Core Values: A Company’s Testimony

Our previous blog discussed how adopting “Diversity and Inclusion” into our core values helped us achieve our audacious goal of closing the gender gap at Ketto.

India recently celebrated 75 splendid years of progressiveness. Its rich history, diverse population and magnificent culture have played a vital role in helping our country reach great heights. Ketto, too decided to celebrate its oneness by highlighting its Core Values with its five main pillars upon which each member of the Ketto family embarks on.

The goal of establishing core values was to ensure that our team understood what had motivated us so far and what we needed to align as we worked towards our objective of making good things happen.

We believe that “smart teams will do amazing things, but only truly diverse teams will do impossible things”.

We have spent the last nine years building a culture of trust, communication, and love at Ketto. Thereafter articulating our core principles became a crucial aspect of our Ketto journey.

A company’s staff will work towards the same goals if their corporate values are defined. These ideas help to shape a company’s culture and vision. We have only achieved this by implementing and aligning our company’s core values with our work decisions. Ethics and values are often found together. A company’s principles usually guide its moral compass and define how ethical its operations will be. In any case, a stakeholder looks to a company’s ethics and ideals to assess whether or not it is a legitimate firm worth patronage.

Why was it important for us to have core values?

Until 2019, although we knew the principles we believed in, we needed to document them. A lot of research went into figuring out how to write down what we believed in and what goals we wanted to achieve as a firm.

We formed a team that began interacting with employees and soliciting their opinions on the subject. We also took a look at what other companies had written down as company values.

The team must have easily listed around 20 values that we shared. However, the exhilarating challenge of selecting the five most significant ones began from there. Also, picking five was much more complex than listing 20.

Consumers have a standard to hold businesses to regarding ethics and morals, which can help them feel more at ease with them. Core Values can aid in the strengthening of business ties with clients as well as other businesses.

Similarly, a leadership team’s ethics and values provide employees with a standard to hold the leaders to and a model to aspire for. Therefore, we decided that it is critical to establish and maintain high ethics and values.

Having all these concepts in mind, we finally came up with our Ketto Tone:

Our Core Values:

We put a greater emphasis on our core values, which are entrenched in our culture. Our core principles include:

When we asked Team Ketto to choose one term that comes to mind when they think of Ketto, the first thing that arose in unison was “Ketto Avenger.”

For most people, the word Avenger conjures up images of characters from Marvel movies, but it has a deeper meaning for us at Ketto. It is an identity with which every one of us is associated. This stems from a sense of being a warrior. We’re on a mission to do our part to make the world a better place in whatever small way we can. As a result, each Ketto Avenger is a Warrior in their own right. This warrior attitude embodies Team Ketto’s determination to leave an indelible impact on the world, to bring a smile to people’s faces, and to spread joy in the lives we touch.

Our own Feet on Street crew, Fellows, and an entire team of videographers and photographers are all great examples of Warrior spirit. When the pandemic struck in March 2020, the whole country turned to crowdfund to cover its medical expenses. Daily, this meant 1000s of campaigns on our website. Our Feet On The Street crew was on the ground, visiting hospitals and reaching out to anyone who needed Ketto’s assistance. They had the help of our videographers and photographers. Whether it’s rain, sunshine, or a global epidemic, our videography team will continue to travel to locations both within and outside of Mumbai to film video footage.

We chose Innovation as our 2nd most important core value. In August 2021, Ketto celebrated its 9th birthday. The organisation underwent numerous modifications during nine years. And, as they say, the only constant is change. The desire to experiment and innovate, on the other hand, remained constant.

In the 1800s, over 120 thousand Americans contributed 80 cents each to create the Statue of Liberty base. But, of course, now that the entire ecosystem has changed and everything takes place on the internet, we want to use technology to make crowdfunding easier, faster, and more accessible to everyone.

Over a span of 9 years, we have built 3 products in the healthcare space that help us bridge the healthcare affordability gap. We are constantly striving to innovate and leverage the power of technology to make good things happen.

We started Innovation Challenges to ensure that our teams adopted the practice of actively innovating into their daily lives: the Shark Tank Innovation Challenge, which takes place every January, and the Moment of Truth Innovation Challenge, which takes place every August. Our Shark Tank is set up precisely like the one you see on TV, and this year we added two new judges to the panel in addition to our co-founders. In these challenges, teams must develop business concepts that Ketto can invest in or incorporate within the company. Individuals with the most outstanding ideas and those who make an effort to create and experiment are rewarded, and that idea is implemented.

Remember the old team-building exercise “trust fall”? Don’t worry; we don’t make our employees do that, but we want to create a community where our team can count on someone to “catch” them. Not only that, but we take pleasure in being a very open crowdfunding platform that our contributors and campaigners can rely on at any time. Since our team is honest and transparent, we can do this. As a result, this essential value has been embraced.

Our workplace’s varied workforce has always been positive in various ways. For example, Ketto is a firm believer in workplace diversity and inclusion. Over the years, a good mix has helped us grow bigger and better.

We’ve always worked hard to ensure that this Core Value is deeply embedded in our company’s culture. Our efforts resulted in some beneficial results. For example, in January 2020, we had 33% women and 67% men in our workforce. In January 2022, women made up 46% of the whole working crew at Ketto.

Our Social Impact Plan team now consists of 90% women. These women have made SIP a success by working their magic day in and day out.

Ketto has always made time for its employees to find a work-life balance since its foundation. We take steps to ensure that our staff are not just engaged and happy but also highly motivated and harmonious.

We want to make sure that people feel a part of a culture that they consider to be their extended family so that everyone can achieve new heights together. At Ketto, we attempt to keep the work environment as lighthearted as possible. We strive to make Ketto a place where individuals can experiment and have fun.

We are a new company. The trick is to keep on innovating.

What matters to us is that Team Ketto has the enthusiasm and motivation to achieve greater heights.

We used to go on regular expeditions, monsoon treks, and pot lunches while working from the office in the pre-covid era. We had even put together our own Ketto Premier League. We have brought in standup comedians, musicians, magicians, and live interactive plays to keep our teams entertained, now that most of our teams are still virtual. So every two weeks, we conduct team games and wellness exercises.

Is implementation all?

Once we constructed and penned down our organisation’s core values, we started bringing them into practice. These core values drive the employees to feel a similar pulse and develop an organisational spirit. Here is what we did to assert our core values:

• Honouring employees: Awards and bonuses to our employees motivated them to be honest and dedicated to work while inculcating the feeling of oneness.
• Ensuring Innovation: Coming up with new concepts and setting them into motion. We at Ketto have our processes and procedures in constant flux. We believe that there is not just one correct answer to an issue, but a variety of options, and we do not hesitate to try them out.
• Language & terms: At Ketto, the word “family” means a lot to us. So our office is set up in a way that feels like a close-knit clan rather than an enterprise.
• Employee Engagement & Events: Ensuring that our employees participate in activities and interact with one another regularly. Ketto places a strong emphasis on fostering a positive work environment. We make a concerted effort to keep our employees delighted and enraptured.

These are the fundamental practices we followed to bring unity and oneness to our organisation. Each executive and manager of our company must have a thorough understanding of the corporate ethos and lead their staff by a set of predefined principles. “Where the head leads, the body will follow,” as the proverb goes. This is especially true in the corporate world. Employees will not be motivated to practise and uphold strong principles if the leadership does not. Instead, we position our organisation for ethical dealings and a solid reputation by knowing and adopting quality ethics and principles.