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Tag: company culture

Work from home/office

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

Once upon a time on a weekday, people got up, got ready, and commuted to a physical work location.

That was the “normal” work routine in many places globally.

On Monday morning, individuals got ready, had breakfast at home/in their commute to work, worked for 8 hours, and then returned home. Same routine for 5 days a week. 2 day weekend and long weekends on certain holidays. Lots of time and money spent on commuting to and from work. How productive this “system/structure” has been is up for debate. Working from home was way less common than it is today.

These days, individuals get up, get ready, and work from their home work station all 5 days of the week or commute few times to their physical work location or still commute 5 days a week. A hybrid work model seems to be here to stay and both employees and employers benefit from this.

Startup Founder Credit

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

Do startup founder(s) get more credit for the startup’s success or blame for its failure than other members of the startup (managers, technical leads etc)?

We know of founder(s) who started companies but what about the initial 5 to 50 employees who helped the startup grow.

What contributes to a startup’s success? Is it the founder(s)’ idea, their execution, their initial key hires, or just the timing of their idea(s)?

How much should we praise founder(s), recognize their successes and failures, and attribute to the startup’s growth?

Are workshops the way to go?

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

Workshops are focused, interactive, and the results can be immediate.

With the current pace of technological advancements, workshops are more effective than year long programs to get faster and effective results.

The format of workshops enables participants to learn a new skill, become more knowledgeable about a topic/subject, interact with other team members etc. in a short time frame.

Online workshops can be as effective as in person workshops and can have participants from various parts of the world.

Which workshop(s) have you attended recently or planning to participate in?

Beauty of Simplicity

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. – Leonardo da Vinci

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. – Albert Einstein

Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

The commonplace about Italian cooking is that it’s very simple; in practice, the simplicity needs to be learned, and the best way to learn it is to go to Italy and see it firsthand. – Bill Buford

To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is. – Bruce Lee

Productive from home

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

How will the current and future of work look like? Is the hybrid work model here to stay?

Mark Ma, an associate professor of business administration for Pitt Business, and Yuye Ding, a Ph.D. student in Katz Graduate School of Business, looked at Standard and Poor’s 500 firms — the largest companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges — that had implemented return to work mandates, forcing employees to be in the office five days a week.

The results from the research study showed that while many of the companies said they were bringing employees back to the office to improve the bottom line, there were no significant changes in financial performance or firm values after the mandates were implemented. However, there was a sharp decrease in employees’ job satisfaction.

To keep employees’ happy and still maintain strong financial performance, companies should be more flexible and allow employees to work from home depending on their work nature, product/service, customers, industry etc. If productivity, work quality, and financial performance are not being negatively impacted by employees working from home, companies should allow employees work from home flexibility and provide support to them.

Simple, easy, and best choice!

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

I love chicken wings!

Buffalo, NY has many restaurant and bar options to have the best chicken wings. There are favorite local chains as well as renowned food establishments. We recently visited The Nine-Eleven Tavern located in 9-11 Bloomfield Ave, Buffalo, NY. Established in 1981, the The Nine-Eleven Tavern is a Cash only establishment and opens on Tuesday through Saturday from 4:30pm-8:30pm.

In The Nine-Eleven Tavern’s menu, they offer Chicken wings – Wings are prepared mild, medium, or hot and include celery and bleu cheese or ranch dressing. For the sizes, you can choose 10, 20, 30 or 50 wings. They also offer Finn fries, Pizza Stix, Chicken Fingers, Corned Beef Sandwich and variety of extras. You can also buy a jar of their Wing sauce. I loved the chicken wings served on their special sauce. There’s only one sauce flavor you can pick and their wings are simply the best I’ve had so far!

From The Nine-Eleven Tavern, we can also takeaway some key business pointers.

Why offer too many sauce choices for the wings to customers when you can offer your best sauce and have customers come to enjoy what you serve best?

Why take credit cards if you can only take cash and avoid credit card transaction fees, credit card machines, and other credit cards related hassles that can come up?

Why open the tavern for long hours everyday if you can offer a window for customers to come and enjoy the wings?

Attracting top talent to your company

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

How about sharing your biggest and limitless vision for your idea/company with your team and prospective employees?

One of the single most important reasons for top talented individuals to join a startup, growing company or even a multinational is the vision of the company’s founders or the company’s management/leadership team.

People switch jobs and careers all the time. Besides financial compensation package, benefits, perks etc., the most talented individuals are also looking to work on the biggest challenges, make tangible impact, and leave their own mark along the way. Next time you want to attract the best talent from the job market, share your idea and vision with them. See how that turns out!

Leadership’s role in Culture

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

Culture has to be created.

Leaders are responsible for creating the company culture, growing it, and evolving it overtime.

Although each team member contributes to the company culture, a dedicated team is needed to focus on bringing people together through various initiatives and activities.

The leadership team has to also participate in company culture activities so the rest of the team knows that it’s important and active participation is encouraged.

