrote back to me saying you know maybe I didn't do well in the interview because I spoke badly but I have a speech problem so what do I do so then I got in touch with that guy's referees and they all told me you know he's fine you know he just has a bit of a speech impediment but he's fine so I ended up hiring this guy I hired another lady who told me she can't do full time but she's willing to do a few hours a day because she's trying to learn the violin at home so she wouldn't tell me the reason in the beginning then finally she told me you know I'm trying to learn the violin and the teacher comes home so that is the only way you know I and she was in Mumbai she was in Mumbai and she could not commute I said fine you know I'll take you on board and so similarly you know I had other cases of you know ladies who were stuck at home because they had kids and the husband was working late hours and you know they did not have the flexibility of commuting and coming back home and cooking I don't know all the typical things that you know housewives do so I ended up hiring you know a diverse set of people like that so it was purely by accident you know and honestly it worked out because I found that all these people who had all these constraints of their own they were more diligent you know they paid a lot more attention to their time when they went from home so you know for example you know the lady who was doing part-time four hours she was able to do what the other people were able to do in eight hours you know the I called normal people young people you know who would love to work in some startup company or somewhere she was doing more work in four hours than what those people were doing so you know just to give you an example and it was not the only case you know even the other cases there were people who were more communicative and because they were in those circumstances and they had no other choice so they kind of forced themselves to adapt to the circumstances they had adapted the movement in their house just to be able to work from home uh things like that you know so they had the facilities and they had thought of it so it was not just you know let me just try this out they had actually thought about it and they had set up their lives to be able to do this so that that was physically my experience thanks Ashok and I think you did make a point which you might want to push which is regarding your own perspective on work from home so if you can push that point and then we will move to Shupra and Rahul okay so you mean in terms of context and how work from home enables you to create your own context and okay so you know I have a broader perspective on this some people think I'm crazy but I say but I think you know if you look at humanity itself this whole going to the office and doing things together and you know it's all a new concept you know it's only a hundred years old since 1906 or whatever Taylorism you know it all came out of there humans are not designed to work like machines like cobs in a machine so my belief is that you know right now with the internet and a lot of the work that is non-industrial like the way you know like the work that the tech space is doing it is very well adapted to people you know doing things from home you know in their own social context so you know I find it very strange when I see companies saying you come to office let's build an office community you know you make friends they have to say that because people spend 12 hours at the office you know they do two hours of commute they are spending 10 hours there so it's nonsense my community is my neighbor so I know people who go to office spend 12 hours a day they don't even know their neighbor so what is the point of work like that so with work from home you don't need that office community you know my the first feedback I get from HR people and people in offices oh my god I miss the office I miss the camaraderie at the office and say why do you need that if you're working from from home you got your people around you you have time to make friends around you you don't even have to live in the city you you don't have to live in Bangalore you know you can live anywhere you want in your own friendly green social context as long as you got a good internet which is there in most places very many places in India you know I don't I don't see what the problem is it didn't need a pandemic for us to think about this okay thanks Ashok we'll come back to this point I'm going to move to Shipra and then Rahul I think both Shipra and Rahul since we are moving to the diversity context what I'd like to understand from both of you is tell us a little bit about your business and I know Rahul's already done that and tell us why did you decide to kind of hire more women for your work what has been your approach and your messaging when you reach out to candidates asking them to join you specifically with respect to women and do you have a sense of the expectations that women have from workplaces from employers in terms of the messaging as well as when you actually had candidates join you so Shipra if you can go first Shali so I wanted to start from the very beginning let's say in earlier times the hiring were related to mostly the compliance related goals however the latest trend of inclusive hiring is related to be more collaborative and team-based structure so the collaboration doesn't need you to be you know sitting in person and talking about it so it just be we we we offered a very flexible flexibility as the workplace spoke and we we brought this win-win strategy by being sensitive to the needs of the people and then providing them options to accommodate you know the varied set of work now I believe the organizations that wake up to this they establish a very common vision and they achieve high goals by both supporting and capitalizing a diverse workforce and they succeed right so just be just is working on a very niche programming language we are working on functional programming we are working on Haskell and PureScript and it's it's been known to very less number of people it's there are very scared resources in all over the world to this technology so we don't build we don't look for people with skill knowledge we don't look for people with the domain understanding we look for people who has the ability to learn and code and also have the curiosity to dig deep so that's how we are engaging people more people remotely and here we have brought in a lot of women's we have we have you know brought in the ability to solve the problems and we have seen that women's are more disciplined when it comes to work when when it comes to getting the work done they are more into it so maybe the innovation or the creativity might be bit on the other side of the areas like design and and more creative ideas towards building into some processes