The Shape of Work

#23: On the importance of a positive workplace culture and how to go about building it, with Chandrakumar Sivasubramaniam

June 10, 2021 Springworks Season 1 Episode 23
The Shape of Work
#23: On the importance of a positive workplace culture and how to go about building it, with Chandrakumar Sivasubramaniam
Show Notes

In this episode of The Shape of Work podcast, Chandrakumar Sivasubramaniam, CEO of Flowtrack talks to Lokesh Gautam, Sales Evangelist at Springworks.

With more than two decades of experience, Chandrakumar is a technology leader and an entrepreneur well versed in working across government departments and also helped build a few multi-million dollar businesses from scratch. He has worked at companies like IBM, Novell, Oakton, MatrixThread & Caprice Technologies.

In the episode, Chandrakumar talks about how he started Flowtrack, an employee productivity monitoring software out of their customers’ pain points. He also discusses how to ensure undistracted productive time for employees, and the importance of creating a culture that is driven by good behavior.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

The idea behind FlowTrack:

The inspiration behind FlowTrack was noticing the pain point of workspaces.

They discussed this idea with their potential investors and people internally from the team. They got 6-8 weeks within which they launched their beta version.

This idea was generated after the pandemic hit the world. They discussed their customers’ problems and came up with this solution quickly. Soon a lot of investors were interested as they realized the potential growth of this startup. This growth soon became a reality as the demand for the product increased in the market.

Will companies start working in a remote framework permanently?

Our guest explains that everything depends on the culture of the workplace. It depends on the trust employers have in their teams. Western countries have complete trust in their employees. He feels Eastern countries still lack this ability.
He explains how western countries might feel different about monitoring their teams and not completely encourage it.
Thus they have stealth mode monitoring as well where the employees are unaware of the monitoring.
 
Differentiating factors between Western and Eastern companies:

Here, Chandrakumar explains that in Western economies, people have more ownership. He has worked in multiple countries like India, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia. He has observed that the manager-to-employee ratio is very high in these countries. Thus it becomes extremely difficult to create a rapport between them.
Less number of employees increases understanding among the employees. They start admiring their leaders and the company.
In Eastern countries, this pattern is missing. Hence monitoring tools are required. Chandrakumar explains that monitoring employee performance is actually beneficial. Team leaders can analyze the areas in which they lack performance and help them train and improve themselves.

How important do you think is employee engagement and onboarding at work in a remote workspace?

According to Chandrakumar, It is challenging to make the new hires bond with the team through a remote workspace. He feels that understanding the project and team members is more effective when done face to face. While the company might attempt to build it at the beginning, they might not be able to manage it. If they lose this engagement level, it becomes difficult to bring it back. Chandrakumar says that there are people who jump from one company to another within one or two months. This occurs due to a lack of interaction. It has grown to be a global problem now. Ideally, now every business can go for good engagement practices to maintain a good bond with their teammates while working.

Follow Chandrakumar Sivasubramaniam on LinkedIn.

Produced by: Priya Bhatt
Podcast host: Lokesh Gautam