Is the leadership team visible in the company activities that the team has put together? How engaged is your team in company initiatives and activities? Do the same team members show up for all the company activities?

Marketing or Product development – Which first?

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

Should you develop your product first or start marketing the idea first?

If the idea has some legs to become a business, building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) first could help. Once you’ve build an MVP, you can test it out with potential customers. Collect feedback from early users of your product/service and continue developing it to create the best value to your product/service users. Marketing the product/service once you’ve built a user base would be prudent.

Product development and marketing will go hand in hand overtime. In the initial stages, product development should be prioritized over marketing. An excellent product/service will always be easier to market!

Running a Tech company

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

In running a tech company, a lot of times the challenge is the company part not the tech.

Tech problems might have easier solutions than people problems.

The tech stack should not be the only focus if you want to build a successfully growing company.

Take care of both the tech and people (more importantly) and you have a chance to make the impact you seek to make!

Coaching Teams for Global Customer Success

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

Multinational companies need to coach their team to handle clients based in different time zones, cultures, languages, and more. Easier said than done. Countless number of hours, sessions, content, and materials are shared internally to help the company’s team to properly and successfully interact with global clients.

A few tips on coaching teams for Customer Success with global clients (North America based):

1. Conduct sessions between team members based in Customer regions and other office locations. If your company’s customers are based in the US and you have a team based in Nepal, then have your Nepal team members interact as much as possible with their US counterparts. Similarly, if your company’s customers are based in Nepal and you have a team based in US, then have your US team members interact as much as possible with their Nepal counterparts. These sessions should focus on cultural greetings, acceptable language and behaviors, ways of doing business in each culture etc.

    2. Inter-office company visits. Organize company visits between your US team and Nepal team members. Nepal based team members will visit the US and learn about US culture and business and vice versa. These cross cultural experiences will add tremendous value to the respective team members and organizing knowledge sharing sessions post the team members’ visit can be fruitful and productive to the rest of the team.

    3. Look outside company’s network for cultural learnings. Besides facilitating ways to internally assist the team members based globally, do look outside your company to find creative ways to provide team members with wider cultural knowledge and experiences. If a team member’s friend or family member is visiting the US or Nepal for a short period or someone is moving to study or work in the US or Nepal, meet them and hear their experiences and share your experiences as well. You’ll get a broader perspective on the culture and it can enrich your cultural knowledge and cultural nuances.

    Everyone agrees with your idea(s)

    Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

    If a team lead/manager or someone in a position of “authority” shares an idea for a new tool/process/policy (or something) and everyone on the team agrees to it without any discussions, questions or feedback, does that mean that idea was flawless?

    If there were no discussions, questions or feedback to the idea shared by the team lead or manager, is the team completely on board or do they feel their feedback does not matter or they did not want to be the “sole” individual who disagreed with the idea or did not have the “authority” to raise their voice in that particular space? No matter how well thought out the idea was by the team lead or manager, there are always areas that can be further polished, improved, or worked on. If you want your idea(s) to be well thought out, it’s important and helpful to have discussions, questions and feedback session with your team.

    If your team always agrees with the idea(s) you share with them without any discussions, questions, or feedback, it would probably be a good time to assess what type of culture you’ve actually created with your team.

    Skills over Location

    Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

    A skilled professional should be respected, valued, and paid as much as someone that can be found in a particular region.

    With remote work and freelancing work becoming more common than ever before, companies have a global talent pool to fill their vacancies. A skilled professional based in the US would generally get paid more than a skilled professional with similar qualifications in South Asia because the argument went that the cost of living in the US was higher so the professional needs to get paid more. Over the span of few decades, companies have been looking for talent in offshore regions for cost savings (primarily), time zones turnaround, work flexibility, proximity to customers etc.

    The talent pool and the job/career marketplace is now global. Companies can have skilled professionals working on their products/services from anywhere in the world and the skilled professionals have a global job/career opportunity pool. Skilled professionals based in South Asia should get paid equally to a professional based in the US if the individual has similar qualifications, work ethic, quality of work produced and such. It’s a win-win for both companies and skilled professionals everywhere!

    The long drought in team engagement

    Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

    A company, WeAreGrowing Inc. decides to add several new team members to its company. They place ads, go through job sites, and recruiters to find and interview the best talent to join their growing company. Lots of time, human resources, and energy goes into finding the right candidate(s) for the roles and after several interview(s), the team members are selected and officially onboarded into the company.

    For the new team members, the first few days and weeks are exciting at WeAreGrowing Inc. As the weeks and months go by, these new team members are not “new” anymore and become “regular employees.” As WeAreGrowing Inc. continues to grow, they add more new team members and so on. Sometime in the distant future, few team members decide to leave WeAreGrowing Inc. for various reasons – join another company, higher studies, start their own venture, etc. Then WeAreGrowing Inc. become highly alert on the recent layoffs and in a move to not lose the team members plans to meet them. HR and managers talk to the team members about how much the company values them and promises that the company will continue to grow. Yet the team members share that their plans to move on were made months ago and felt that their personal and professional growth was stagnant for sometime and were not growing at WeAreGrowing Inc.