and all but the discipline part is the only thing where i feel that women has done their part really well and they have excelled and achieved the goals of the organization and therefore we are focusing more on different set of people and the agenda itself. Okay Rahul if you can and also if you can specifically and concretely point to us how do you message when you specifically reach out to women candidates what have you learned in terms of their expectations in terms of what they expect of the workplace and of the employer when you have put out your hiring messages? Sure um so i'll i'll you know uh in the same way that Shrutra did i'll step back for a second and talk to you a little bit about our motivations for building a more representative workplace right i think that one of our main reasons for doing so was that we're in the business of building products for other people and we believe that a product which has been built by a homogeneous set of people is unlikely to take into account the opportunities or challenges that a diverse world faces so we didn't set out to say hey we want to hire more women right i think that's that's very key to sort of understand we said how do we build a workplace that is better representative of the world in which we exist right so that's that's the broad idea that we had and of course gender is the possibly the first um and and you know perhaps uh you know on the scale of different axes of diversity perhaps the easiest to tackle in the beginning right or perhaps that's me speaking from uh you know having um gone through that process for about three years now right i think when you start interrogating different kinds of axes when you go into uh you know like we were talking about earlier when we go into axes around sexuality around disability around caste around class etc it becomes far more complex to figure out exactly how to calibrate ones hiring you know sort of pipeline half processes um i think the other thing that you talked about right how do we actually reach out it actually starts far before that right so we set out three years ago to say hey we're not at that point in time we were a very you know and i think that we're you know baby steps along that particular journey but we have a far less representative organization than we are today so we set out to say okay how do we actually look at our overall organization's growth going forward and i think a key part of that was to look at every part of our workplace right so there's one part of it is of course when you actively reach out to people but even before that how do you build uh you know i think today it's called an employee brand how do you build an idea around uh you know an idea with people who may not actively be looking to join your workplace you may not actively be hiring at this point in time but how do you build a sense of who you are before people come in to start with right so that's one part then of course there's within the hiring uh sort of cycle there's you know different parts of that so we looked at that as well as a sort of a system uh the third part is what is daily life like and you know that that is of course the one somebody's in the organization that's the majority of the way in which they experience the organization so we looked at multiple attach points within that okay so you know from the more um starting at the beginning somebody's 30 day first 30 days somebody's first 60 days 90 days right then what happens when somebody's been there for a year what happens when somebody's been there for two years right and there are typical inflection points that everyone goes through um you know if you're if you're um in the tech space today in India uh if you're a funded company then at three or four years then there's you know typically an itch when people stock options best etc um in you know maybe uh you know i i don't know what the average lifespan of an employee is today i suspect that it's you know somewhere between maybe i don't know 18 to 24 months i think Shipra is probably better place to answer that uh but we said okay uh how do we actually build for um you know one of our one of our primary goals as an organization is to say how can we build an organization where somebody would want to stay for 10 years how do we make sure that we look at uh building an ambitious goal right where uh there's no downside to remaining at obvious for 10 years either in terms of your own personal growth your career growth the opportunities that you unlock as part of that or the financial compensation that that you know we we can create for you and so that's how we sort of oriented ourselves along this particular thing and of course we're nowhere close to that right i cannot today in good faith say hey if you stay at obvious for 10 years you will not have any opportunity costs relative to the larger market right but i think that that's the sort of north star that uh we're looking at all our recruitment processes uh and all our uh i don't know what it's called um i i read employee life cycle is that right so you know the the entire time when somebody is with you and i think then the last bit is we also very actively sort of look at how do i you know when somebody leaves obvious and you know in many cases um for the most part right we've been extremely amicable we've actually encouraged people to move out because you know i think that in many cases though we saw that you know to meet their own personal objectives they would need a different space they would need different opportunities they would need different geographies right but we said that how does how do we maintain a great alumni network right uh because we don't see that this is sort of a one-way relationship if you look at for instance um you know other consulting companies like a mckinsey for instance right uh their alumni are their biggest clients right out of the i i don't know what the numbers are but if you look at the fortune 500 i i would interest you know estimate that a good 50 to 60 percent of you know sort of sea level is seeded with by mckinsey and that becomes a regular stream of business for them so it creates a sort of a very um you know a virtuous cycle in some sense right so we looked at all of these different bits and we said okay to start with let's be very clear even before somebody joins us because at this point in time or you know when i'm talking about three years ago there's no good reason for somebody to there's no good way for people to find out what obvious is about so what we did is we started from this value of being public by default with all the things that we do right and we assembled what we today call our play book which is at this point in time more than 50 thousand words which is publicly accessible but everything right from the mundane to the sublime is how i term it right so everything from these