Nishith Kumar is a lifelong entrepreneur and best known as the founder and CEO of Interstellar Systems- helping startups & brands achieve their digital goals.
On this episode of The Shape of Work podcast, Nishith shares his journey from being a Computer Science Engineering student to founding Interstellar Systems.
With over 15+ years of experience, he had plenty of expertise to share in this conversation. We discuss with Nishith:
1. Increasing employee retention by flexible working opportunities
Nishith feels that people should be motivated to work from home as it can help them generate better output. Managing resources was a challenge for their organisation during the pandemic, but eventually, the employees started adapting to working from home. After the initial hurdles, the employees started investing more time and eventually, they liked the opportunity of working from home.
2. Maintaining productivity without hampering employees’ personal lives
According to Nishith, there were trust issues in the initial part of the lockdown. However, employees started micromanaging things, and the reduced productivity started falling back into place. He thinks that employers shouldn’t bother the employees after 7 pm unless it is extremely crucial. Working from home allows managers to extend the time and provide flexibility to the employees.
3. Changing workspace dynamics and concerns
Because of the pandemic, Nishith’s organisation had to dissolve some of its offices. Rather than having three offices, they now have only one office in a metro city. Some employees are frustrated because of working from home. Therefore, they should have the option to come back to the office, according to him. This is because employees don’t have the necessary infrastructure like optical fibre in their homes.
Virtual workspace for meetings, parties, etc., help the employees engage while working from their home. Arranging a dinner once a week from the company’s side where everyone can have dinner together virtually, and activities and games that can be played together are some ways of engaging them. Once in a month or six months, the employer should sponsor team or project wise trips according to the budget and projects. For that, employers should allocate a budget that can include these things.
Slack, Zoom, Skype, WebEx, etc., are the tools that they use for communication and employee engagement as per the requirements of their clients.
4. Effective rewards and recognition policy and its impact on productivity
Nishith Kumar feels that sending surprise goodies to employees is a good thing to motivate them. They give quarterly credits that add value to their appraisals, goodies, and monetary benefits to the employees, including Amazon gift cards and vouchers, which are some of the rewards they prefer to give to hardworking employees. It happens via both peer-to-peer recognition and management to employee recognition, but most of it is the latter.
BONUS: Willing to figure out ways to save your employee turnover cost? Read our latest blog post.
Follow Nishith on LinkedIn