 Hello everyone, welcome to another Pilates India experience sharing session. This session would be on Women in Entrepreneurship. We have with us Swati Kakarla, who would be speaking on inspired great culture in your organization. Over to you Swati. Hi everyone, thanks so much for joining. I know things are crazy and I hope all the guys are staying indoors and safe and wear a mask. Okay, well, first of all, thanks again. I'm going to be inspired great culture in your organization. So I'm Swati. I'm the CTO and co-founder at a company called Script. One of my greatest loves in life is technology, but the other is people and is taking care of my people. I'm just going to walk you through some things that I've learned in my journey on how to build an amazing organizational culture, right? Because I feel that this is an important topic because the word culture gets thrown around quite a bit and it can mean so many things to so many people. The managers, the leaders for companies and what happens is that people tend to gloss over it and they prioritize the importance of it, right? And this comes later in the life of an organization. It affects efficiency, it affects retention and so many things, so many intangible things that make a true difference when you're trying to run a successful company, right? So especially when you're a startup founder, a tech startup founder, right? Your company is your people and how you treat them is essentially going to lead you to success. Because while other businesses, they sell bottles or cans, you sell vision, you sell creativity. It's something that's so intangible, which is more often than not a direct reflection of your people's values and you can't build it, right? I've heard it so many times, build great culture. You can't do that. You can only inspire it and you can only hope that everyone in your organization carries those values, right? So this is why whenever people talk about culture, this is not culture. A pool table or a football table is not culture. A bean bag is not culture. Definitely not the office Christmas party or office Punggol party, whatever you guys celebrate, right? It's not it. You feel it. You feel it in your bones, right? That this is not culture. So basically, what is it? Culture is essentially what makes people feel good about where they work, right? It's something that you can't touch, but it can be something that you definitely feel. It's what makes work fun. And culture is why people want to get things done and not punch a time card. Culture makes people want to stay and be part of something bigger. And culture is what makes a team succeed. So I'm Swathi Karpala, the co-founder and CTO at Scripps. I love to code. I'm an open source contributor. I write tech blogs, right? Business blogs. I love to talk about tech startups, culture, as I'm doing now. So why am I qualified to talk about this, right? It's about a decade ago, decade or so ago. I built my company, Scripps, because essentially I was really bored in college. I just, I don't get the thing, right? What people do in college. So I decided to start a company. Crazy, I know, but fortunately it worked out. I started it with two of my friends, the three of us together. Till today, we're completely bootstrapped. Still are. No funding. We've got offices around the globe. And what we do is we build the future of tech, right? We help companies and businesses scale for tech. And we have so much of fun doing it. I think I'm qualified to talk about this. All right. So why do you need it? Essentially when people start a company, they think about sales, marketing. How do I make money? How do I hire? Hiring is important. All of these things are important. But if you're trying to build something that's sustainable, that's going to last a very long time, culture is where it's at, right? This is essentially you're not start. This helps guide your people at your organization when you're not there for them, right? And we all know how important it is. When you don't get this right, you tend to micromanage. You tend to always be there and you don't give your people the freedom to breathe and to be creative, which is what we need in our industry. So basically culture is your identity, right? So if you inspire a great culture today, tomorrow your employees will transform into advocates for your own company, right? You can attract great talent. You can attract great customers, whatever you want. Your best people actually want to stay with you. So you don't have to throw in crazy perks. You don't have to say, hey, we got a pool table or we got a great office. I'm going to pay you this amount of money. All of these things, you're essentially buying people's time, right? You're bargaining with them to stay within the company. But when you get your culture right, people actually actually want to stay with you. New employees have an easier time onboarding. So you can build your team, right? You can keep scaling it, you can keep growing. And what essentially happens is that your company functions as a single team once you get your culture right. Okay. A little bit of philosophy here, just bear with me. Okay. So there's this old Chinese proverb, as there are so many Chinese old Chinese problems. If you want to, if you want to change the way of being, you made to change the way of doing, right? So my first tip for you guys is to be the change. If you're a leader, if you are a manager, if you are a founder, if you are a CEO, if you are in any position where people look up to you, you need to be the change. There's this famous consulting company, Dane & Co., I'm sure you guys have heard of them. They released about 33 different traits of a leader. All of these things are essentially what helps a human develop inner resources, connect with others, and finally to lead the team. There are so many different traits. A couple of them, stress tolerance, self