‘We are a big firm now, not the Wild West’
NITIN SETH
When people appeared for interview here, they were always offered a massive salary hike. Has that gone away now?
In the early stages we were over exuberant and, in hindsight, we were irrational. Now there is more clarity on how we want to peg ourselves, which is at the high end in the market. For every role in the company, we have a benchmark. It means that if somebody should be given a 40 per cent increase we will do it, but if someone should be given a 15-20 per cent increase, we will do that too. The sheer point is that there is rational a behaviour coming in. I would say we are a big company now and not the Wild West.
You had a reshuffle at the start of the year and a lot of top talent has quit since then. Has this affected employee morale?
It is fair to say that the last year was full of big experiments and some of them did not go very well. We made many business and management calls. This year, we had to go through a “let’s fix our house process”, which meant there was a reshuffle in the management team. There are two ways of looking at it — there is change happening and there is uncertainty. You can say nothing’s wrong, everything’s fine and we will keep going that merry way. But I think there is tremendous amount of honesty in this company. If we felt there was something not going right, we have stopped and taken corrective actions.
The second thing I would say is that the management team that we have today, is one of the most high quality management teams you can have anywhere. I would really struggle to see how many companies have anything even close to this quality of leadership. It has taken some time and we have gone through a process. You know there was a period when we had an 18-member management team.
How do you keep up employees’ morale during such times?
In this business, from an employee sentiment perspective, there is nothing that works like business success. You know Flipsters are not here to do just ordinary jobs, they are not driven just by salary. They are here to do something exceptional. If you see our BBD (Big Billion Day) sale, we had each of our 12 offices packed with hundreds of people who were here for 24 hours for 5 days in a row. If anything, the number of people we estimated who would be staying in the offices was a lot more. That happened not because we were giving people some kind of an incentive or some money for doing those things. It is that DNA. It is very important to understand the Flipster DNA, and that it is driven by that kind of sense of success.