Sushrut Bidwai

Appraisal systems! When you are leading a services company this is the most important thing which is ignored at early stage. For product companies few things held the group together, but services, specially in India people seem to keep hopping job forever. How I am implementing these system at StartupForStartups.

First of all what is purpose of appraisal systems in my opinion.

1. Systematic evaluation of things that went right and wrong since last appraisals.

2. Evaluating the goals that were set and whether the goals were achievable in the first place.

3. Reviewing positioning and career path the appraisee is following and whether that needs to be realigned.

4. Aligning goals of individuals with goals of the team for current appraisal cycle ie 6-12 months

5. Making sure appraisee is having a good time in the company and setting targets mutually to keep this up

What appraisal systems are not meant for.

1. Improvements. You can not have a 2 hour meeting and expect the appraisee to improve his/her performance.

2. Discussing salary hikes. I am strictly against this.

3. Discussing promotions. Again something that I do not like to discuss in appraisal meetings.

Open appraisals. How we do it.

1. Entire team fills out self appraisal and peer appraisal forms.

2. Every team member also fills out a appraisal form for senior person ie manager, but this form is submitted to manager of manager

3. Once these first round of appraisals are over, a team apprisal meeting is conducted.

4. This meeting is attended by entire working together ie smallest team that can be identified.

5. An open appraisal meeting is conducted based on level. For all junior members in the team, one meeting. For seniors one separate meeting.

6. Third party moderators, observers attend this meeting, though they do not participate in the proceedings.

7. There are no quantitative data that is discussed in the meeting. For example, we do not say like I think XYZ performed 4 on scale of 5. But instead we ask questions like what do you think is the asset that XYZ brings to table, and everyone including XYZ is suppose to answer.

8. This is again a 360 meeting.

9. There are specific questions which are for judging the performance of the team as one unit. And what we can do to achieve better performance.

10 . Team level quantitative data is given out. So if management feels that a team is performing 3 on scale of 5 then team members are notified. Also reasons for this given by management are discussed.

There are many things which are part of this open appraisal meeting and all IP can not be shared here. Also note that we do conduct open appraisal education programs for the team members and educate them about how to participate in such process. Do give me feedback as this an experiment very close to my heart.

Also I have not added advantages of this system on purpose. Let me know what you think would advantages.

Uncategorized entrepreneurship, evangelism, HR, innovation, Process, Recruitment, startup advice, training

Now after reading my last post, you know you need to evangelize your platform. How to do it? Well that’s a million dollar question isn’t it? Here is some free advice to mobile SMS platforms. If you are looking solutions for your own platform send me a gift that I would REALLY like and will post about it.

Government and organized institutions like Nationalize banks:

My father worked in Maharashtra irrigation department for 35 years. From 2006 he told me that District Collector communicates using SMSes! Reach to them. Go and talk to these people and make them see how they can use SMSGupshup like platform (SMSGupshup sucks, as its branded wrongly, so first build me too product with much better branding).

These large monolithic organizations require sending of memos (often one-liners) and receipt of memos. See if you can make them use it for the communication.

Emergency Services

First time in 20 years 5000+ Nasik people were left homeless due to floods.  Fire-fighters often need to  communicate with large audience. Emergency services, police, blood banks all need mechanism to communicate with community to get there support. Evangelize your platform for them, customize it and they will buy it.

Latency of content 

Internet is slow content delivery mechanism. When I say that, I mean a person has to be logged into Internet and be looking for stuff. Whats latency of your delivery platform? If its SMS, user is always online, content delivered in say 2-5 mins depending on bandwidth etc etc. So if you are using SMS for content delivery, think about who need fast information irrespective of where they are, traveling or in toilet! Few examples of such target audience for something like SMS content channel is Brokerage firms and there custoemrs, helath-care corporates and its staff, event managers. One quick example of all places you can use it is think out of the box. I attended Barcamp Mumbai 4 recently. It was a good experience. Problem was unconference nature of the event means sessions are rescheduled, venue for a session changed many times. I missed 3-4 sessions which I was really looking forward to. SMS to the rescue! Thats the power of thinking out of the box. 

Trade fairs and organized events

As I mentioned in the previous blog post about how you can create user base from farmers, traders easiest way is to use trade fairs for educating people. Don’t send your sales team to these events though, they are generally afraid of that. Send your product evangelizing team. What you don’t have product evangelizing team??? <very dirty look and thinking if you are from B-school> .

There are many more ways to do it, for the list of the rest develop good wordpress theme for this blog and help me maintain it .