regard, optimism, all of these things help you develop inner resources. So what this means is that you're in a good mind state to do things, right? Whereas things like vitality, humility and empathy help leaders connect so that you can set the tone for them essentially, right? So they can inspire and vision, focus, servanthood basically helps you lead, right? All of these things constitute you being a leader. But what they found was that you only need to be really good at one of these 33 traits to increase your chances by 50% in order to become an amazing leader. They also found that people who inspire are incredibly diverse. They're all unique in their own way. And they're all unique for your organization, right? It depends on what your organization is, what your context is. So there's essentially no universal archetype. And what this means is that anyone can become an inspirational leader as long as they focus on their own strengths, right? There are 33 traits. Focus on one of them, become amazing at it, and you can start leading change within your organization. That's step one, right, to believe in yourself and to be the change. Step two is to set the tone. You need to kind of communicate with your team, with your employees that things are about to change in here and things are about to change for the good, right? You need to find what is your unique, you know, a comfort that makes you different, that works for you. There are different ways to figure this out. You need to figure out this with essentially what is your strategy for business? What is your business model? How is it that you are making money? All of these things, right? You need to figure this out. For an example, let's say a company, the entire business model is that they outperform their competitors by over marketing, right? They're always out there. They're always in front of you. So for a company like this, if you bring in someone who sets the culture based on performance and efficiency, it's going to constrict creativity. It's going to work in a negative way. Another example, I'm not sure if you guys have heard of Alan Mundayli. He was the CEO of Ford back in the 2000s. Do you guys remember the 2000s? They were a crazy period of recession, especially for the automobile industry. So essentially, every single automobile industry in the US needed to get government funding in order to survive, except for Ford. And this boiled down to exactly one thing that Ford did differently. So basically when Alan Mundayli came back to Ford in 2006 to help turn around the business in this crazy time, he took bold actions to change the way the company operated. And it's crazy that it's one of the smallest things that you can do to help change the culture, right? It's like the butterfly effect. It's a very small thing that you think that you're doing now, which has incredible repercussions in the future. One crazy thing that he did was he applauded Mark Fields, another business executive, for admitting failure in an executive meeting. So all of the board members are present. There's crazy huge important people. And Mark Fields was honest and open enough to admit failure. And Alan Mundayli, instead of covering it up, instead of telling him to not talk to the, you know, not basically reveal this to the board of directors, he appreciated him. He congratulated him. And what happened was that this set the tone for change in the entire organization. Eventually, Mark Fields actually became the successor. So Alan Mundayli with this small gesture, he helped set the tone for open and honest communications, which are, you know, the foundation when you want to change or bring about a new culture in the company. All right. And finally, give back. You can do a lot of things. You can do a lot of group activities. You can go crazy on vacations. You can do all of this. But why people are working for you is because they want to feel like they've contributed to something, especially millennials, especially, you know, all of us. We want to feel that we've made a difference. We've made a dent in that universe. Right. So always make sure to give back to your, to your people. Right. Whether this is just feedback or certifications, whatever it is, right. Do it. The example of this was Howard Schultz, who was the founder of Starbucks. So he came back to Starbucks after about, I think, a decade-long hiatus. He came back because he felt that Starbucks unique customer-focused coffee experience was now at the back seat. And what was in the front seat was automation, diversification, and all of these things to make an organization a corporate. Right. Basically, people in suits trying to make money. What he found was that it's not working. Starbucks shares started to drop. They were not doing good business. So what he did in 2008 was that he shut down 7,100 stores all across the US for three hours, completely shut it down. This was completely random, totally unannounced. If this was me, I would have said he was mad. Right. Because huge money, 7,000 stores being shut down for three hours, all so that he could retrain the baristas in the art of making coffee. He did this. He put employees first. And you can see now there's basically a Starbucks on every corner of the street. Right. This is what makes change. That is what is required for you to build an amazing organizational culture. Okay. All of this is philosophy. I'm sure you guys must have been sleeping by now. I'm just going to tell you what you have to do. Okay. Take this with a grain of salt because organization organizational culture is very unique. Not only to its organization, but to the time in which or the past. The path in which your organization is at. Basically, what this means is that all of these things that I'm doing right now, I would not have done two years ago. Right. Two years ago, the culture that I had of my organization is different from what it is now. This is because we keep going back and we keep working on it. That's what you need to do. It's not something that you do once and then you repeat. Right. It's not code. Unfortunately, I wish it was as simple, but you can do it. Right. A couple of things. I'm just going to walk you through stuff that we do at strict. Okay. Team activities. I know I started my talk at the beginning with you don't need a foosball table. Don't get me wrong. You need team activities, but they need to be directed. Right. There needs to be an end result that you want out of them. This is what we found works at our organization with the growth that we are in right now. Probably would have been different couple of years down the line. I think probably in year one when we started team activities were 100% just fun. Now it's about 20%. Right. 