“Fantastic work culture” with Keval Baxi CEO and co-founder of Codal

As a part of my series about about how leaders can create a “fantastic work culture”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Keval Baxi is the CEO and co-founder of Codal, a global UX design and development agency that helps businesses evolve through digital transformation. While earning a B.S. in Entrepreneurship & Management from DePaul University, Keval co-founded his investment firm, KBMG Ventures, and started Codal, a digital agency that champions transparency and efficiency. Since Codal’s founding, Keval has taken on an advisory role for many of its startup clients. Through his mentorship, he has helped these nascent companies generate over 100 million dollars in business growth. An expert technologist, Keval specializes in scaling eCommerce businesses — his agency Codal is a certified partner of Shopify Plus, and has worked with online retailers of every size and sector. Keval has a passion for projects that require complex solutions and excels in leveraging the services his full-stack agency provides to achieve his clientele’s business goals. Between his daily responsibilities as CEO and his dedication to advising startup companies, Keval is spearheading Codal’s mission to engineer the future.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

Of course, thank you for having me! I got my start doing freelance consulting projects, mostly related to development or network engineering. I’ve always had that sort of ‘entrepreneurial spirit’, but I think what drew me to the technical side of things was the satisfaction of solving problems, discovering inefficiencies and figuring out how to remedy them. I’ve always found that process to be deeply fulfilling, and now it’s essentially what my company does.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?

A lot of interesting things happen to you when you’re founding and scaling a company, but I think it’s fascinating how much Codal has changed over the years. Everyone has a different background, a different story, a different perspective — it’s helped us improve so much, across every area (except for maybe in rec league softball, where we’re still losing most of our games).

Are you working on any exciting projects now? How do you think that will help people?

We work with quite a few exciting non-profit organizations, but one I’ve really enjoyed partnering with is #BUILTBYGIRLS. It’s an excellent mentorship program from OATH that pairs young women with female leaders in the STEM fields. We’ve been re-designing their website and matchmaking algorithm, but what’s really great about it is that some of the women working at Codal have signed up to be mentors too.

Ok, lets jump to the main part of our interview. According to this study cited in Forbes, more than half of the US workforce is unhappy. Why do you think that number is so high?

U.S. culture as a whole glorifies work, and that often translates to the business world as this sort of pressure to constantly grind, to embrace being a workaholic. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that — hard work is great — but when upper-level management and policymakers take that mentality too far, employees can find themselves in toxic work environments that don’t account for their personal wellbeing. On top of that, society still prizes the practicality of a job over its personal fulfillment.

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?

An unhappy workforce is one that’s unmotivated and uninspired — when you run a creative agency like I do, that’s a major problem. It manifests as small shortcuts, which can then snowball all the way through the project cycle until you end up with a shoddy product. But more importantly, it hurts the employee’s health and wellbeing too. If you’re miserable at your 9–5, you’re miserable for almost the entire day. That’s disastrous for your mental health.

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?

So I’ll give five concrete, actionable things managers and executive can do to improve their work culture, but the bottom line, the sort of overarching theme of all of these, is to foster a culture of empathy. That means listening to the wants, needs, and expectations of your employees and working together to create an environment that everyone, from the C-suite to the interns, can learn, grow, and thrive in. That means:

1. Implementing several different feedback channels — whether that’s a HR system, a physical comments & suggestions box, regular face-to-face meetings, an open-door policy, anything. The point is to create as many different opportunities for your employees to let their voices be heard, so they can pick the one they’re most comfortable with.
2. Working with people, not just managing them. As CEO I have a slew of ‘big picture’ duties, but I try to get hands-on involvement with our projects as much as I can. I want to emphasize this is working alongside your employees, not micro-managing them (which I’m strongly opposed to).
3. This goes hand-in-hand with the implementation of feedback channels, but regular communication between managers and their employees is a must. This should be facilitated in ways both formal (regular check-in meetings) and non-formal (company lunches, team building events, etc.).
4. Understand what your employees wants out of working at your company. What skills do they want to learn? How do they want to grow personally or professionally? What path do they see themselves taking? Once you know that, you can work to help them realize that ambition, and further your company’s goals in the process.
5. Transparency. This should be a no-brainer, but no healthy company culture is built upon managers or executives hiding things or misleading their employees. Be open about policy changes, why they’re happening, and what they mean. Let them know your thought process on certain issues and ask for their input as well.

It’s very nice to suggest ideas, but it seems like we have to “change the culture regarding work culture”. What can we do as a society to make a broader change in the US workforce’s work culture?

We need to re-think the relationship between employer and employee, as it’s currently a one-way street. Workers are forced to fit into the mold of a company, rather than the company being flexible to the worker’s needs and expectations. This helps both parties: the worker feels more comfortable; the company gets more value out of their employee.

How would you describe your leadership or management style? Can you give us a few examples?

I let the experts make decisions and advise base on results, rather than control from the top-down. For example, the leaders of the user experience design team control the entire hiring process for designers. They know better than I do what makes a great UX designer, and they appreciate the autonomy. Again, it’s a win-win for everyone.

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?

It’s hard to pick just one person! I owe a lot of my success to my teachers and mentors over the years — too many to name. I run a successful design & development agency, and it cannot exist without the contributions of each one of my employees. I’m grateful for each and every one of them.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

Codal has worked with non-profits since the beginning, but in recent years we’ve been successful enough to offer a discount price to non-profit organizations that enlist our services. We believe in partnering with our clients, so their mission becomes our mission.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Short cuts make long delays” — J.R.R. Tolkien

Clients often come to us with the intention of saving some money by doing the design work themselves. In these cases, they look to us for our development work. But because their expertise lies in their business and not in user experience design, the client designs will often be missing important screens like a loading screen or onboarding sequence.

When we point this out, clients realize that they have to backtrack to the drawing board and end up investing in UX design anyway. However, the clients that do understand the value of UX design and invest in it early are the ones who launch their products faster. In the end, that “shortcut” ends up being a project extension, which can delay launch or make the project more expensive than originally anticipated.

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 would try to inspire people to be more transparent about their stories in the business world. People often try to hide things about their personal lives that in reality make them who they are. Every person has a unique point of view backed by their personal life, and gaining a deeper understanding of their background can be extremely beneficial. Sharing stories and understanding each other on deeper levels makes it easier to come up with better business solutions.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We wish you continued success!