My colleague Natarajan recently brought to my notice the following article  he had written several years ago. Amazingly, it actually quite well reflects lot of the culture we have at our company.

In a nutshell here is what I think makes for a good contract between employees and companies. The top three things each needs to do to create a lasting, pleasurable, goal oriented workplace. In this age of 140 character for a tweet, 10 is too big a number – we only have top three

Top 3 things for the Employees:

1. They have to be customer focussed (obsessed) – everyday morning they should get up and ask the question how can I be relevant today (to their customers – internal/external)
2.  Bring a single minded focus to the mantra of execution – need to be in the “now” and get into the zone while working. This is the biggest driver of productivity and quality, and consequently customer satisfaction
3.  Accept every execution challenge as part of a long journey (called their career) and focus on how they can solve the challenge and in the process add value to themselves at the current job. Stop worrying about things beyond their control.

Top 3 Things for Companies:

1.  Have a clear direction and priorities at any given point of time  – this can change from time to time but at any given instant there is one clear direction.
2.  Establish a fair, transparent organization which is data driven and where everyone has visibility into all aspects of business. We carry this to an extreme and so far there is no data other than personal compensation that is not known/made known to people. We encourage participation and eschew politics.
3.  Provide a supportive atmosphere for helping people succeed and give them enough chances to succeed. On the other hand when it is clear that people will not succeed in this environment (we are very sure there are other environments/roles where they would be very successful), it is right for the careers of those people as well as the morale of the organization to help those people find alternate positions where they can succeed.

   One of our employees forwarded this post titled “Don’t Gauge Your Worth By Your Salary” to the entire company and this set me reflecting on how there were very different types of engineers. We are quite fortunate that almost all our employees subscribe to this philosophy. It has not been easy – we have spent an inordinate of time in getting this right.

    However, we have had more than our share of woes during the recrutiing process. The following applies to hiring software engineers in Namma Bengaluru. It could be different in other cities in India and definitely not the case for non software engineering positions. It has been an roller coaster ride all right. The process of ”Interview, Accept, Disappear” in ten steps is  as follows:

1. We get tons of resumes both solicited and unsolicited (from all the engineering colleges around India, the count of which is elusive since before you can finish counting there are a few more)
2. We go through a resume filtration process that is largely based on grades, college, experience etc and manage to make a small hill of this mountain of resumes
3. We arrange a phone screen or a face to face interview and with about 50% success rate this meeting (real or virtual) happens during the scheduled slot. Half the time it is rescheduled after the candidate is a no show or shows up so late that it is impossible to keep the candidates new time.
4. The interview proceeds with some candidates occasionally wondering why all the fuss about us asking questions of them — after all they have an engineering degree from a reputed university – how can we ask more that their university system has not asked them.
5. In any case, after an arduous (for us for sure) interview process we like a few candidates and try to impress on them why they should join us.
6. The most immediate reaction is what is my compensation? I want to get 35% over my current salary — else it is not worth my time to change jobs.
7. After a lot of cajoling and telling them how startups need to conserve cash and people should work for creating something of relevance to the world and creating and sharing wealth in the process and agreeing on the
   terms they accept the offer and say they will join you in a month tosix weeks since they have to serve a decent notice to their current employer (thank heavens the notice period is treated with some respect).
8. Attempts to keep in touch during the notice period to ensure the candidate is able to make the right moves, find a place closer to their new work location and any other support they need is usually greeted with an enthusiastic response initially.
9. As time wears on they stop responding as much and have some excuse or the other – getting married, out of town on a long promised vacation with a spouse; mother is not too
   well etc.
10. Finally, on the day they are supposed to join when we call them they let us know that they are not joining!

   I am not saying the above is the norm but it has definitely happened often enough that either we are a lightning rod for such events or this is the norm in the larger ecosystem. What leaves me scratching my head is why is acceptance not a “word from a professional” that needs to be honoured? One of the candidates I talked to was frank and honest enough to admit that he would accept our offer and then serve his notice period. In the interim if he got a better offer he would take that up!! I had to retort with my usual business quid pro quo and said how would it be if we made offers to him and continued interviewing for the same position and made an offer to a better candidate in the interim period. He definitely did not think we were right in doing that. Obviously no company does what I said but it is an argument to portray the one sidedness of this whole equation.

    In fact, we have a policy in our company that we will not talk to
(interview) candidates who already have accepted an offer from another company. We do not want to do to other companies what we would not like to happen to us. That is a small start. Perhaps some neutral body should maintain a database of offers (not the details necessarily, just whether some one has an accepted offer or not) which can be looked up by all companies. This can be a two way street - candidates can comment on unfair policies of companies and companies can comment on the punctuality of the candidate. All I can say is we have an extremely inefficient system right now with a lot of wastage of time.