In the second part of the ContraMinds Timeless Wisdom series, I continue to reflect back on my conversation with Kumar Vembu. In this episode, Kumar Vembu talks about the importance of the team’s emotion in doing a good job. He says this begins by being transparent and real in what you do and the ability of the people to accept what they do as they are.
He breaks the generally accepted myth that bosses must know everything and are invincible. In fact, he goes on to say that Gen Zs of today want to work with leaders who are real and they really appreciate when you say, don’t know. He also talks about an ingenuous method of converting client escalations into an engineering problem, which I thought was phenomenal.
Finally, he says he places greater value emotion over data, but he says data will be used to validate if the emotion that people express is real or not. He stresses the need for people to be deeply self-aware of what they do at work and he says that leads to happiness company. Let’s now dive into the conversation.
00:16:08
Q1 The Levers Behind GoFrugal’s Culture
Swami:
Brilliant, brilliant. So as I was looking at your current venture, which is GoFrugal, and I went back and looked at some of the Glassdoor ratings, and I compared it with Zoho, okay. GoFrugal is largely an India-based product company, while Zoho is a company which builds products for the global market.
And when I looked at the overall culture and ratings, it was very, very close to the Zoho ratings, right. So therefore, here, there is an Indian company, and I’ve always heard you say, building a product in India, delivering a product in India is very difficult. I saw the work-life balance rating, which was slightly lower than Zoho, but right from, you know, the fact that, you know, all the ratings, if I were to look at it, were pretty much same as a company that’s building a global product.
So what did you do in GoFrugal, and what levers did you apply differently in a product company which is actually doing it in India? Because the engineers’ expectations are very, very different, because everybody expects, you know, the Infosys or the TCSs or, you know, a global culture which is there, while building a product for India is very, very tough.
As you rightly said, the return on effort, okay, is far more lower. So therefore, when I looked at the ratings, it was very, very stark for me, right. And that tells a lot about the way you build that culture. So what levers have you used in building GoFrugal?
00:18:01
Kumar:
I think, see, I’m glad you are doing this podcast now, because maybe if you had done it five years back, the Glassdoor rating would not have been the same. And the second thing is, you know, I, if you see our, what I had written in the Glassdoor about company overview, right, I actually don’t respect anonymous feedback.
Because if somebody is a professional, it requires that they have the guts to share feedback openly, right. So we actually, honestly, we don’t take Glassdoor very seriously. Because I found a lot of, you know, I can say it’s very easy to, for example, you can give a rating for Microsoft or GoFrugal very easily.
And those guys don’t even detect it and remove it, right.
Swami:
Kumar, I think I totally agree with you. And I also don’t believe because anonymous feedback doesn’t give you anything. But for me, it is an indication of what happens inside the company, right. Because for me, the difference that I’m seeing is the expectation of many of these engineers is I need to have a, you know, global culture, you know, what happens in companies, but it is not real. The expectation is not real. But the fact that you have been able to do that, to me is a very, very clear indication that setting expectations right is something that you have done very well. And therefore, I wanted to understand the levers.
Kumar:
So see, there are, I think, three, four things we have been focused on for probably close to 10 years now. Right. Well, the first and most important thing is we are a happiness first company. That means I measure happiness every day. So by in the sense that we have a daily reporting system, right, so that people spend 15-20 minutes reflecting about the day’s work. Right. And the first thing they report about in their daily report is how happy they are at work, emotion of the day. Right. How did they feel? So I know in the induction and also the first thing we tell every new joining is, you know, professionally, we want you to start the day happy and the end the day happy, meaning nothing that happens in the company should make you unhappy. Right.
So that means we, you know, I believe this is very, very important, you know, because people spend 10 to 12 hours of their time every day during working days in the office, and we don’t want the friction in their work. Right. So that means, you know, this is helping us, you know, but just by measuring happiness, we are able to understand the challenges people are facing. We are able to understand, you know, where people are less productive, or where their effort is going waste. Right. And we are able to learn more on all aspects of all aspects that leads to productivity, right and improve.
So every one of our team leads and managers also look at the daily report of every individual. So if there are frictions and the challenges and the things like that, you know, they go and address that. So that happiness being happiness-first and reporting this happiness in every project they engage with in a day has really helped us, you know, improve a lot of things.
And the second most important thing we care about is, you know, whether we are providing a psychologically safe environment for everybody. Right. That means that to offer that psychological safety, you know, we are very transparent and open. So even when things don’t go well, right, so we know we used to have monthly all-hands meeting before the pandemic. And now we do fortnightly all-hands meeting. So one hour every week, right and a few weeks there are questions and answers also in that.
But, you know, whether we do well or we don’t do well, whether we fail or we are facing some challenge or we fall down or whatever, we are very transparent about what has happened. And we also discuss about how we can pick ourselves up because we are real. It’s not like, you know, we only, you know, face success in whatever we do and we don’t fail. So in that sense, I would say, you know, I also conduct myself as a human. That’s what I will say. So it is not like, you know, because some some places I have seen, you know, the bosses behave like they are invincible and they will never fail. And that is where creates a stress for everybody. So the moment you are real, you know, I think more and more younger people also want to work with people who are real. Right. Who see people, other people also, you know, my boss also has these shortcomings and he is also openly admitting it. You know, he also, you know, for example, I used to tell I don’t know to people at least once a day so that none of my managers think because they are managers, they are supposed to know everything. Because I remember one of my first jobs in the industry when I was working in HCL, I used to feel some of the managers are afraid of facing people because they don’t want to, you know, admit that they don’t have power to fix something or they don’t have authority to fix something or they don’t know something. Right.
So one of the first lessons I have, you know, I learned and I have started practicing is let us be open. I can do this.I can’t do this. We can afford this. We can’t afford this. I know this. I don’t know this. Right. So those things make a huge difference. I think, you know, I can really see our people becoming more and more engaged and happier and happier and that is leading to more and more success also. You know, mainly I would say because of this happiness first, the psychological safety we want to offer and what we call a social connectedness.
It’s not like, you know, all the work is done as a transaction. How do we get to know people? How can we accommodate their aspirations and their context and the situations? Right. So those are the things I think that are helping.
00:24:58
Q2 From Firefighting to Planned Work: A Culture Shift
Swami:
Fantastic. So I have a follow up question on this, Kumar. When you measure happiness first, you yourself in one of the interviews, I heard you say that it’s very difficult to satisfy an Indian customer and you use the word that sometimes the self-esteem itself is questioned. OK. And when that happens, your happiness first takes a beating. And how do you address those issues? Because, you know, when you work for a global back end, if I were to call it, it’s very easy because the client on the other side is mature and things like that.
But here, the rigour and the hard thing that they go through will be very, very tough. So when you measure this every day and when you find something like this, can you give me some instances of where you saw unhappiness? How did you address it? And therefore, how did it help? I think it’s something that I would like to know.
00:26:01
Kumar:
See, I will first address this, you know, challenges in servicing customer and the self-esteem point you talked about. Right. So I would say, you know, is that something we have control over and we can fix it? Absolutely, yes. So that means, you know, from the beginning, we have tried to, you know, take control of that.
How do we, you know, if these are all the customer expectations, how do we make sure we don’t put ourselves in a situation where we have to compromise our dignity or self-esteem and we have to be yelled at by customer. Right. So I’ll give you one example.
You know, in a retail environment, consumers are picking up the goods or they are getting serviced and they have to be billed. If for some reason billing stops, the retailer is going to be wild because it is his livelihood and he cannot serve his customer. Now, 99% of the time, the billing will stop because there is no disk space. The bill cannot be saved. Or there could be a loose contact between the printer in the printer cable connected to the computer or a mouse would have, you know, bitten the cable. Right. And so many other reasons are there where it is an environmental problem rather than a problem on GoFrugal software. Right. So what we did is, how can we identify, you know, like, okay, this is something which is going to trigger a customer and he is going to be wild and they don’t have control over what they speak when it happens. But after they know that it is a disk space problem and we service them, 90% of them even apologize, saying, you know, we went out of the way, but they should not have yelled. But, you know, a word spoken cannot be taken back. Right.