50% is focused on education. Right. How to give back to our employees. How to retrain them. How to, you know, make them up their skills. Right. And then 30% is team bonding. A couple of things that we do. What we do in terms of education is book clubs, nerd chat, two cents, all of these things. I know they're like, they sound like made up words to you. But essentially what this is are ways to get their team together and do something productive. Right. So book clubs is basically where we all decide to read a book and read it together. Nerd chat because we're a tech company. There's everyone that's learning different different things. We want to give back. We want to give back to the team and just help kind of, you know, upskill everyone at the team. So any skills that a person picks up, they actually share it back within the organization. And two cents is just something that we started recently where we realized at the point that we are in, we're all growing up. People have been in the organization for about four years, five years right now and it's time for them to take their finances seriously. So things like tax, things like funding. All of this stuff. So we started a program for that. So this is what makes a difference because it gives your high achievers something to expect and to actually want to come to team activities instead of waste their time. We need to have fun, right? As a team, you need to have fun. These are, this is the time when things kind of, you know, build and they form within your company, which these are kind of bonds that can never be broken. So just have fun, play among us, play dumb charades, play secret Hitler, whatever. Just have fun, right? And then team bonding. So what we do at script is that we run it like a democracy, right? So any huge decision that we take, we basically pull people and we take a decision together. It allows employees to feel that they have a say within the company that they actually drive the shit along with us, that they're not just in it, you know, for us to take a ride. We have something called Freedom Fridays, which is a completely open conversation. No judging where you can talk about whatever crazy stuff that you've faced in your life. No judgment whatsoever. Just a platform for you to let your emotions go. And then you also do something called the monthly highlights where anyone who's achieved something or anything small, like, you know, someone learned how to cook a new dish or someone contributed something to open source. All of these are curated together. We make a small, like a PDF, like a booklet out of it, and we publish it to the world. We celebrate our people's success, right? We show them off to the world. And it's quite fun. There's always competition in, you know, who makes it to the monthly highlights. Open conversations are incredibly important. If you want to build culture that, you know, that enables people to kind of be free, be open, be honest with each other, with the management, however you want it. So we actually have four different types of one-on-ones. We have the HR one-on-one, which is completely anonymous. So any kind of discomfort that people are feeling, they can voice it out. You know, project manager or a product manager one-on-one. This is very direct. It helps people set the pace for work, right? People work differently. The productivity is different at different times. You need to kind of find that out. And this conversation helps them do that. We have a team leader one-on-one, which is completely goal-oriented. What do you want to do in your career, right? Not at the company, but what do you want to do at your career, your entire life? So all of these things get discussed. And finally, we've got direct CEO one-on-ones. Because it helps people see that they are truly connected to the company, right? Completely honest. Yeah. So this essentially gives you a channel for having open conversations. You need to have a defined path for your employees, right? For your team. I hate saying the word employees, basically for your team. So they need to figure out where am I and where am I headed? So where am I is very, very important for freshers, right? As a startup, resources are tight. So you are probably going to be hiring freshers for quite a while. So you need to help them figure out where they are, right? You do that. And what happens is that you build bonds and people feel that they're connected to the company, right? For people that have been there longer, where am I headed is so important, especially for high achievers because they hate feeling complacent, right? Challenges keep the fuel burning. So you need to define that for them as well. And clear communication. This is the opposite of open conversation. Basically open conversation is how the employee speaks with the management and clear communication is the other way around. How does the management speak with employees? Are they honest? Only if you're honest, people will also want to be honest, right? It's reciprocation. So are you talking about the good