Who is Our Speaker? 

Bhavani Pandi serves as People Partner with Zenefits India. She brings in 15 years of diverse experience across a wide variety of People functional areas in global technology firms. She is passionate about building high-performance and high trust organizations with superlative People Experience. Her core strength is an avid understanding of people and drive to constantly acquire new skills. She is a certified in HR – Behavioral Event Interviewing & DISC Assessment.  

Listen to the Podcast here 

A Peek into the Podcast 

00:35 –  03:00 – How do the HR pivots engagement and performance to drive collaboration and growth in the remote working environment? 

03:02 – 07:32 – What are the HR initiatives undertaken to drive adoption to the new system of frequent check-ins and reviews? 

07:36 – 09:26 – How does the new system of continuous check-ins impact your business growth globally? 

09:28 – 10:20 – How the future of work will be? 

The Significance of Continuous Check-ins 

Remote workforce is the new normal. Remote working seems like a choice of more and more people today. So, as business continues to grow, whatever industry you’re in, opting for remote workers comes with its own benefits, right? And for those industries were working out of offices is essential, it is very important to have a plan to keep your employees connected and engaged. So, can you tell us how the HR pivots engagement and performance to drive this kind of collaboration and growth in the remote working environment?  

The remote working environment is something that we didn’t know it will come this quick and no sufficient notice at all. In remote working like this, communication is very vital. You are not in office, and you cannot talk to each other. People will have to have the feel of getting connected and engaged to perform better. So, it is very important to move on more empathetic but the practical actions are very important. That’s when we really thought how do you really drive your performance when you are going through an unnatural situation like the pandemic, we’re currently in. while looking into the different options, one-on-ones is the single most powerful thing we know a manager can do to improve the relationship with the direct reports and get better results. So, that is why we thought we need to increase our multiple conversations that we have with our respected team members and we started introducing the monthly check-in during the pandemic when it just started.  

And the important thing about our discussions in the monthly check-ins are we are not restricting to only performance we also cover around their well-being. And while speaking about the collaboration, Zenefits is a HR product and it enables collaboration, it so happens like most of the performance conversation is one way, the manager initiates and the team member will discuss about it. But the tool itself enables the collaboration in both the way like, “I am a team member; I can initiate a conversation with my manager,” I can still update the tool saying these are what we’ve discussed, and we can just finish off the monthly conversations. So, the collaboration starts both ways with the facility we provide in our product.  

Frequent check-ins can help employees course-correct as and when necessary. So, how does this new system of frequent check–ins and monthly or quarterly reviews work? How is the adoption and what are the HR initiatives undertaken to drive adoption to this new system?  

We consider monthly check-ins as a vehicle to converse with your respected team members to ensure everything is alright. Gone are those days where we used to have one goal-setting in a year and only at the end of that particular year, you would’ve discussed how you performed, how you’ve achieved against your particular goals. After that, there are a lot of organizations which moved on having this particular performance discussion more like a conversation and this happens on a quarterly basis with most of the companies.  

It so happens that you set a goal, you review that, and you get feedback from your managers, so this is how we used to do at least in a quarterly basis. So, in Zenefits, we started adopting the monthly check-ins, and these monthly check-ins, initially when we rolled out, we had adequate support from the leadership team. They were fully supportive of this particular idea of having this kind of monthly check-in. In initial few months, the adoption was around 80 to 90% of the employees. They were doing it.  

Over a period of time, whenever something new comes in, we are all very enthusiastic about it and you want to give it a try. But over a period of time, sustaining that is important. So, when it comes to Zenefits, the leaders are really awesome. They wanted to practice them and leading by example is very important. If I am a leader and I have to do my monthly check-ins with my manager in the first week of the month, this automatically triggers that particular manager to complete their one-on-ones with their particular respective team member and it cascades down. That’s one of the ways we were able to succeed.  

And also, when you speak about the initiatives that we took to ensure that this is happening smoothly, it is not just about the one goal you set and you keep on discussing about the same goal on a month-on-month basis. We have a particular topic that is designed for a particular month and there are certain questionnaires that are designed in our tool. You are free to use those questionnaires and the topic will pretty much evolve around it. There are certain topics that were little closer to me as well. So, every month, you discuss on multiple different aspects. Around the month of April or May, we had a topic about supporting SOs and others during these challenging times. So, this is like related to your work, how are you supporting your work and are you equipped with enough of hardware, enough of support from the technical team, are you able to perform your work. So, similarly how are you able to work in a way that you are supporting the rest of the team members.  

And a lot of times, your performance conversations are going to be like your manager talks and this is more like a complaining session when you hesitate to take the feedback in a more constructive way. One of the topics that we have also had was the upward feedback. When you say upward feedback, it is primarily I’m a manager and I will ask the team member what is the better way I could do or “If you were the manager in my particular situation, how do you think you could have done it better?” It could be a very simple conversation and as an individual, I love having that kind of conversation with my manager. Though you have multiple discussions with your manager, during an official check-in where you have to discuss about it, it brings in a lot of value between the work relationships.  

We also discussed about the team dynamics. While you’re working remote, you’re anyways not seeing anybody but at the same time you have to ensure you’re working with the team. So, when working remote, how are you maintaining the dynamics, what kind of assistance which is required from your respective manager to ensure that team dynamics is maintained well. These are some of the topics which keep most of them look forward for what is new for this quarter and what kind of conversation can I have now. This helps in adopting to our new system.  

How was the impact of this new system on your business growth globally? Did you witness any level of improvements in terms of engagement, performance after this particular initiative? How did it work for you?  

How do we measure performance? It is hard to measure how it used to be before and how we are having it now. But when it comes to business growth, we had three or four cross-functional projects. We stood out ahead of the competition, and that proves that we have been performing real good. There isn’t a specific metric that says yeah, before this check-in, this is what our performance had been. Certainly, there is no doubt. So, we are ahead of the competition and we are doing good in terms of performance and also, we are very adoptable and flexible with our goals because the goals are set real-time. You speak to your manager about your goal and you keep editing month-on-month basis. When I say editing, we realign it according to the organization goal perspective. I do not set one goal for this month and I do not change it for the next month. Rather, we see how we can align ourselves to perform to that particular goal.  

And, when it comes to the improvement perspective, if I have to look into the statistics, I have to be started off with our performance initiative, which is going to be the monthly check-in. The turnover has been extremely less for the team who had continuous frequent monthly check-ins. So, that proves your monthly check-ins are helping to reduce turnover during this pandemic.   

What the future of work will look like? Do you think that we really are equipped to manage our fully remote or hybrid workforce? What is your opinion on it?  

The future of work in a technology company, I think it’s gonna be hybrid and we’re completely equipped to be remote but I love having that to be hybrid. When you are working remote like this, you’re in a safe workplace, you pretty much do not spend, you’re still being very productive, and your travel time is much reduced. But still there will be a little bit of the people element that you will be missing. When it comes to Zenefits, we’ll go with the hybrid model. We would offer lot more flexibility than does not hurt our business.  

Hope you enjoyed the podcast that was given in the link above. Stay tuned in to Synergita TalentCast for more such insightful sessions. Have a good day!