Axelerant People Report: March 2019

At our annual retreat in February 2019, we'd conducted a feedback session to help us consider the viewpoints of all our team members regarding our policies.

Over a week-long sprint, we reviewed all this feedback we'd gathered from the retreat and made adjustments to our policies where possible. We finalized these changes and announced our new Appraisal, Bonus, Incentives & Benefits Management policy in March.

In cases where we were not able to implement all suggestions made, we created a backlog so that these items would move to the Q2 cycle.  

Hopefully, these changes will enable our team members to feel more fulfilled and supported at work.

We cultivated team members' focus on praise and positivity.

In every engagement meeting within departments and project teams, apart from the regular engagement questions and discussions, we try and take up some fun, self-reflective exercises along different topics.

One of the activities we took up in March was an exercise designed to make people more aware of the qualities they appreciate in each other and in themselves. Most of the team participated in this exercise. This exercise helped many of us learn to be more compassionate to and appreciative of ourselves and others. 

Overall, this has helped increase happiness and connection within teams.

We’re encouraging our team members to set OKRs.

We've been encouraging our team members to set individual OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) for a long time to help them achieve their learning and development goals.

Before July 2018, in every appraisal cycle (six months), people were working on OKRs which were assessed by their Engineering Managers, and certain bonuses were rewarded based on their completion.

In June, we declared that bonus and salary cycles were not connected to each other for the upcoming appraisal cycle. As a result, we saw a dip in the number of OKRs being taken up and over the past nine months.

Our updated benefits policy closely ties OKRs to bonuses again in very clear and specific ways. We've formed an OKR committee to review individual OKRs for alignment to organizational goals and approve them. 

In March, we restarted conversations between team members and their Reporting Managers (RMs) around the OKRs they want to take up. We hope that this will help bring people closer to their learning and development goals.

This is how we’re doing by the numbers.

Here’s a look at some metrics that tell us how our team is doing.

Engagement score

This month we have a healthy employee engagement score of 8.7.

10 Supporting Metrics 

These are the various metrics that are individually considered to generate the engagement score, and below is a snapshot of our scores for the month of March.

For our team at this point, the lowest metrics are: Satisfaction, Personal Growth and Happiness. While these are still healthy scores overall, we want to make sure we do everything we can to provide our team members the best environment possible.

Officevibe makes certain recommendations to help improve each of these, so these are going to be our focus over the coming weeks:

Satisfaction (8.4): ensure that team members feel that they are being compensated fairly, and address any concerns in a timely fashion.

Personal Growth (8.5): encourage employees to get better at their craft by providing coaching, trainings, etc.

Happiness (8.5): speak to employees and get a better understanding of the causes of unhappiness.

ENPS (Employee Net Promoter Score)

We need to focus on tax planning and communication.

Several team members faced tax deductions in the month of March without prior intimation. While the calculations were not wrong, there were undulations through the year, with inconsistent deductions being made, which came as a surprise to many.

Through feedback channels, we learned that a lot of people were unhappy about this, as they had financial obligations to meet in the month of March. 

We learned from this that we need to focus on proper tax planning and prior intimation to help avoid stress and unhappiness for our team members. We’re now bringing in specific tools to smooth out our processes and compliance. More on this soon. 

We’re renewing our emphasis on work-life balance.

In some Project Engagement meetings, we found that team members are willing to work odd hours or longer hours simply because they work remotely—forgetting that this will create an imbalance in their personal and professional life and ultimately impact both negatively.

We began coaching people to be more assertive and maintain disciplined work hours as a team, so that they’re able to keep in check any unreasonable expectations from clients.

We had team meetups in several cities this month.

Delhi

Amritsar

Delhi

Bangalore

London

We continued to learn and grow.

We conducted a number of knowledge-sharing webinars internally in January. Some of the topics we covered:

• PDF generation using mPDF library
• Styling a PDF generated by mPDF library
• Angular Views Encapsulation: Best Practices and Costly Mistakes
• Refactoring without breaking a project, aka, bringing down NPath complexity