things that are happening in the company and are you talking about the bad? This is incredibly important for now with the entire coronavirus pandemic situation that's happening. So are you being open and honest to your employees about what's going to change within the organization? Do they know? Are they able to plan ahead, right? This is basically a reflection of yourself. And finally, do you provide a platform for failure, right? Famous Murphy's Law, anything that can go wrong will go wrong, right? So don't prepare for things to go right. As important as that is, you need to figure out what is a plan of action when things completely hit the road, right? So are you communicating? Are you providing them a platform to reflect, to actualize? There should be no blame game. You need to figure out what is the root and you need to prevent it. So once you do all of these things, once you reflect, once you actualize and fix that problem, are you updating your process so that you ensure that this doesn't happen ever again, right? And a picture is worth a thousand words. When you first start working on culture, you have a gazillion ideas. I want to do this, I want to do that. With this team activity, I want to read this book, so many things that you want to do. But what's going to stick is that if you document it, we actually have something called the red book, which everyone in the team contributes to. And this essentially acts as our north star, right? And what makes it really stick and work is that we go back to it. Once we figure out that something's not working, that, you know, we need to refine this, we go back to the red book, we figure out where we've written that and change that, right? It's a democracy. Whatever you're running is a government, right? You need to have things documented. Makes it easier for second level of management to follow through and to ensure that your culture never, ever fades away. It's documented. All right. So finally, we're at the end of our conversation. I hope it was the conversation. I hope you weren't falling asleep. All right, so basically the foundation for inspiration comes from three things, right? You get this right and it becomes easier for you to inspire people. Your values. You need to write this down. You need to have a conversation with yourself if you're the sole founder or with your co-founders. What are your values? What makes script script, right? What makes your company you? Your vision. Where are you headed? What is the end goal that you want to achieve? You need to figure that out. And these two things basically help you set the tone and help you set your organizational values and your culture values, right? Where is this headed? And finally, your being. Basically, how are you running the company? Is this all stuff that you've written down but never, ever executed? Because then essentially a waste of time, right? So are you hiring the right people? How are you firing people? That's incredibly important. How are you handling promotions? Basically, how are you handling your everyday? How is culture? How is your culture being reflected in the way you behave and the way you make decisions? So once you get all of this right, you will be able to build, not build, inspire an amazing, amazing organizational culture. Well, thank you so much for coming here. I know Saturday you could have spent it sleeping at home. But thank you for coming here. Thank you for listening to me. If you've got any questions, you can follow me on Twitter. You can email me. We have an entire page dedicated to culture because we spent a lot of time on this. All right. Well, thank you so much, everyone. Thanks for attending. I hope you've learned something out of here. Thank you. Thank you for this amazing session. You all enjoyed. And yes, I mean, even if it's a Saturday, it's still a day to learn, right? Thank you so much for accepting our invitation and coming to speak here. No problem. If anyone's got questions, I'd be happy to answer. Sure. We've got about five minutes left, I guess. Sure. If anyone has any questions, please post it in the chat. Otherwise, we do have to Zulip Streams that Zulip is a real-time messaging platform. And people can ask questions there as well. So you let me know, right? Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Cool. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for the invite. You can use the top right. Okay. Bhavani has a question. How to ensure that the culture traverses as the size of the company grows? Yeah. All right. So yeah, we've had some trouble with this, but we're happy to say that we, you know, conquered this. So what you need to do is completely document. You need to have some sort of culture book. All the amazing companies have it. You can refer to Buffer. Buffer and GitLab, I think, have actually open sourced their culture book. And you need to kind of, when you're onboard people, this is part of the onboarding package, right? They are required to go through it. They're required to read it. And what happens is that people already are entering your organization with this expectation, and they will follow through. And what also happens is that once you've documented it down, anything that changes, any revisions that you want to make to your culture, it is easier to communicate. So you can, you know, tell that to people. What we've also done is open up an internal communications board. It's basically a Discord forum where people can write, you know, like internal articles to share their thoughts, whatever. You need to build a foundation and build a platform for people to talk about culture. That's how you traverse it, basically. You're almost on the top of PR. Again, once again, thank you, Swati, for giving this amazing session. You can use the top right button and leave. All right then. Thanks again. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye.