Urban Company’s Rewards Philosophy

By — Sana Nayyar (VP, People Operations)

We started the company in 2014 with the goal to solve tough, large scale, daily life impacting problems where we could meaningfully contribute.

And as part of that, we wanted to build an institution, not just a company. An institution that is known to be world-class in it’s pursuit for excellence, rational thought and balanced decision making.

Today, we stand proud of having achieved what we have. At the same time, we stand humble to the fact that we are still learning and have a long way to go. We must be nimble. We must innovate and be in search of better ways. We must iterate quickly. This is our DNA.

So today, we are taking a big step in people & organisation science by bringing the best of what we have learnt internally and externally in building high performance, long-lasting organisations. Here is our Rewards Philosophy to steer our frameworks and actions in matters of people. This serves a first step towards aligning our teams towards a common goal post and best-practices, which becomes increasingly important as the teams scale and the internal bar rises.

The Reward Philosophy

We have three absolute core reward principles –

• Employees will be value driven
• The organisation will be fair to all internally which means “equal pay for equal work”
• Exceptional performers will see exceptional success in the long term

Here I will take the liberty of explaining what each of these mean.

Value-driven organisation

Urban Company values teams that are driven by the pursuit of creating impact. As an organisation, we have an undying spirit to create immense value for our consumers and partners by delivering on our mission to empower millions of professionals worldwide to deliver services at home like never experienced before. This needs individuals who buy into the mission and want to push their personal limits to create value as a team. Such individuals measure their personal success in the value they create over time.

This means:

• Strive to create value: Success for the company, or an individual, comes by first creating value. Hence, we like conversations that are about “how you will create impact” before “how you will see success”.
• Link your success to company’s success: The most powerful way to get rewarded is to link your success to the company’s success. Every ounce of value created adds to success for you directly then. This is why Urban Company has an ESOP program. ESOPs allow employees to be a stakeholder in the company. This means that as the company grows, so do you — you become a part of that success story.
• ESOPs are the highest form of reward: The fast growth nature of our company makes ESOPs the highest form of reward, this is where we believe we can enable & create wealth for all employees.

Fair to all

Urban Company is a workplace that values fairness and merit. We strive for doing the right thing for each employee based on the merit of their work.

This means:

• Employees doing the same role should have similar compensation at joining
• Employees with equivalent performance at a level should have similar reward (increments, bonuses, esops, etc)
• It is fair but not exact, we don’t encourage comparisons and once you join, it boils down to value creation

Rockstars will see non-linear rewards

We are a place for high-achievers and promote a culture of pushing our own personal boundaries and unlocking our ability. In this spirit, we strive to ensure that we create a highly successful path for the best performers who have the highest bar and expectation from themselves creating the most impact in the organization.

This means:

• A performance-linked rewards payout: We believe in enabling best performers to earn outsized rewards which will, in turn, drive better performance both for the employee and for the organization
• Best performers get the best rewards: We believe that the most valuable reward of ESOPs is best suited to give high performers. The impact they create serves the mission well in the long run, hence they should also benefit from the success of the company in the long run.
• Best performers see a faster growth trajectory: At Urban Company, everyone can reach the pinnacle of their profession. Time and skill aren’t eligibility criteria, ability and impact are. This means that you can unlock different career paths, reach more senior positions faster if you are a consistently good performer who creates high impact.

How To Use This Philosophy?

With a clear philosophy in place, we will derive frameworks and policies. This means, that our new-hire rewards program, our performance-review cycles, our promotion and increments philosophy – will all reflect and put-to-use the basic ethos of our Rewards Philosophy.

However, it is important to note that any framework or philosophy is to help us do better. It’s a tool towards improvement and progress, it’s not the end in itself. This being a first step is not going to be absolute, nor is that the intention.

Hence, we wish to use this as a guide and work on success of each team member over the long run. Sometimes things get subjective, it is important to remind ourselves our foremost desire is to do good work and create impact.

If you are interested in exploring opportunities with us, reach out to us! We would love to hear from you.

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You can read up more about us on our publications —
https://medium.com/uc-design
https://medium.com/uc-engineering
https://medium.com/uc-culture

https://www.urbancompany.com/blog/humans-of-urban-company/

If you are interested in finding out about opportunities, visit us at http://careers.urbancompany.com