Ideas, Startup, philosophy entrepreneurship, evangelism, innovation, internet, mobile, SMS, Startup, startup advice, startup ideas, startups

There are numerous applications which are developed to take advantage of mobile and SMS penetration in India. Vakow, SMSGupShup are just 2 such examples. All these entrepreneurs read blogs, industry data about how SMS is going to grow and mobile penetration is going to still grow. These blogs/industry experts give numbers like how many SMS delivered in a day, on particular day like festival, valentines day and all. They tell you how you can use SMS as content deliery channels to attract user base and create a killer startup with multi-million dollar revenues. All good, go for it. Before going for it think about what these blogs don’t tell you though.  Does any of the blogs tell you how many people who use mobiles for voice communication extensively are not using SMS? I dont think so. Do they tell why they are not using it? Naah, they just can’t figure it out. It takes lot of evangelism to understand your user base. 

One of the problems with web 2.0 startups that I recently talked to or I have seen mushroomed targeting mobile and SMS content delivery is, they focus on existing user base of these media. They are not putting lof thought about why lot of people are not using the media despite having access to it. If you are a budding entrepreneur then before creating your killer app consider these points that come up in this post. Its good to target a large existing user base and hey you got idea to get rich. But it will be better if you keep that scalability to your platform to reach non-existent user base and make sure your delivery channels reach them in short term OR long term future.

For example, SMSGupShup has lot of user base, market momentum and everything is good and they will make tons of money, or at least I hope they do as an entrepreneur myself. But problem is they are focusing too much on the Gupshup part of it. I recently developed similar app for a brokerage firm that wanted to use SMS as THE media of communication with its client base of 5000+ customers. Now I told them about SMSGupshup and they said they cant use something names so funny for professional purposes. Now I was trying to make them use it as I was not going to get paid for developing it as its my friends firm. Though he did send me Johny Walker Black Label 24 for my birthday! Why they did not want to use SMSGupShup, because its named Gupshup and gives impression that its for fun and ONLY for fun. So I think the brand does not have scalability, but that another post in draft about brand scalability.

Point I am trying to make is, think about existing user base of a media and think harder about non-existent user base and whoa you got yourself much better business model and hence more chance of making it big. Taking case of SMS channels for instance, can’t you reach to customers in villages/taluka places who have mobiles but don’t use SMSes? You can. I know you will say in comments section that these people can’t type SMS and literacy rates are low and every other problem. Instead think about can they read the SMSes? Yes they can, believe me I do lot of field work and I know lot of them (30% approx)  can. So who can send them useful SMS which these people, like farmers, can use for there advantage? Traders. For example, Nasik exports grape to global market. Lot of farmers who export them are not literate but are rich and have mobiles. Now you can bridge these farmers in Nasik to exporters in Mumbai using SMS channel. How? Let me explain. Go to traders in Mumbai and see how they work. For every day they will call n differnt farmers telling them todays market price and if they want to sell for that market value. Otherwise farmers go directly to markets and sell it for available market price with out holding for better valuation for tomorrow (or is it always yesterday?). So you can help farmers get good pricing for there goods and you can help traders in managing there supply chain using SMS channels. Makes sense? I thinkso. 

Though this audience is little harder to reach, but I think user base is so huge that once you penetrate in that market segment you are going to be rewarded n times for your hard work and evangelism.  Educate people and wider audience about your platform while you are doing good job at reaching to existing customer base.

Ideas, Startup, philosophy entrepreneurship, evangelism, innovation, internet, mobile, philosophy, SMS, SMSGupShup, social media, startup advice, startups, web 2.0

We are trying out this new method of conducting interviews of experienced technical/non-technical resources. This method is only used for 2+ years of experienced candidates.

What we do is we have a pre-interview with people who have applied (15 minutes) with out much technical questions after a careful screening of resume and reference checking. After this pre-interview we divide short-listed candidates in group of 3-4 people. Now the second round of interview these candidates conduct there own interview in sort of debate/group discussion. So each candidate will ask question to others in the group and they will write down answers to it on paper. 

Candidates try to bounce each other of with the cool thing they know about technology which they think others may not. We just moderate the interview after conducting 10 mins of introduction and rules section. This debate (?) is typically for 1.5 hours. Note that we do not give grades to answers, just that we moderate closely and through observation decide who is better.

There are generally 2-4 groups that we form and we select 1-2 guys from each group. This is not a rule, if we like all we will select all! Then winners of groups go through third round of interview again in same way but for 3 hours! We downgrade a person who does not ask questions, but just gives answers. We also downgrade people who are too agresive and want to show off with by asking questions which even they cant answer satisfactorily. There is bunch of observation that we do in this process. And we note down these observations not by pen, notepad or any other thing but using twitter!!!!

Why we came up with this model? Well people can answer questions just fine. There is limit to how much research I can do before going into an interview. There are only so many type of questions that I can come up with. I dont have time to categorize these questions or decide how hard they are etc etc. So I delegate by job on the person who has applied for the job itself .  

We are just trying this model till we see it works or not and then if it does then we will implement it for all senior positions. Do comment if you think there are some things we can try out or if you find any broken piece with this model.

Ideas, Implementing Concepts, Process HR, implementing concepts, innovation, interview, Process, Startup, startup advice, training