“Five Things You Should Do To Create A Fantastic Work Culture” with Alexey Orap, CEO of YouScan
Cultivate empathy. Empathy may come in different forms, like building more trust between the team members or learning to listen and understand others. Depending on the culture of your company, it should not necessarily mean family-style relationships — I think of it mostly as a pragmatic approach to develop effective business processes. Personally, I try to overcome my tendency to quickly form strong opinions about problematic work situations or difficult employees that I have to manage from time to time. I try to understand the motivations behind their attitude better. Sometimes it completely changes my understanding of a situation or a person and helps make the right decisions.
As a part of my series about about how leaders can create a “fantastic work culture”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Alexey Orap. Alexey is a founder and CEO of YouScan, social media monitoring company, which helps consumer brands and agencies analyze product-related discussions and find consumer insights online. Before founding YouScan Alexey had extensive experience in consumer internet and telecom sectors. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Applied Math from Kyiv National University and an MBA degree from Kyiv-Mohyla Business School. He lives in Kyiv, Ukraine, with his wife and two kids. In his free time, Alexey likes to hike, ride a cross-country bicycle and snowboard.
Thank you so much for doing this with us Alexey! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
My father worked a software developer, and my mother as a physicist; so you may say my STEM-related career path was almost pre-defined :) After graduating from the Computer Science faculty of Kyiv National University I was working in the telecom industry as a network engineering manager and enjoying it. Later I moved into more business-oriented roles, working as a pre-sales engineer and sales manager in multinational tech companies, such as Nortel and Alcatel-Lucent, and then in Yandex as a regional business development director.
In the meanwhile, I’ve also started a couple of side projects, some of which were half-baked and failed, but some do successfully operate until this time.
I always felt an urge to be independent and run my own business, so in 2009 I decided to become a full-time entrepreneur and launched YouScan, which I run till this date as a founder and CEO.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?
One of the most exciting stories is how I met my co-founder, Alexander. The company was into its first year of operations, a very difficult one, and my initial co-founder has left because he wanted to pursue other opportunities. I was looking for a new partner to help me boost business development and sales. After interviewing a few candidates, I was talking to Alexander who had applied as well. After a few minutes of conversation, we both felt great chemistry between us, and he offered that we go pitch a few customers together at the party he was going to later that evening. So that was what we did, and we became great business partners since then. Today I’m happy to work with a whole team of like-minded people, whom we hire with a culture fit in mind.
Are you working on any exciting projects now? How do you think that will help people?
At YouScan, our mission is to help companies become better by listening to their consumers online. We believe YouScan benefits not just businesses who use it to track brand-related discussions on social media, but to some extent, ordinary people like you and me too. As consumers, we get a better chance to be heard by those companies and influence them to improve their products and services.
Every year there’s something new in our business which excites me. Right now I’m totally thrilled about the AI-powered image recognition technology which we launched last year to help marketers detect brand logos on social media images and analyze moments of consumption. I’m truly proud of it — it is a real deep tech developed by our incredibly talented R&D team, and it works just magically.
Ok, lets jump to the main part of our interview. More than half of the US workforce is unhappy. Why do you think that number is so high?
I think there are a lot of factors influencing this, but specifically, in the tech sector where I’m involved, I think our modern workplace has got a bit crazy. First, it has become very difficult for people to disconnect from work, even on weekends, due to being always online on their mobile devices. I believe that we need to be able to disengage from work and recuperate our energy for wellbeing, and productivity too. Second, with the constant flow of distractions, be it Slack notifications or meetings, for most of us, it is getting harder to concentrate and stay in the productivity zone, to enjoy both the process and the results of a well-accomplished work.
Based on your experience or research, how do you think an unhappy workforce will impact a) company productivity b) company profitability c) and employee health and wellbeing?
Well, admittedly, you can achieve fantastic business results with an unhappy workforce — but merely short-term. If you are thinking long-term though, it should be clear that people who are motivated and happy at work will deliver so much more. I’ve worked enough as a regular employee before starting my own business, so I understand what makes people enjoy (or hate) their job.
So I’m influencing our company culture with that in mind — what kind of principles do we need so everyone (myself included) comes to work every morning highly motivated and productive? We use OKRs for goal-setting, and one of the company-wide goals for this year is “To make employees happy and productive.” As we reach 80+ eNPS score for the second year in a row and grow our revenues around 100% YoY, I feel this approach works well.
