Everyday Life

  F or around an hour, I kept on writing a summary of the book,   Traction , that I read recently. While looking for some pictures of the book, I found some good summaries. So, dropped the idea of writing it again. Instead, I thought of writing down a few things that I had learned in my first job. A company goal of having x amount of revenue or customers can be achieved, or it gets achieved anyhow since everyone — your founders, investors, and CXOs — is looking at that, but a few things related to the culture can be done only if the day-to-day small things are in place. Things as small as responding to a calendar event, showing up in meetings, meeting what you committed, responding to work messages, etc. 1. Showing up in meetings on time:  In my previous organisation, a few people would show up 5–10 minutes late for the meeting and would start the meeting without even apologising or even casually saying “sorry” about it. Being late sometimes is ok, but making it a habit —...

कल रात में ठीक से नींद नहीं आयी | सुबह जल्दी ट्रैन से आना था और रात में लेट सोये थे | सुबह हड़बड़ाहट में पानी का बोतल गिर गया, फिर फ़ोन पानी में भीग गया और रेलवे स्टेशन पर थोड़ा जल्दी जल्दी चलना पड़ा | ट्रैन में बैठ कर थोड़ी देर में जब सांस नार्मल हुआ तो थोड़े ख्याल आये | सोचा थोड़ा लिख लूँ | मन हल्का हो जाता ह लिखने से | जब सब सामान पापा दिलाते थे मेरा, तो मैं कोई भी जूता बिना सोचे खरीद लेती थी अब 8०० रूपए के जूते पर भी ऑफ होने का इंतज़ार करती हूँ | बचपन में वो दो चम्मच हक़ में आया गाजर का हलवा बहुत ज्यादा अच्छा लगता था | उसकि खुशबू और स्वाद आज भी दिमाग में एक दम ज़िंदा ह | पर अब वो दो कटोरी हलवा खा सकती हूँ लेकिन इतना मज़ा नहीं आता |   अम्मा (दादी) को बचपन से दूकान पर बैठा देख कर लगा की वो अमर ह | कभी लगा नहीं की वो चल बसेंगी | फिर जब तीन स साल पहले वो चल बसी तो लगा की शायद सबको जाना ह | अपना तो डर नहीं ह लेकिन अपने मा-बाप, सगे-समबधियो, दोस्तों को खोने का डर लगता ह | फिर  चिंता  में मैं उन्ही से लड़ जाती हूँ, झटक कर बात करने लगती हूँ | कितनी अजीब स...

Do you struggle to remember your employees’ birthdays, let alone celebrate them? Many organizations face this challenge, but there’s a simple solution: Google Sheets. By creating a script in Google Sheets that automatically sends birthday emails to employees and copies their team members and managers, you can enhance employee engagement with minimal effort. Imagine the positive impact of a thoughtful birthday message on your team members’ morale, even if just for a day! Managers can receive reminder emails a couple of days before an employee’s birthday, allowing them to plan simple celebrations like team lunches or cakes. And the best part? You don’t need to create a new spreadsheet; your HR department likely already manages this data. All you need to do is keep a draft email ready for each birthday. Interested in implementing this idea but unsure how to start? Let us handle it for you. Contact us today to streamline your employee birthday celebrations and boost engagement in your or...

  A  couple of months ago, I visited Bodhigram. It is a quiet place at the foothills of the Himalayas and ideal for people looking for some peace of mind and wanting to spend time close to nature, away from the city. One of the founders of that place suggested a book called “The Four Agreements” by Miguel Ruiz. It is a 140-page book yet I took almost a month to finish it. Not because I am a slow reader or it was a complicated book to read, but because the book is so nicely and rightly written that it makes you think. I am not sure if the things written in this book would have made less sense if I had not been questioning some patriarchal aspects of the Indian family structure. The book says that you should make four agreements with yourself. If you do that, your life changes for the better. The agreements are: 1. Be impeccable with your word; 2. Don’t take anything personally; 3. Don’t make assumptions; and 4. Do your best, but it is the intro chapter that made the most differ...

  Most organisations make decisions based on the data, whether these are decisions related to expansion, mergers, operations, or hiring. To make sure that the data gives us the right insights, the data should be clean, reliable, complete, and consistent, among others. But even if there are all the desirable traits, does the data give us the right insights? But by working for different organisations, what I have realised is that even if the data is complete, reliable, complete, or consistent if the context is missing, it can mislead, which can be quite dangerous. For example, the graph given below shows the number of days taken by different executives (A, B, C, D, and E) to resolve queries. Just by looking at the graph, it seems that A is not a good performer, while E is the best performer. Here, the data has all the qualities (such as completeness, integrity, etc.), and yet it misleads. One of the CXOs decides to fire A, but before that, he consults with the department head. In tha...

  One of the startups with which I worked was 200 employees strong at the time I joined. It was 4 years old at the time. I was working as an operations manager and chief of staff, so I was given the task of streamlining processes in different departments. One of the departments that I worked with was HR. The company didn’t have any HR software. All the finance-related work used to be handled by the finance head through Excel files. The HR executive used to share payslips with the employees by manually editing a Word file template, mostly with those who requested it. The result was that a lot of the time of the HR personnel was going into creating those payslips, and the employees were also suffering by not getting them on time. When I was given this task to streamline the processes, I started using one of my favorite tools, SpreadSheets (aka Google Sheets). We wrote a script and pasted the monthly payroll data (which was already being managed by the Finance Head) into a tab in the ...