Are Current Company Policies Failing Your Employees?

Over the past several years, we’ve seen a trend of rolling back traditional “HR policies” in favor of perks like “unlimited vacation days,” with individual choice (e.g. the mantra “using good judgment”) replacing the employee handbook. This push for individual responsibility clearly stems from larger economic forces that have encouraged the same — namely, a global trend called neoliberalism. In a sentence, neoliberalism favors a free market and personal accountability, in which the government plays a drastically smaller role in covering the social needs of citizens. Countless social scientists have commented on the destructive side-effects of neoliberal policies, especially its impact on social inequality — access to education, access to quality health care, wealth inequality, etc. Others still touch on the negative impacts of global economic trends on work cultures.

If this push for “individual responsibility” has had such devastating social effects on a global level, how could responsibility-oriented policies ever make companies more democratic and horizontal internally? If an entry-level employee was made to feel that their “judgment” meant they should take half as many days off as a senior employee, then the practice hindered a company’s ability to create a respectful and equal workplace. In fact, companies with unlimited vacation day policies often see employees taking fewer days off than those working under a more specific leave system.

At the same time, more flexible policies have the potential to let people make policies work best for their particular situation. For instance, the needs of a single twenty-something that lives in Delhi but has family in South India differ from those of a North Indian parent living in a Delhi suburb like Gurgaon. Religious and cultural differences may have a major impact too — someone celebrating Ramadan during the summer, for example, may require a different work configuration over the course of the month.

When building out the Kite employee experience, we wanted to make sure that we created the best of both worlds — a system that gave individuals the opportunity to apply the rules to their own situations, but also one that set the tone for an equal and transparent working environment. As such, we opted to establish a system that followed guidelines, rather than policies. Our guidelines are different from traditional policies in that:

• They clearly set a recommended figure — from 37 days off from work per year, to a sum of INR 250 per person for food reimbursements for late work hours.
• They explicitly state that they might not apply so rigidly to every circumstance, in which case a team member should just inform the People Operations team so that we’re in the loop.

So far, we’ve been using this system for six months, and have used it for everything from leaves, late-night transportation, work hours and even writing for Medium (cite your sources!). While the implementation of most of these guidelines has gone smoothly, there are several points others should keep in mind before creating or transitioning to such a system:

1. Announce the switch to a guidelines-based system in advance, and work with team members throughout your company to come up with guidelines that work for everyone. Coming together to approach these questions is in some ways a team-building exercise, and is an opportunity to create consensus-based definitions of “flexibility,” “late work” and more.
2. Working with your team will also help your company plan for multiple contingencies. Getting team input to arrange pre-established guidelines for parental leave, marriage leave and bereavement leave made it easier for people to adjust to these life-changing situations as they arose.
3. Establish regular, anonymous feedback mechanisms to revise guidelines as needed, and to make sure that your guidelines make sense as your team grows/changes.
4. Clearly state what the implications are of not adhering to the guidelines — for instance, what happens if someone decides to work from home 15 days a month rather two days (as recommended)? A guidelines-based system is still largely based on trust, and taking that flexibility too far should be addressed (especially in the opening months of the system to clear the air).
5. Encourage employees to check in with others on their team about when is best to work from home or take days off. Kite follows Agile methodology, and as a result the success of the team is critical to the success of our mission and products.
6. Make these guidelines part of your company’s onboarding process, so that new employees are aware of guidelines and flexibility from their first day at work.
7. Some issues (often by law) still require policies rather than guidelines — for instance, our sexual harassment policy uses specific definitions, figures and timelines.

In general, transitioning to this system at Kite has succeeded in that:

• Team Kite members understand these guidelines are flexible according to their specific context, and can be brought up with peers, including those on the People Operations team. Parents know they can adapt their workday according to their needs, night owls can work in a way that suits their late-night productivity, and bookworms can do necessary R&D in their home nooks when they need to.
• Kite is healthier: employees aren’t afraid to take a sick day or work from home as needed.

There are still tasks left to accomplish to complete our transition to this system:

• We’re still rolling out our performance review/appraisal system, which relies as heavily on team consensus for its success as leave guidelines do. It takes several team-wide meetings to create a system that satisfies the needs of all team members. As the design of our system currently stands (to be shipped in Q2), the backbone of our appraisal framework will be the 90-day plan, which team members draft and evaluate during quarterly reviews with their team mentors. These plans include: key responsibility areas (KRAs), descriptions of how these KRAs tie in to our mission and values, and Kite-supported plans for professional/personal skill development. We decided that 90-day plans made the most sense at an early-stage startup like ours, since responsibilities and strategies change quickly. One in every four quarterly reviews includes salary and position reviews.
• We’re still determining what mediums work best as a central repository for our guidelines. We’re in the process of looking for wiki solutions that would enable Kite members to engage with/discuss the guidelines through comments (or even suggested edits). Until then, we’ve compiled all guidelines in a central Google Doc.

Ultimately, a guidelines system is never “complete” — it involves regular feedback and reconfigurations. Guidelines may seem resource intensive, but providing your employees a seat at the table in guidelines-related conversations helps ensure company structures support the everyday realities of work at your company. These guidelines also help push back at neoliberal trends by providing both flexibility and real institutional support. Although Kite is just one company in a larger web of millions of companies worldwide, we believe that our values and mission affect others. We approach our company culture as a source of both internal and external change. That is, we try to incorporate our culture into our employee experience, and also into our products, services, and everyday interactions with customers and society. Our culture aspires to be a catalyst for systemic changes at other companies and beyond, encouraging clients and peers alike to provide a greater voice and structural support to their employees as well.