    There seems to be a long drought in team engagement between when new team members join a company and when they decide to leave. A company can convince itself that they did whatever they can at their disposal to keep the team member(s) engaged and growing. However, team members feel that the company did not engage them enough or challenge them enough or show tangible growth during the time they were with the company. Addressing the team engagement issues when the team members are almost out the door is too late!

    If a company sincerely believes that the team is their biggest asset, then they should treat them as such – keep them engaged and challenged throughout the team members’ journey within the company. It’s more expensive for companies to find and hire new talent than keeping the current talent engaged and productive. Better for the company to approach their people that they can leave at any point and realize that the team members have many other career choices as well. You (HR, Managers, Founders or Leaders) just have to deliver the message and show that staying with the company is the best career choice for the team members!

    Skills Degree

    Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

    What if we could have a Skills degree similar to a College degree?

    A Skills degree would show all the skills you have accumulated over the years. Writing skills, editing skills, sales skills, Excel skills, technical skills, marketing skills and more skills. In a knowledge economy, our skills are our biggest assets. Skills are learnable and we can get better overtime with practice and repetition.

    What skills do you have or working to be better at?

    A College Degree is great but not required. 

    Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

    I saw this on a job vacancy post.

    A college degree is great but not required. What’s more important is having the skills to do the job.

    Skills are the way to go. Whether its for an Account Executive, marketing, or technical role, skills are becoming important than ever. With the speed of technological developments everyday and shortage of skilled talent across various industries, skilled professionals will continue to be in higher demand across the globe.

    What skills can you gain while in college and what skills can you gain outside of college?

    Less Meetings, More Productivity

    Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

    Meetings fill up a work day. There’s a meeting here and a meeting there. Then the day is almost done and we still have a lot of important work to be done.

    With remote work being a part of our professional lives, video conferencing tools so easy to use (Zoom, Meet, Teams), and devices at our hands, we could be taking meetings from anywhere. An organized meeting with an agenda, meaningful audience engagement, and clear next steps is well worth it. However, many meetings fall off the mark and we end up just looking busy and not getting much work done. There’s a huge opportunity cost to meaningless and unproductive meetings when the team could be working on more productive and important tasks. A CBS News article stated that “Based on how much time workers said they spend in nonessential meetings as well as their salaries, the survey estimated that organizations employing 5,000 people waste around $100 million annually on unnecessary gatherings.”

    What are the solution(s) then?

    Meeting Purpose: Before setting up a meeting, asking ourselves is this meeting necessary, what’s the agenda, who is absolutely needed for this meeting, what can be the end result of this meeting etc. Being absolutely clear on these few questions can make a huge difference on how the meeting goes.

    Meeting Audit: Once meetings have been on the calendar, conducting a meeting audit from time to time is important. A meeting audit will consist of reviewing whether this recurring meeting is still necessary, what can be changed, and if possible can the meeting be removed from the calendar completely.

    Meeting Scalability: Often times, there could be meetings conflict where the same key individual(s) are needed in multiple meetings. Considering if the next individual in charge can attend the meeting instead, can the meeting be recorded, or can the video conferencing platform create an AI Summary of the meeting are some options to make better use of our time at work.

    Silicon Peaks

    Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

    Pukar C. Hamal, Founder and CEO of SecurityPal, recently coined the term Silicon Peaks to capture the growing startup ecosystem of Nepal.

    On his LinkedIn page, Pukar wrote that “The Himalayas have always been a source of inspiration for me. And given that 8 out of the worlds 14 highest mountains are located here including the highest (Mt. Everest) and the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th(!) highest, it only felt natural to pay homage to the incredible Peaks we have here! And thus ?️*Silicon Peaks* ?️ was born!”

    Silicon Peaks is here and will continue to grow! #SiliconPeaks

    What’s your Trillion Dollar Venn Diagram Of Success?

    Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

    Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and CTO of HubSpot shares his thoughts on rare skills and the Trillion Dollar Venn Diagram Of Success (phrase credit to him).

    Dharmesh shares that “You probably have a few valuable skills right now. The question is, how do you turn those skills into a successful career or company? By combining skills together. But combining any set of skills won’t necessarily get you where you want to go. You need to be strategic about which skills to acquire. Here’s my framework for combining skills to maximize your potential.”

    https://youtube.com/watch?v=WghyEbmPWgk%3Fsi%3D08-AmPfcl47pxRhZ

    Engaging Company Culture

    Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

    Engaging company cultures have empowered, creative, and growth oriented team members leading company culture events. Through empowerment, employees are given the decision making authority and independence to decide what activities bring out the best in the team. Through creativity, employees can be resourceful and come up with activities that are out of the box and meaningful for the team. Through a focus on growth-oriented activities, employees can initiate programs that integrate both learning and fun.

    What’s your company culture like?

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