So what we did is, how do we identify this one week, you know, one week or even two weeks ahead. How can we send an SMS or notification, you know, and show in the application itself, so that the owner will not miss it, the IT head won’t miss, the SPOC won’t miss it, the shop boy won’t miss it. Right. And similarly, we also know how many times we raised this with the customer. Right. So if there is a breakdown happening, we made the customer come to us and request. Right. So every single situation, we looked at it as an engineering problem. You know, how do we proactively inform the customer? How do we even proactively remind the customer? You know, sometimes three days before we will even call the customer and tell, where we tell them, okay, if you come after disk is full, you know, and you want us to service, you have to pay. It will not be free service, you go and clean it up. This is the one minute video that is there on how to create a free disk space. Right.
So like that, we have solved a lot of the issues, so that such breakdowns don’t happen. Right. Wherever breakdown possibilities are there, can we proactively identify it, can we proactively communicate that, can we proactively communicate the impact of that, can we proactively communicate the service cost, if they come after the breakdown for that, so that there is more, you know, awareness to address it before the breakdown situation arises.
So that is the way we have, you know, we have reduced our work, we have, you know, significantly lowered the incidents where we put ourselves in stressful situation and put customer also in a very stressful and frustrating situation, so that we are able to proactively manage that. Okay. And coming to your question on, you know, this unhappiness and how do we manage it.
Right. So, for example, you know, we are closed on the weekends. Right. So, but our customers peak business is in the weekends. Right. While we provide a 24×7 service, our support team alone, you know, some part of the support team, which have a holiday roster, is actually working during the weekend. Right. So, now, there may be support instances where the support guys need the help of some other experts, or somebody in development or somebody in implementation, who does not have, you know, the duty on the weekend. Right. Our engineering, sales, implementation, for everybody, it is a holiday on Saturday and Sunday, except the fourth Saturday. Right. But the support people who are on duty during those times, sometimes they need the help.
So, I noticed that many times, you know, in few occasions, people have, people would have scheduled family engagement, you know, an outing or a movie or something like that. And because of a customer escalation, they have to cancel that. And, you know, they also miss that family outing, but they also sort of, they have to face the music from the family members also. Right. So, we started a project called the Project Peaceful Holidays. So, that means, why would some, you know, somebody who has to work on that day, he has to work. But whoever is on a holiday on the weekend, you know, they should never be disturbed. So, what are the reasons for which they will, you know, they have to be called? Is it a knowledge issue of the agent? Is it a skill issue of the agent? Is it, you know, a problem that can only be looked at by, you know, troubleshooted by a more skilled person or only by a developer? And how can we eliminate that? So, we did this for a few months, you know, and analyzed.
So, when we started, if, you know, in a weekend, if there are six or eight times in which somebody had to be disturbed, we brought it down to one or two times and we put in motion a plan where, you know, maybe it will be eliminated. Right. So, when somebody, first is we have to make people comfortable expressing their emotion, even if that emotion is a frustration due to how their team lead is running the project. Right. Because many times, you know, I have the power to create most stress to my team. Right. So, whether I exercise my power that way or not is the question.So, it is true of every level of managers. Right. So, this is one example. You know, how can we take control? So, whatever we can control, we want to give priority and control that.
And the second thing is we emphasized on, you know, a lot of unhappiness is because people have to do a lot of unplanned work. So, when they do more and more unplanned work, their planned work is taking a beating, their planned work gets delayed, and they have to give an excuse for delayed planned work. And that is affecting the self-esteem of people. Right.
So, how can we come up with a better and better plan? So, that these are all one week, two week plan. In a one week period, if we can’t do 90% of the time only planned work, we cannot anticipate what unplanned work will come in a one week window, two week window. Then, you know, it’s not a healthy thing. We are only reacting and, you know, jumping up and down. Right.
So, we put a lot of emphasis on planning. So, that, you know, 60-70% of the people can work and complete their work as per the plan. And they have a say in the plan from the beginning. So, these things improve engagement, increases ownership, increases the commitment, right, and by and large make people happier.
00:34:22
Q3 Managing Unplanned Demand Without Burning Out Teams
Swami:
I have seen that work in a, you know, GDC, which is a Global Development Center, but typically, you know, the client on the other side in India, your retail customer, you know, retail client or whatever has to be as planned like you because, you know, the unplannedness of somebody else affects my planning, right, which is where this unhappiness or peaceful holidays project typically has an issue. So, therefore, how do you, you know, how do you address that because this is real in India. What you are talking is real in India.
