The Four Cs to Guarantee Employee Engagement While WFA
A year into Working From Anywhere (WFA), Meeshoites have enjoyed everything: from the familiar structure of our office to the snowy backdrop of the Himalayas and the comfort of their homes.
We owe the success of this beloved model to our ability to provide 1800+ employees with the means to feel connected, supported and motivated as they build for Bharat. To put it plainly, we have been able to steadily maintain our “Employee Engagement”.
Some of the key challenges that we saw coming up due to WFA was how we ensure bonding across different teams. We took a User First approach and gauged employee pulse to develop policies that celebrate employees, give them chances to collaborate under a virtual roof and simultaneously make them feel appreciated despite the distance. These initiatives make us a People-Centric Workplace and have led our WFA model to be successful.
— Ashish Kumar Singh, CHRO
Mission MeeEngagement
The first step to tackling Mission Mee-engagement (Meesho Engagement😉) was identifying four 4 Cs to curate moments of delight and drive continuous engagement.
Connection
Feeling connected to Meesho and fellow Meeshoites is one of the biggest parameters to working well together virtually. Moments Policy became an integral part of this.
The idea behind the policy is to create delight around pivotal moments in an employee’s life cycle.
This policy evolved into driving virtual engagements at a team and organisational level as well through our signature programmes — Happy Hours and Friday Frolics!
Happy Hours are rituals where all team members get together under one virtual roof to collaborate on things beyond work, usually games. This one-hour session usually involves an icebreaker, the main game — anything ranging from solving murder mysteries to surviving escape rooms together — and finally, a round of gratitude with fun and banter. Happy Hours became so successful that its adoption has increased by 75% since its inception in February 2022, and we’ve now automated and calendared it as well.
Meanwhile, Friday Frolics are company-wide virtual events that range from Slack-based trivia to meme-making contests, wellness sessions, talent shows and celebrity performances. Of course, the winning team is rewarded with gift vouchers, and winners get featured on our social media pages. This is a matter of major clout because these posts average 69000+ impressions 😎
Communication
While working remotely, we often go through our task lists in silos. To avoid this, we have events like Sabha, All Hands & Panchayat.
Sabha: We utilise these weekly hour-long events to celebrate the day-to-day achievements of the company and individuals. We also invite new employees into the fold and acknowledge the landmark anniversaries. One of the most anticipated sections of Sabha is when a different team introduces themselves, their work, and their impact in the wackiest ways.
All Hands: These are Business Unit (BU)-specific events where different teams share updates on their specific tasks. More nuanced than the company-wide meetings, we deep dive into functional updates during these meetings.
Panchayat: These quarterly company-wide meetings last a few hours and go over everything we did in the previous quarter. We hear from the leaders about what their BU targeted and achieved. We also learn more about our leaders and see our co-workers’ non-work-related talents at these events.
The common element in all these sessions is the Ask Me Anything (AMA) section at the end, where all participants are encouraged to question leaders on any work-related topic. We keep things democratic here at Meesho 🙌
Congratulations
One of the best ways employees feel valued, especially while working remotely, is when their peers and managers appreciate them. With this in mind, we’ve developed a recognition framework:
1. Spot Appreciation (Kudos via MeeDelight tool): MeeDelight is an in-house tool that allows Meeshoites to pat their colleague on the back for embodying Meesho Mantras through their actions at work. They are given out on Slack and are aimed at tapping avenues of recognition to compensate for the real-time kudos that we’ve lost due to the remote set-up. This informal rewards system has created a sense of community among Meeshoites, where appreciation and recognition have become. Since its launch in February 2022, we’ve issued more than 700 Spot recognitions.
2. All Hands Meet (AHM) recognition: Chosen by team leads, these awards are given out during individual BU’s All Hands to employees who have displayed Meesho Mantras. These rewards, which have been given to 500-odd Meeshoites so far, include vouchers and certificates.
3. Panchayat Recognition: One of the most prestigious recognition programmes at Meesho, nominations come from people managers ahead of the Panchayat, while BU leaders choose the winners. We have capped the number of awards at 5% of the BU headcount and have given them ours to 250+ Meeshoites since February. These rewards also come with monetary benefits, and winners’ names are announced during the Panchayat, which all the leaders and employees attend.
Collaboration
Engagement is a natural byproduct of collaboration. True to our mantra of Company > Team > Individual, we saw a huge opportunity to drive inter and intra-team collaborations in the Quarterly Summits.
These BU-wide summits bring teams from the same pods and clusters together. All participants also get to speak with their BU heads, give real-time feedback on their teams’ functioning, and interact with fellow team members in person. The week-long summits are often packed with parties, hackathons and team outings.
Don’t take our word for it. You can read about Product org’s first Quarterly Summit and the Supplier Growth team’s Hackathon Sup-Go Hack 2022.
Of course, many of us settled in Bangalore occasionally visit the Head Quarters. For others, there’s also the option of satellite offices. We have opened these offices at co-working spaces in cities with the highest concentration of Meeshoites — Delhi, Noida, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Pune, and Mumbai — with the aim of opening more on a needs basis.
While we strive to improve our efforts in improving Employee Delight at Meesho, we are also taking a data-driven approach to understand if we are moving in the right direction. And, if these testimonials that came up in an org-wide survey are anything to go by, we certainly are:
Would you like to be part of a company that redefines workspace and work culture? Join us.
CREDITS
Inputs from: Meenambika Meenakshinathan and Niksha Gupta
Creatives: Vishal Singh (Behance)