are the days that you know we have holidays this is what you can expect on your first day to you know we give away all our secret sauce in terms of this is exactly how we do you know our design this how we do our engineering you know we tell people like you know our entire hiring exam is available online so all the questions that we would ask you as part of a you know i think there's sort of in the engineering hiring there's a take-home exercise etc all the way all the questions are available and the way in which we would evaluate your submission is also publicly available right so you don't have to go through our hiring pipeline to get a sense of what it would be like you don't have to go you don't have to be part of obvious to at least get a sense of what it's like internally as well so i think that was we sort of looked at these as systems and not as um hey you know we need to go hire 10 women and so what how can we short circuit that i can go into more detail perhaps but i don't want to take up so much time right so i think i just have one last question for both Shipra and Rahul before we run a poll and open it up to the attendees over here which is that uh this is again going back to this question and maybe you have addressed it but if you could summarize one or two uh expectations that you have found that you know women candidates have had uh which may have not been part of your messaging or uh you know what you've learned in the process of hiring like what are your hiring funnels and uh uh you know where is where is what is the expectation of a candidate from the employer from the workplace and which you think other organizations should also incorporate when they're reaching out uh shipra and then rahul uh shipra you will have to unmute yourself uh yeah so if i look at the example of how i am staying at just pay and what is really motivating me to stay at just pay uh i just wanted to put across that just pay is a place where you are not involved in one particular area so for example uh let me just take that recent example and we were doing this closure meetup right and and you were helping us in you know bringing in the community and talking about what we are doing and suddenly we came up about this logo mug logo and we wanted to give the mug logo to you and it was so urgent and we were so working out onto that but my team was not wasn't there they were they were out somewhere and and they were not available to me my design was like okay what i have to do now so i created the design i went into it i created five six designs i really draw that design onto the mug and i i went to wimmel the founder of the company and i say wimmel can we just do this and he sat with us for for around three to four hours and we just did a lot of improvement into it and we we came up with the design and we all loved it so that's how we are bringing the responsibility and the ownership to everyone it's not even women but to everyone and women's are very much interested in all these areas where where they can you know outperform the the real responsibilities of theirs and then they bring more creativity and you know the the innovation to different areas not only this i i wanted to add very recently we have started learning art so i'm also learning art the HR the whole team is learning art why we are learning art and what exactly it will help us out in in the future so we we are learning art to just bring the deep analysis and automation in the human resource team we wanted to do the funnel analysis not on excel we wanted to bring the automated automation towards it and that's how we we believe that people are learning and bringing their strength to the organization and that's how we are engaging more and more and motivating people to join us right uh yeah Rahul thanks for sharing the link to the playbook i was just going to suggest that uh we should also tweet about it uh but uh sit down we've noted your question we will be talking about the disability stress sector in a big i just wanted to add to your question you know you ask like you know what you know what did the women working for you expect so in at least in our case uh from so we i had like four women out of our team you know at different points at four women working you know for our team and uh most of the time they all wanted flexibility because they were working from home they wanted flexibility and timing uh which was one problem they had with many companies where they were because i asked them you know i saw they said you know we i can do two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon uh because i have life in the middle you know i have to my son is coming back from school i have to make lunch for him and that was very difficult for many companies to accommodate because they have meetings on at scheduled times and you know it's always a problem for many organizations to to deal with this kind of flexibility so because they have uh this concept of having what you say yeah no problem Ashoka we are all used to this new way of life there you can hear my daughter also talking about tamarind okay sorry that was my talking clock for some reason it showed up at that point it was not my son it was the talking clock i just realized yeah so sorry for that so you know that is something that i heard across the board you know this uh wanting flexible timing and uh because companies have fixed meetings every day you know that that fixed schedule does not work for many people uh so that is one big thing that i at least that's what i heard and then the second thing is probably training some kind of uh online courses uh because somebody's sitting in baroda for them to go to a conference and attend something was a problem so you know giving them access to online online training or online courses there's so many of them around you know so that that was big for many people that was uh you know they they really appreciated very small things like that i mean it it doesn't cost much to do those things uh so that was appreciated yeah thanks Ashoka i think this is quite concrete Rahul anything to add on like you know exactly these concrete points that Ashoka has raised in terms of obvious experience or anything that you think are other motivating factors beyond these immediate tangible needs of flexibility and and education and training sure so i think that's that's a good start that's a you know definite a huge plus right in terms of having flexible times etc i think that one i mean you know there's some things that we've done and i think these are things that are a sort of a result of some of our learnings over the last few years so i've also included this link later in the chat maybe you can share it with the other participants if you think it's applicable so for instance you know we've learned a lot from you know our friends at Nelenso so they introduced