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

These few list of things I found out working in a startup and on a startup.

Employers:

1. Great team does not necessarily have all star players. A team in itself can become all star if it gels well together.
2. Don’t hire some one just to fill up that vacancy, not at least for first 10 hires. Fill it up when you get good fit only. 
3. Be HR manager for first few months or a couple of years. Your team is your best asset and you need to be involved in building it.
4. Your culture, attitude and personality is going to be reflected in attitude and personality of your company. Be sure what you are projecting.
5. Be transparent to initial hires. Don’t be afraid to even share critical data like business deals or financials. 
6. Use equity to your advantage. Don’t be greedy on that front. Your equity will be worth something only if you succeed and for that you need great people.
7. Intervene right away if you see minor cracks in the team. Don’t wait too long for the matter to be strightended out on it’s own. 
8. Don’t create hierarchy too soon. First few years should be directly you and your team. Use this time to grooms few people to become mid-management people and intrapreneurs if you like that word.
9. Be social and let your employees have some social life. Its not very productive to work 24 by 7. Take 2 day vacation once in a while and encourage your team to take it too.
10. Don’t go too much on brand of top institutions like IIT’s and IIM’s. Make sure person also has ability and right attitude to work in the team that is already there.
11. Is you see someone not performing, fire them. Don’t keep giving them second and third chances. This attitude is very contiguous. 

PS: Dont know why numbered lists are not working on the blog and too little time to dig into it. Any solutions?

Uncategorized entrepreneurship, HR, philosophy, Process, Recruitment, Startup, startup advice, training

Probably the most important responsibility of any entrepreneur is to hire good people. But how do you do that? Be it product company, services, media or any other company, you need good people to sustain growth. Most companies despite having great product or great service offerings fail in this aspect.

What I do with StartupForStartups.com is, I have created an organizational chart. Now since we are a service collaborator company this chart is extensible. But we identified all the roles/responsibilities that will be required in team members once we start maturing. I have it prepared for next 5 years in detail and next 10 years high level view.

What this chart contains is, different skill sets that are required from a particular resource who is playing a particular role in the company. For example, right now I am HR head, Operations Head and Business Development head apart from taking up few key technical responsibilities. Now I know exactly when I will be giving up operations responsibility and what skill set I am going to look for in a person when I want to hire him as a operations head. Along with that, these skills are broken down into multiple charcteristics like mandatory, preferable etc. One of the category is if a person can acquire a particular skill and if can then how. Is there any training program being offered which will help, or some in-house training we can design. So once I know all these things I put up cost against each skill-set and approximate value of the resource to recruit. And then begins optimization of cost and skills.

Second important use of such oraganizational chart is, in a startup you can not hire all the people from outside playing limited role. Few roles have to be taken up by existing team members. Also you have to show growth path to your initial hires. So when you have hired few people. Identify what they are good at what they can learn in 1-2 years. Now cross check this with kind of skill sets you are will be looking for for a particular role. So not only you provide growth path to your team members but you create long term relationship with them. One example for such growth pattern is can a technical team member grow up to become an business development manager? or delivery manager? There are many possibilities open when you know what you are looking for and when you will need that.

Process, Startup entrepreneurship, Process, Recruitment, startup advice, startups

I have always been thinking about how I am going to train a freshly graduated student coming just out of college and joining my company. Not having a good training program in place is one of the major mistake any startup makes. I have been with a startup where we had same problem. So what we did was devise a sound training program.

Most important thing you have to understand is writing quality code is art, there is no other away to put it across. Have you ever learnt a musical instrument? Painting? Singing? How do you learn it. First you have see a maestro at work, live. Performing just for you. So you know the body language, know the small movements, listen to breathing as he/she performs. We do the same in our training program. We start with one week of class room training focused on software solutions and not technology. (We hire people who have some knowledge of technologies we use) After this one week, we give new trainees a project to execute, typically a small project like implement a blog tool, bug management tool etc. We work with the trainees in all phases of project execution.

We do requirement analysis together and play roles of customer as well as facilitator. We do design with them. But most importantly when the architecture of the project is decided, we implement a use-case for each new person in pair programming. All the trainee has to do is sit with one of the more experienced developer and watch him implement the use-case.

Advantages:

1. When a person see how a pro writes code, how he uses various tools including time-sheets, IDEs, debuggers , he gets window into how as a professional he should work.
2. Experienced person normally walks trainee through various things, classes as he is writing them. This gives insight into how a high level design is transformed into low level classes and data structures.
3. We normally don’t have time to do entire low level design, attribute design. So we rely upon experience and re-factoring to some extent.  Pair training gives trainee hands on re-factoring.
4. Get to know various tools, shortcuts, first cut what proficiency trainee should have once he/she has experience.
5. Time management. How much can be accomplished in how much time.

Disadvantages:

1. Sometimes there is chance that trainee will pick exact bad habit trainer has. Though we try to monitor our training processes closely, but there is still a chance. To reduce it we do pair training with multiple trainers.
2. Time consuming. Hence we do it on a Sunday. Yes we work on Sunday! We want to grow and build a great company.

Implementing Concepts, Process, Startup pair programming, Recruitment, startup advice, training