India
My name is Nishigandha. I work with Fynd as people success manager, and I've been working in recruitment and HR domain since past eight years now. And I specialize into talent strategy and culture building.
A lot of challenges we faced, good thing was we prepared for it in advance. We ensure that we have our hiring challenges are addressed or analyzed before actually going fully remote. So hiring challenges, how do we maintain our culture? How do we keep our people engaged in the lockdown and all sorts of issues were covered and we ensured that when the pandemic hit, we are well prepared. We have a remote working plan in place. So the challenges majorly with employee engagement over past 20 months, which we have noticed is initially people working from home, they were really happy.
They got to spend time with their family, which didn't happen during the normal times. And they were able to be very flexible with their work timings. Right? So working from home initially, people were happy and, whenever we arranged various employee engagement activities virtually, they were very active and participated a lot, and it was a lot fun, but eventually as in how people had to stay at home and work continuously in front of screens, their enthusiasm of having these virtual events and participating in them and being more active virtually, it kind of decreased.
So it kind of became a challenge for the HR team to keep the employees engaged virtually. So this challenge, we faced a lot during the starting of this year. And now currently we are in a hybrid work model. So here the challenge is do we organize a virtual event or do we organize a in office event?
So this is actually the challenge, but what we have decided that yes, there will be a set of HR team who will organize fun events online. And for the people in office there are some other set of events or some other employee engagement activities like having meet-ups or having party or any kind, the previous employee engagement practices, which worked for people. We started organizing them in office. Yes, of course, for people who are fully vaccinated, that is a mandatory thing we have implemented. So the challenge here is yes digitally people have got immune to all the excitement <laugh>, they don't they are not really happy participating in the virtual events. So we have started with various activities. So getting everything done virtually people are not happy, or they are not willing to participate much in the online events.
So that are challenge to keep them engaged for the HR team is one of the priorities right now.Q (03:44):How to ensure that there is culture building team learning happening for the hybrid workforce. And how can we navigate through them?
The best solution which has worked for Fynd was WORKCATIONS. So WORKCATIONS is something where we combine work with vacation. We take our teams once a week to a nice tourist location, or a nice scenic location where the teams have their schedules plan in advance. You know the morning, morning time is dedicated for brainstorming session. Morning, time is dedicated for meetings and the regular
businesses as usual. And the evening time is dedicated for more and activities like sight seeing, or having discussions, playing games and all sorts of, of team bonding activities.
So this is something which is, will really well for us WORKCATIONS.. Apart from that, yes, we have started some fun activities in office also. What has really worked for us is work weeks. So since people have been collaborating virtually it is difficult to maintain that momentum of the work, right? It is difficult to ensure that the work is then in the timeline given to us. So we have decided we have started the work weeks where we call the entire team to the office for a week. We brainstorm, we plan. We ensure that all our activities are decided for the next three months so that people can go back to their,hometowns and work remotely. And then the, work is properly planned and scheduled. And it has been, a very positive experience for, our people because it, gives them clarity on what exactly needs to be done.
They get to meet their people, they get to meet their teams. And also there's a lot of team bonding fun activities for them during this work week. And yes, of course, deciding the targets, deciding the work for the next three months. So this is something which is worked so under employee engagement This is something which has worked for us vocation work weeks. So, these are the things we can plan for under employee engagement and tackle the difficult situation of managing the hybrid workforce and keeping them engaged.
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