a paid menstrual leaf policy right so we have we've adopted that completely for for ourselves and so we have a menstrual leaf policy which is separate from you know our regular holiday allowance or sick leave etc we also make comprehensive family insurance which covers not just your spouse and and but also children right the other thing that i think that i showed touched on is also being big sort of aware of what working hours are like right so we have very sort of actively look at ensuring that working hours don't exceed you know 40 hour work week in addition to that whenever we hold events right we make sure that we don't do late evenings you often have team dinners and now things which are at times which are very difficult and you know these are important you know places where people make connections often there's you know sort of post work connects across teams that happens at these places and i think they're highly tied to also progress within the organization at certain scales so we made sure that we looked at okay can we not have them later in the evening can we have them can we do a breakfast meet-up instead right is that a more is that easier for different people again parental leave india has a really progressive maternity leave policy i think especially compared to lots of other global other countries in the world but there's a clear expectation in some sense in the law that the women stay at home and you know take care of children so we said that okay can we at least do i think that we offer at this point 12 weeks of paternity leave of paid paternity leave with an option to extend beyond that at a you know slightly reduced salary beyond that i think it's really important to have you know and i think this is like for me this is like the baseline you have clear policies on discrimination sexual harassment are these sensitized at regular intervals across the company in some sense you know it's not that hard to be to be inclusive in india because you know the bar is so low that you know you keep if you're a company you would keep hitting your ankles against it right so in that sense you know in terms of a takeaway i think there's just very small actionable things that you can do beyond that i think you know looking at okay can you do community can you sponsor communities which may be outside or you know which are adjacent to the things that you're doing so i think that you know we've worked with you before on this we work with other groups there's this one called pie ladies we also actively mentor people without you know an expectation that they become part of our organization right again i think that you know i saw something about physical infrastructure as well and i think that these are really important things so you know continuing from that point about menstrual leave we the core thought was how do you de-stigmatize menstruation right and so something as simple as making sure that all bathrooms have access to menstrual supplies which are regularly refreshed right is is just and you know just put a little sign there saying you know free-for-all kind of thing how do you make sure that your office you know furniture is is suitable for everybody right regardless of you know your shape and size can you have equipment that adjust to you rather than you needing to adjust to the equipment so you know can your desk be lowered if you want that you know why does it all have to be at you know 30 inches is it standard why can't it be at 26 inches or 48 right depending on what you want again you know something as simple and and this is something that so many people have called out that centralized air conditioning is very rarely comfortable for everybody and you know i did a little bit of digging into this and it's really funny it was sort of standardized based on the study which was done in the 60s based on the temperature of a white man who's wearing a suit right so that's why you'll find that a lot of officers will have the air conditioning down at 22 or something and you know this is just such a simple visual test that you can do you know you walk into any organization you know like a medium-sized company right 250-odd company and just look at who's wearing a jacket or a sweater and who isn't and you know there's just there's so much truth in that simple visual test so yeah these are just just some very basic things that you can look at in terms of changing things Thanks Rahul Ashok thanks for this impetus what i'm going to do now is Amal can we run the first poll we want to find out from the 12 attendees on zoom how many of you are remote workers so if you could please respond to this one okay i'm going to bring in a few participants over here to respond to some of the points that three of you have made let me bring in Nadika who's my colleague also here Deepthi i'm going to promote you also to a panelist so that you can unmute yourself and we also have Srirahari Sriraman who is driving the efforts at Nirenso in terms of diversity i will point out to you exactly what you need to do but i also wanted to mention that we have Siddhant and Satish here who represent accessibility and disability i'm sorry if i've used the wrong terms but i think they may also have a bunch of questions both from the point of view of inclusion and from the point of remote work so we will bring you in as well but i think in terms of the expectations from Nadika, Deepthi and Srirahari if you all can go one by one in that order is if you can feedback you know the points that Rahul and Chitra made with respect to what would be your expectations as candidates in terms of in terms of you know the kind of organizations they're running in terms of the messaging that they put out and what is your expectation as a candidate from the workplace from the employer etc both from the point of view of remote work as well as from the point of view of inclusion sorry for the lying long-winded question but i think you can take it up from there so if we can have Nadika then Deepthi and Srirahari okay so i think very interesting questions and interesting you know things have come up so just to give you a sort of a background i've been working on and off outside of an office set up for i think well on 10 years now right i usually i occasionally go into an office and then and then i decide that it's too much for me and then i come out and i start doing stuff on my own or i work with a few people that i like and sort of do things like that i think one of the biggest my learnings i've worked in i've been working journalism tv production web and tech media and things like that right one of the biggest things that i see is that offices sort of companies and organizations and office that physical space of an office sort of restricts you to conform to certain kinds of expressions on yourself right and and it also affects you because some of