UC Value: Win-Win - Our guide to Partner empathy and delight
At Urban Company, our values define who we are, what we want to achieve and how we’re going to do it. They guide us on every step. The seven values that we live by are: Customer Obsession, Win-Win, First Principles, Ownership, Bold, Simplify, & Bias For Action.
What does the UC value Win-Win signify?
While “Customer Obsession” defines our true North star, our second value “Win-Win” guides us on a day to day basis to make decisions and build products and experiences that have a massive positive impact on the lives of our partners.
UC’s Mission is “To empower millions of service professionals by delivering services at-home in a way that has never been experienced before”. Over the last 18 months since we established our new values, we have come across many discussions and decision points where we at UC, cutting across teams and roles, have quoted this value “Win-Win” while making a decision which is right for our partners and helps us work towards our mission of empowering service professionals.
How has “Win-Win” been our guide for Partner empathy, love and delight?
PSOPs for our partners:
Many of us would have experienced ESOPs and RSUs which are popular tools companies use to invest in the wealth creation for their employees.
However a testimony of UC’s Win-win value was an industry first initiative: PSOPs (Partner Stock Options Plan). This plan enables our service partners to become shareholders of the very company they work with, making them equal stakeholders in the company building journey and benefit from UC’s growth in coming years.
Meet some of our best partners who were the first recipients of PSOPs. During the launch ceremony of the PSOP program, excitement, pride and emotions ran high across the room. In our various Focus Group Discussions with multiple partners, we can clearly see the anticipation and desire to be a PSOP recipient and be part of UC’s journey. Isn’t this culture and environment a perfect example of win-win ?
CULT: The social media community of our partners:
As a fast growing startup, we are always constrained on bandwidth. Tech bandwidth is precious and we are always sprinting to launch business critical features. However, it is the Win-Win value of ours which inspired us to take some bandwidth out of our regular BAU builds and invest on CULT.
We recognised the need for a platform where our partners could get inspirational and educational content to get better at their work and where they could share their own success stories and moments of pride. So we built CULT: Our own Digital Community of our partners.
We were blown away by the response from our partner base. Adding a screenshot from cult. Please note the caption.
This again validates how a UC value was taken as a guiding light to prioritise and go all in with full conviction on a feature which many organizations of our size would have struggled to prioritise and launch.
Personal loans for our partners:
Economic wellbeing of our partners has always been one of our top priorities. While we have been able to create significant delta in the earnings of our partners, we also decided to invest on personal loans. Most of our partners being new to credit (and hence not having a CIBIL score) would be ineligible for loans outside.
Over the last few quarters, we have extended personal loans ranging from Rs. 10,000 to Rs. 1 Lakh and upto a tenure of 1 year for thousands of our partners. For this, we have built our own lending stack (integration with lending partners behind the scenes). We have built an in-house ML based credit assessment engine which pre qualifies our partners for loans, a loan management stack and a repayment engine which deducts re-payments from their payouts (with their consent) and ensures partners never miss a repayment to the lending partners.
And we are just getting started. As we write this, we are working on providing home loans to our partners. This would be the pinnacle of partner empowerment.
Health and Accidental insurance for all our partners:
Covid 19 has taught all of us the importance of having a good insurance plan. While we can afford good insurance, the gig economy workforce does not have access to insurance. It is our Win-Win mindset and value which guided us to take the call of providing medical insurance and accidental death insurance free of cost to each and every one our partners (in partnership with Acko). Our top partners additionally get medical insurance for their families as well.
We didn’t stop at this. We realized that finding out insurance card details, covered ailments, cashless hospitals and filing claims are not easy. So we built a flow on our partner app for our partners where on a click of a button they could do all of the above and also consult a doctor online.
Such an insurance plan is unparalleled in the industry and we are super proud to be associated with such builds for our partners.
Best In Class Partner app:
It is often seen that while customer facing apps of many organisations would be best in class, the seller/partner/driver/runner facing b2b apps would be barely functional.
At UC, a few quarters ago, the design, product and engineering teams started making a conscious effort to bring the partner app at par with the customer app. Now all our partner-facing properties have the same design language, same React Native based platform (Orion) and same RN components as the customer app.
Truly Win-Win. Our partners love the new interface and super performant app.
So to summarise, while this blog just captures a few examples, each and every team at UC aspires to use this value in their day to day work. As an organization, we have effectively demonstrated that company values need not be “HR Jargons” to be talked about in off-sites, but can truly inspire and guide you towards the goal that you have set.
About the Authors:
Rishabhdhwaj Singh is a Vice President Engineering at Urban Company. He loves solving complex business problems using tech.
Sana Nayyar is a Vice President People Success at Urban Company. She has diverse experience across roles (Business Partnering, Learning, Recruitment, Operations) and industries.
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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
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