Can you share 5 things that managers and executives should be doing to improve their company work culture? Can you give a personal story or example for each?
1. Employ growth mindset across the organization, starting from the top. Everyone should be able to admit their weaknesses openly and address them, to become a better and more competent yourself tomorrow. This way organization will continuously improve, instead of stagnating. As a personal example, I often admit that being a CEO does not mean that I’m always the most knowledgeable person in a room or that I’m always right. I listen to my employees and learn from them, too.
2. Have regular one-on-ones with each of your direct subordinates. I’ve learned through the practice that this is probably the best way to collect the feedback and address organizational problems swiftly on each level. I conduct informal bi-weekly one-on-ones with each member of our leadership team, and they cascade this practice through their departments.
3. Cultivate empathy. Empathy may come in different forms, like building more trust between the team members or learning to listen and understand others. Depending on the culture of your company, it should not necessarily mean family-style relationships — I think of it mostly as a pragmatic approach to develop effective business processes. Personally, I try to overcome my tendency to quickly form strong opinions about problematic work situations or difficult employees that I have to manage from time to time. I try to understand the motivations behind their attitude better. Sometimes it completely changes my understanding of a situation or a person and helps make the right decisions.
4. Provide transparency. Open metrics, goals, measurable results help employees understand what’s going on in their departments and organization as a whole and keep each other accountable. This, in turn, creates a greater sense of ownership across the employees and motivates them to do their job better. In YouScan, we have an online dashboard with key business metrics, including financial ones, accessible by all employees. We also employ OKRs which is an effective way of keeping everyone on the same page.
5. Give people meaningfulness. A sense of purpose of your work is an incredibly powerful motivator. It is a well-known fact, but it is often overlooked by company leaders, as there are always so many operational issues that they need to address in the first place. Our mission — to help companies become better by listening to their consumers online — is part of our meaningfulness framework. The other part, I think, is a very short feedback loop that we have with our customers — for example, everyone in the company has access to the customer’s NPS answers, so employees feel like they contribute to these clients almost on a personal level. It motivates everyone on a team to do a better job serving them.
How would you describe your leadership or management style? Can you give us a few examples?
I think my leadership style is shaped by my natural tendency to take a lot of risks, accept uncertainty, and focus mostly on the desired outcome. So I try not to micromanage much, and I trust my subordinates to do their best. At the same time, I can’t tolerate unprofessionalism, so I want everyone on the team to keep learning and be absolute best in their field. This trait sometimes makes me paranoid, as I try to assure the best quality in everything we do, so I start fixing all the little issues that I see need fixing. I think I bounce between these two opposites — letting things happen without my direct control, but also often going into the tiny details of everything to assure the best results. So far it works fine for me :)
And I know everyone can be subjective evaluating themselves, so to have a more objective picture, I’ve recently took a Builder’s Profile 10 assessment developed by Gallup, which is designed to identify a person’s dominant talents related to building a company, a team or a product. And though I did not agree entirely with the results of the assessment, my top four talents were identified to be Knowledge, Risk, Selling, and Disruptor.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
There are a lot of people that I’m grateful for helping me at different stages of my life and carrier — from my past bosses to the current co-founders, mentors, and investors. But most of all I’m grateful to my parents who influenced me so much to become who I am. Being a parent myself now, I’ve started to appreciate all the challenges that people face raising their kids.
One of the pivotal moments that defined my interest in technology was a personal computer that I’ve had at home since I was thirteen or fourteen years old, thanks to my dad. That was a pretty rare thing to have at home in my country back then. I still remember coding my first program on it — just some geometrical figures bouncing around the screen, and it was thrilling!
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
As a company founder, I try to do the best for our 80 employees, and I’m happy to see them thrive and grow professionally. As a company, we help various non-profits in their good cause, by providing them free access to our platform. I support other entrepreneurs as well by mentoring a couple of startups, and participating in various educational programs for young people who aspire to start their own projects. Anyway, I think most of us, including myself, can do a better job of bringing goodness to the world. So I’m always looking for new ways to make a positive impact.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
There are a lot of great quotes, and I’m not sure we can easily distill life lessons into some best one. I have to think about that! :)
*You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
I’d love to influence people to be less obsessed with their material possessions or social status, and think more about how they can make their life more meaningful and helpful to each other. I think these issues are at the core of most of the problems that we currently face globally — from social injustice and violence to climate change, and unhappy employees too.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We wish you continued success!