us have complex lives and some of us have complex identities and things like that so an office space the physical space i'm not talking to an organization but i'm talking of a physical space sort of restricts how and what you do with yourself um and i think uh that's something that i would expect from an organization to address to me if i am as a candidate i'm coming to you how do you address this question of so there are things like dress code it may not work for everybody some of us don't like dress codes some of us uh you know um we may have other uh reasons for letting our hair grow out or whatever things like that i'm just saying this this may sound like trivial things to uh to a to a person from a from a hijab perspective but for a person who may not be from your mainstream or who don't want to fit into a mainstream these are things that matter a lot more right or things like for instance ashok was talking about i may have to work i may be able to work only two uh for two hours in the morning and then go and cook and you know clean the house and handle things and maybe i could go to a bank for instance uh you know to open up to open an account to pay off a check or something like that and if i'm sitting in an office from nine to six then i'm you know i'm pretty much gone uh left uh hanging with other things that i may have to do so these are things that i would uh you know things that are uh matter to me as a candidate cool uh yeah uh thanks nadhika uh shipra rahul ashok would uh can we collect a question from dipthi or would you like to respond to this uh i would like to uh put forward that uh the companies whenever they bring in certain kind of infrastructure they always bring that infrastructure after understanding the comfortability and uh of the people so for example when we brought into we we we recently moved last year we moved to a different in a new building all together but while we were looking at the infrastructure part of it uh most of the core team members were playing a really uh they were playing a really good part in uh you know portraying what could be the best comfortable zone and what all things we can bring into make it more easy way of working right so so we we brought the colors we we brought a very uh neutral color to the walls of the organization we brought certain areas where we can put across the way where people go and just have some rest the sofas the chairs the tv's everything was planned so we we brought in lots of core team members to help us to address the comfortability of the organization and later we brought in uh the way how we are right now in in in infrastructure today i would say um i would also like to say how we have pianos on each floor of our office we have musical instrument people are very much into the music into classical music into different kind of music and and they go around and then they play we have a library uh on each floor not only that we have a terrace garden where where sometimes people go and sit and they just talk they just talk about things what are happening in their life what what exactly they wanted to innovate and all all that stuff so we have indoor games we we plan indoor games there are different things that just be so i think we have brought all of it by just understanding the need and to make it as a second home for people okay uh ashok rahul do you have any i i i have a comment on that you know so i have an extreme view and i have a moderate view so let me start with the moderate view you know so what what uh you know what what nadika asked has not really been answered there you know so i don't see an answer i'm hearing pianos put in the office space i'm hearing other stuff most people don't want the piano you know do you or do i want to go to office and play the piano no i prefer to do fewer hours in the office and sit at home and do my work get my bank stuff sorted out get my get my food cooked nicely by myself you know have the time to do that rather than ordering some still food from some startup you know i might even kind of pandemic doing that so you know i i think those pianos and those gizmos they don't really address they are just there to decorate the office and create like an environment that hey it's fine if you all come to work and spend 12 hours a day here so we gotta build a community so it's ignoring reality so now you know this pandemic has turned up and it's uh brought reality home so i'm sorry but i don't agree with that view so i i think my more moderate view is that so my extreme view is there should be laws which force companies in certain sectors to have a certain percentage of jobs completely uh you know remote there should be laws for that that is my extreme view because unless there are laws companies will never do it you had uh you know kids working in carpet factories which was fine you know until there were laws banning that otherwise you know why would something like that happen until the 18th and 19th you know that is how i think of these things so that's my extreme view so on the moderate side i think organizations should be flexible uh you know if somebody is different they may not be they may not feel comfortable you know let's face it organizations are male-centric everything is male-centric talking about Netflix and i don't know all the conversation is around this uh you know kind of artificiality you know Netflix what TV show did you see what did you do it's not about life so what Nadika asked was you know how do i feel comfortable you know with who i am and you know come to the office and i don't feel uh i'm in a different place nadika is probably most comfortable at home let's face it you know uh you know nadika seems comfortable working from home so i don't see that being addressed you know so that that is just what i know you know sorry sure um yeah rahaul i think before you can sorry uh shipra rahaul before you can respond to uh this you know point that nadika made and i know that shri harry is also here we actually have a set of very interesting questions from youtube which i wanted to bring in over here and i would also like to put this question to nadika and to nikhil uh as well and to shri harry which is that uh there are questions about saying that how do you assess uh self-discipline and ownership and uh you know relatively we have uh raga malika and rashmi asking saying that you know uh how do you track the presence of employees and the work that they're doing when a large number of people in the organization are working from home so this question of trust and you know how do you do self assessment and discipline uh i think it'll be nice if you know ashok you could go first maybe then nadika and shri harry and then we could take the rest of the people uh from both an employer and a candidate perspective ashok so so the first thing is you know there's an element of