While the whole world including many of the large corporates are pushing their people to start working from office, here is a start-up, FloBiz, a neobank for small and medium businesses, that still believes in work from home.
Remote working has some obvious benefits – the biggest being the unlimited talent pool, which means companies and organisations can hire talent from anywhere and everywhere.
“For remote working, there has to be a clear message on what is expected of the team member. If that is conveyed clearly, half of the battle is won,”
Rabi Agarwal, HR Head, FloBiz
From an employer’s perspective, what acts against remote working or work from home, is the challenge of managing productivity.
Rabi Agarwal, HR Head, FloBiz, believes that if proper communication and technology are used in sync, this challenge can be overcome and work from home or remote working can be easily managed.
“For remote working, there has to be a clear message on what is expected of the team member. If that is conveyed clearly, half of the battle is won,” Agarwal says.
In order to achieve higher volumes of work, the company follows a top-down culture of deep research, planning and prioritisation. The company has a system in place and uses the right set of technologies and tools that allows the employees to plan their work better.
For instance, Flobiz uses tools and apps for bug tracking and agile project management. In addition, it also uses tools that enable the team to plan, track, and collaborate on any project, and build the perfect workflow, all in one platform.
These tools help the team to communicate and collaborate better, and that works as an advantage.
One apprehension of work from home especially for employees is unlimited work hours that leads to exhaustion.
Agarwal agrees, “Remote work is challenging and if not managed properly can lead to exhaustion.”
Flobiz has a policy in place where there is a zero tolerance policy on work related calls or meetings after office hours.
“It is important to maintain a work-life balance among the employees. This is why we don’t push people for exhaustive hours; they are given a certain task to do, and they can do that within their comfort timeline. That way they can balance their personal work and professional work also. At the same time, they have mandated that work-related calls or meetings cannot happen after a certain time in the evening or during weekends,” claims Agarwal.
Next, for evaluating employees on their performance and productivity, the company uses an Employee Net Promoter Score (ENPS), a scoring system designed for employers to measure the productivity and satisfaction of employees within the organisation.
ENPS is done once every six months. Additionally, they also undertake other surveys, which are circulated among all employees. “Employees can anonymously submit their feedback regarding their organisations, teams, or work culture,” shares Agarwal.
The company also claims to have a robust feedback mechanism.
Managers have a one-on-one conversation with the employees once a month to get their feedback.
“This unique feedback mechanism helps the employees grow, and it also helps in reviewing their progress. With this feedback mechanism, the employees perform even better,” says Agarwal.
Generally, it is seen that employees are often apprehensive about the feedback mechanism and are uncomfortable with the idea of face-to-face feedback interactions with their superiors.
The feedback mechanism that the company uses promotes a healthy workplace environment and helps employees and employers achieve the goals of the organisation. If the feedback is more constructive and positive, employees will feel more at ease. Also, organisations should consider and try to understand issues raised by their employees and take feedback or reviews from their working experiences.
“We proactively assure the employees that these feedbacks will benefit them, and that increases their participation,” Agarwal states.
Agarwal further added that they have a human resource business partner team that does one-on-ones with all employees individually once a quarter.
“The HRBP team talks to the employees, understands the problems they are facing, and learns about things they like or dislike or what other help they need; all this information is gathered and then discussed with the management.”
Smaller companies, especially startups, face some unique challenges regarding talent acquisition.
“Yes, it is true that employees look for stable companies, and that’s the challenge with a small B2B series B funded startup like us. However, we try to make them feel assured that the company is super stable. Besides, we try to sell the role really well, to grab their interest,” shares Agarwal.