It’s great if you are running a global process, it’s great. But when you do it every day in India, you know, the fact that it is amazing that you have done something like this, how do you plan that because the client is unplanned, your retail, you know, client is unplanned. So, how do you really build that bridge to ensure that it happens?
No, actually, see, there are two things, right.
One is people who are in the role of responding to customers. So, for example, if I have a support team member, you know, their job is to respond to customer. They don’t know what, who’s going to come for support, what they are going to come for today.
But we know that our, based on historic averages and how the support lead is, support incidents are trending, right, what is, whether it is an increasing trend or downward spiral, what kind of things are coming. So, for example, today I know for this product, you know, time-wise, hour-wise, if I plot, this is how the graph will look like. You know, today is a Friday, right, and we have done the shift roster to handle that load, right.
So, we know the typical average service times, we know how many customers will come and things like that. So, we have, you know, we know, for example, if today current shift is having eight people, we know six people are enough to handle the support volume. And we will have two people to do some, you know, you can say some identifying or making us more proactive for certain other incident or eliminating certain support incidents or doing, making something as a self-service.
Those kind of work, these two people will be working. And if there is a critical issue that shows up or if there is a, you know, there is a long, something that takes a very long time comes up and one guy is engaged, these guys can be asked to drop what they are doing and go and attend to support. So, there is one plan for how do we manage development and marketing kind of work. There is another plan for how the sales guy and support person and the customer success person work. Because in customer success and sales, you know, while they may do some inbound will be there, their work 60% will be outbound engagement that is already planned. And the 30-40% will be the inbound call that customers may be calling which they have no control over.
Similarly, in support, maybe 100% of the time they react or respond to what is coming. But we know the load in both the cases. So, we manage that.
00:37:43
Q4 How Emotion and Data Keep Each Other Honest
Swami:
So, one thing that I am picking up is the way you therefore manage the company literally is data driven, right? Because it looks like you look at the number of support incidents that come in. Then, you know, you look at agile product development. So, lot of things is data driven.
So, do you bring different sets of data together and then look at it on a regular basis? And how often do you look at it? And how do you ensure that people are aware of these issues?
00:38:13
Kumar:
Actually, I would say we are number one emotion driven, number two data driven. So, what we use, we validate one with other, right? Because, for example, like I have had this conversation with people who are in pre-sales, right? And they say I have made, you know, every day I have to talk to 60 different customers and each call is about 15 minutes. But when the data says they have actually made 30 calls and each call is only two minutes, right? So, there is a gap between this perception and reality, especially when, you know, so we make every individual actually face the truth like this, you know, because if you do 30 calls at two minutes average, and you think you have done 60 at 15 minute average, then your job is a burden for you. So, the burden is not on the call you are making, but the burden is in your mind, right? So, either you have to correct your mind so that you can actually acknowledge the real truth and real experience or you basically, you know, if it is too much of a burden, then find something else. Because in the interview, people say they love talking to people. But after one or two weeks in the job, their love is shown in the perception or the feeling they get about how many people they talk to and how long they talk to with each one, right? And what the data says.
So, the most important thing for me always been how do people feel rather than what the data say, right? Because a lot of insights you get when you ask people how do they feel, right? The data can be used to validate that. See, finally, I would say one of the most important thing we do, in fact, to even our glassdoor rating or all the other things is making everybody more self aware, right? So, for example, when something happens, the first thing we ask is whether that individual understands where the mistake happened without me telling. So, am I able to do a root cause analysis myself? Am I able to come up with what I should have done differently, right? So, if that self awareness is there and the commitment to improve that is there, we don’t have to manage them at all.
We just have to give them the time and space and the coaching that is required. Right. So, we focus on building the self awareness in all aspects of the work we do. So, that means the management is number one, you know, how do they feel, right? And what does the data say? You know, we then talk about the whole truth.
EPISODE 02 OUTRO
In the final part of the timeless wisdom series Kumar Vembu discusses digital transformation and how it helped him reshape his company’s structure and culture. More about this in the next part of this episode. If you like this episode, do comment, like and share it within your network. It helps spread the message and get us more people into the Contra Minds community. Thanks for listening.