trust thing so you when you interview the candidate uh you can kind of judge that sometimes by asking them you know about past work that they have done and checking up with their references you know how did this person work in a remote situation how did they work so that's one so two even in terms of tracking you know it doesn't even have to be something very inclusive you just need to have a daily update so it's a fact that people you can trust people but sometimes people also sleep so it's good to be able to keep track of that so you know like what i would what i used to do was have a travel page uh where people assigned tasks on a weekly basis they had uh you know they they basically broadly knew what they were doing uh what they were going to do and uh they would just put an update at the end of the day and since uh you know the work was primarily programming you could see the output which was being put on git or whatever you know things were being tested so it's not very hard to do that so and most of the time i found if you hire correctly if you hire the right people you know trust is there you know if they are late they will tell you in advance not at the last minute but two days uh before so there's a strong element of trust there you know that that is certainly there thanks ashok nadhika if you can also take that question and then shri hari okay uh yeah like ashok says uh the question of trust is important um who and how so um frankly i think we're we're beyond i think this is something that i think a lot of companies are now figuring it out is that letting the letting people set their own deadlines on work and then just sort of nudging them along because i think the older technique of okay uh the you know the boss is telling you okay this is this is do it and you know do it and gets done and then we'll go to the next our sequential uh you know sort of sequential working is sort of giving way to taking up a couple of things that like a basket of related work and just sort of moving along uh with it and setting very loose deadlines around it i think that's sort of working and i say this because uh you know from an advertising uh background to come to a sort of a general purpose i don't know what i do exactly but you know um i see that i i work better if i if i know uh if i know that i like these sort of i set myself these goals right and then i know uh i i can do this and then i set my own deadline around it and then i just finish it uh it doesn't help when somebody's breathing down my back uh my neck and telling me okay have you done this have you done that because uh and this is coming back to the earlier point of there are things that we do outside of work also and if you're sitting in an office and doing these 10 things sequentially every day and then your your mind space is going towards oh i have to do that at home i have to carry over you know i have to um sort of solve these other things and all that so your your mind space is going and so your productivity sort of dips there so i think giving that trust to your employees uh uh that okay these are the tasks that we need to finish within a certain number in a certain amount of time can we just go ahead and do it and then we'll catch up and then have a review or whatever i think that works um there was a question about um uh in fact there was a long time ago there was this concept of present ease and i don't know if the people still uh uh you know um talk about that because in an all in a setup in a sort of rigid setup we're forced to be present at work even though we may not want to be present at work um when you're not well for instance maybe let's say you're coming down with a small uh cold or a flu right and you need to turn to work because there's a presentation or there's a meeting or there's something and then your contribution to that meeting is maybe like a 10% of what is going to happen there but you were forced to stay there for the rest of the whole thing and so that's going to dip uh very badly in terms of what you what you do in terms of work and things like that so i think those are things that um uh sort of helps with uh allowing this kind of freedom to choose timings and choose work pressures and things like that um there was a question about values and how do you um ensure that other people have the same values i think i think it comes back to that idea of trust and you know i think it's this idea of what the company wants to be is is translated by who is approaching uh candidates for instance in ashok or ashipra or rahul go out and meet people right it's sort of i think there are many ways that it translates and then you know the sincerity of the people and then and people sort of build build into it buy into this philosophy themselves i think and you can't force a certain philosophy of people who don't want it uh right um and so i think in in a certain way you sort of hire the kind of people who you think will work to you work for work for this kind of uh to use a slightly abused word in a vision right and so you sort of build into that thing and it sort of comes to and i think just a question of this then trusting the people and giving them that space to build building to it and buy into it and then move on from there uh thanks nandika i think shri hari and rahul and maybe nikhil if you could also take this question of like uh you know self-discipline self-assessment especially because i think in many of your contexts it's also linked to uh to being able to uh you know deliver to a certain client uh in your case you have to deliver on time and so therefore like uh you know what happens in that case uh shri hari uh are you able to yeah am i audible yes yes pretty much yeah okay cool uh i missed a good you can also turn on your video if you like otherwise no i'm in a dimly lip space sorry should have would have been able to do that about an hour ago um so yeah i think i might have missed some of the context early on i wasn't able to join this uh and the initial part um and i also want to call out that at melenso and probably not the best person to talk about this because since well i'm a male and i think uh it's very it's a lot more valuable to have a perspective of uh a woman and i think uh for example dpa or ned who are in leadership positions would be in a much better place to talk about this uh however in terms of uh trust in self-assessment and whatnot i think um one thing that comes uh somewhat by nature to us is uh transparency uh we are structured as a cooperative and we have a sense of equal ownership at melenso this means that a respect of your if your gender irrespective of your seniority you are going to have an equal sense in ownership in terms of uh having an equal say and um structurally that provides transparency transparency in finances transparency in communication right so um over time over years what this has resulted in is um a trust in that if you're going to have a conversation with somebody you're likely going to have that conversation uh with other people as well and there is no difference in you having the conversation one-on-one and having the conversation in a group all the reviews everything happen uh publicly i think uh that's something that we've uh grown with and i think that kind of helps um not reporting to someone also helps so we don't really have uh someone to like okay this person is your boss you need to report to this person we just uh expect people to give daily updates on slack uh whoever they are and they have a slack channel and and whatnot and uh it's not really different whether you're male or female at least in that respect um like rahul mentioned earlier you know in terms of instruation and the baggage that comes with or whatever right like it's completely okay for someone to say i have cramps and then take the day off it's not a sick leave and people understand what's going on there and and so it's also okay to talk about it completely at all times um yeah so so structurally i think that's kind of the space we are in and i i'm i'm guessing it helps but i haven't really received an outsider's view on this uh an example of something that we hadn't thought about a lot for example is when uh one of the people that we work with refused to work in the same room as us because it was a room and it could it has walls and the door could be closed right and we didn't recognize this until it was said we live we do our work from a house essentially right not a large building with with the glass walls all around and there is a lack of physical transparency and um this is something we hadn't even considered until this person actually told us and since then like you know we've made a little bit of an effort in like always keeping doors open even if you're in meetings things like that and i'm sure we have a lot to do on that front as well we have a lot to improve on um and like touching back a little bit on um the remote aspect of things uh i'd say like at least uh at lento and being consulting women and what not work from home hasn't changed a whole lot um although i think working from home has helped uh make some of the things that are generally more prominent with women as in you know taking time some time off to cook or or go to your vessels or whatever apparent in everyone's life right so it shows up in everyone's okay i'm doing this right now sorry i'm not in front of his screen uh front of the screen i can't respond to this right now that sort of thing uh becomes a little more apparent and i think maybe we can use that as an input to ensure that you know we're always being a bit sensitive uh thanks to you harry uh rahul if you can take this question and any comments on adika's point i think there's also a nice point that's been raised in the chat which is is presence by satish obviously says no whether presence is equal productivity but i think rahul in your case uh given that you also have delivered to clients uh in how does this play out sure so i i think that you know at this point it's probably useful to distinguish two things right remote work versus working from home right they're very different things uh and i think that you know at this point we are working from home but i think remote work specifically is a very different topic right remote work means that as an organization whatever your organization does right i think ship trice organization is in the business of creating a payments product ashok has a legal startup right shihari and i work at consulting companies nadika is in like she said right in the media and and advertising space perhaps remote work requires that you look at how all of the sort of you know if you look at a company as a black box and you know inputs being uh capital people etc and the outputs being the you know whatever it is that comes out to the other end um remote work requires uh a you know clear cultural protocols i would say almost around how how do you be effective right and every company will have different answers for that right and i think that i you know i think that um you know ashok uh highlights some interesting points about you know requiring a certain like for instance legislating that a certain number of people be remote or you know certain percentage if i if i remember correctly um i'm actually you know almost scared of of that uh not from the perspective of needing people to be remote but my experience with companies which have some people working in one location don't have a remote culture but have some people working from elsewhere what typically happens in in you know setups like that that i've seen are that there's huge information asymmetry because there's lots of conversations you know which you know of course some of them are around um you know are more socially oriented so around you know what you might be watching or you know whether you prefer x versus y or whatnot but many of those are around how do we do something or will pertain to how you produce code or or design or or you know any of the varied things that people do in these companies and so if you don't have a clear way that everybody in your organization right whether they're within an office building which has glass walls which has rooms or your office building is your slack channel or your office and you know or your office building is a distributed company entirely right when nobody has to be say online at the same time necessarily you don't have any things right so there are many companies which push that particular perspective very very far and and i think that we've tried to borrow from those so i think good places to look at are companies like git lab uh base camp is a big proponent of of remote work right and uh it's kind of interesting because if you dial back to the early i don't know when exactly but you know late 90 late 90s early 2000s uh there was a clear schism that kind of happened between the idea of agile with a capital a and agile as a discipline with a you know lowercase a and so you know then you went into people becoming agile certified right uh looking you know fast-forwarding two or three years into the future uh i for one believe that you know this pandemic is here to stay and you know there will be future similar pandemics uh do we see remote certified companies emerging right which have as little relation to productivity in a remote space um as as you know uh some of some of these predecessors so yes i think that presence is for us at least i think um uh you know with with discipline with a clear understanding of what are all the kinds of artifacts that you're producing uh presence does not need to equal productivity but i do empathize with companies which aren't set up to be productive without presence as well right there are i i think that the majority of the tech sector in india at this point in time would not be productive without presence right that's the reality of the situation and one of of course legislation is a is a powerful tool which can attack that it's also very blunt instrument so i think that we have to move in with a uh you know with a cultural approach for instance writing needs to be a discipline and be your first class citizen in a fully remote workplace right the understanding of how to be effective asynchronously is probably equally important uh you know discipline the other thing is that i think there are different kinds of disciplines some of which are you know it's sort of um you know to to riff off uh you know uh i can't remember whom i think thomas freedon or freedman um remote work is here but it's unequally distributed right so there are protocols and ways in which programmers can be extremely effective and have historically been effective remotely uh those protocols do not necessarily exist for all kinds of cultural production so can designers be as effective you know maybe 50% with further investment in best practices you know closer to 80 and 100 but for many people you know that's not part of the job training unfortunately so i think that we need to sort of evolve those practices as we move forward as well i don't know if i answered the questions at all i think this was useful and i think it was a good point about saying that you know presence is required at some level but presence is not the only way to be productive uh i think uh some very telling remarks over here uh can i request actually satish at this point if you can step in uh because satish you did make this point of saying that presence is not equal to productivity i know that you work with dq and you have your own context with respect to accessibility so if you could quickly comment on this and then we may have to close but we do have a bunch of things before we close uh so satish yeah um so what i'm trying to um tell here is for example our company in us not in india obviously but in us um has remote work because accessibility we are in accessibility space our company is a dq systems incorporated which is into accessibility space digital accessibility space and most of the work in us is done remotely and um because there is no need of a presence um for somebody to sit and you know do the work all that you get is a product you need to just assess them audit them for accessibility or sometimes they give you a design file you don't need to annotate them uh with accessibility related feedback and all that but otherwise um this is absolutely fine for a remote uh place um so india we do have office but at the same time um our company has also provided remote work or i don't know so i don't understand the difference between work for a moment remote work but let's say that it is a remote work obviously they don't stay in the same city obviously uh there are a lot of women uh employees who got married and they wanted to move to their husband's location so our company did or has provided that opportunity to go and uh to go to their place and work and we don't really ask for you know when do you log and when do you log out all that matters is are you staying for that h hours and be productive it doesn't matter when i think you are present or not i if you are you if you are able to come back and answer me i think that is fine that's what we count um the only place that um as a so our company just uh have uh employees with disabilities and even i'm one of them so the only place a remote work are probably a work from whichever it is um has a decent advantage for people with uh uh so if you have a lot of meetings particularly people who are visually impaired are blind what they will face is if there are so much of you know sharing the screens and you know explain the concepts or maybe some organizational charts or maybe sometimes um the presentations and all that going on they may find it difficult because obviously there would be no one to help them whereas in an office space there would be somebody to help them but if you're on the other hand this is just a one small switch that we have at remote work what if on the other hand they will be more productive because they are comfortable at where they are although they want to venture out that's a different story but still at home uh they can be comfortable because they know the place they can roam around they can go to their systems and work anytime and they can be productive so they don't need to travel they don't are they don't need to ask for help in the uh at the public place or you know maybe the commutation and all that so there are a lot of things that could be safe for people with disabilities and our company adopts that also and as of now so for the past one month i've been doing work from mom and i'm i'm able to meet the same goal um as i was able to at office too thank you thanks atish uh okay so time is not unfortunately on our side uh we uh we are actually at the close but there are a lot of very good questions including one that even i'm very interested in i knowing which is somebody mentioning that she's the only woman on her team and there is everyone chasing a deadline and uh she seems to be the one at disadvantage in what role can HR play unfortunately we don't have the time to answer that question and a bunch of other questions that have come regarding mental health but what we can promise you is that we will open the people here on this chat uh and hopefully uh rahul and chipra nashok will also join us and we will do a session which might be an AMA where we can look at these questions and some of the follow-up questions that have also come in please stay tuned we will keep you updated in terms of how we're going to run this but we will try to take this up as soon as possible uh since the conversation is quite lively and people have a lot of questions i don't have anything else much to say over here but thank you so much ashok rahul shipra and many of you others unfortunately we could not include all of you given that we had shortage of time but let's keep continuing this conversation and uh let's see if we can uh can actually kind of come up with a framework and uh you know like obviously like rahul mentioned obvious as a playbook i think this might be a useful time for organizations to create some of these blueprints for themselves either in terms of playbooks or uh all little things that actually help in in in in gratifying a culture itself having said that thank you very much we have a slack channel you can join which is friends.haskeek.com and let's hope to continue the conversations over there and you will hear from us in terms of follow-up and this and our questions to be taken up thank you everyone for being here today thank you bye thank you bye