How would you feel if your company allows you to get your pet at work, or what if they organize a cake-fight for all the employees in the office itself?Sounds fun right? This is what Indian startups are currently doing to make their employees imagine more and brainstorm for innovative ideas. What else? On-demand service company, UrbanClap has specially formed a team of four members to organise fun activities for the employees.
As reported by The Economic Times, startups like TinyOwl, LivSpace, DogSpot, Junglee Games and Intellipaat belong to a separate generation of startups with a goal of having greater work engagement and more out-of-the box ideas that help the startups stand out.
This new breed of startups, fuelled by liberal doses of funding, is basically designing a work culture that emphasizes on creative thinking and collaboration among different departments, which doesn’t happen on a daily basis. To do this, they provide a plethora of activities including health and wellness sessions, team outings, hobby classes, provisions for indoor games, movies, book clubs and much more.
Suresh Bhagavatula, assistant professor of entrepreneurship at the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore says, "I have a feeling it's a function of boom time.
In a boom time there is a lot of exuberance and positive thoughts or energy around; then people may want to invest in all this. If there is a recession, all this will become much more serious—it's a reflection of what is out there in the economy."
"China is not doing too well and I am sure Chinese startups won't be doing the same thing
Bhagavatula, personally, isn’t much convinced with the idea of workplace fun. Bringing in light the other side he says, "It needs to be studied in greater detail than to just say that cool culture leads to better work. There has not been much research done to see whether it is actually a distraction. I assume so at some point it will become."
Recently, DogSpot, a four-year-old pet supply store, has allowed its employees to bring their pets along at work. As per the company’s co-founder Rana Atheya, “it helped fill gaps in inter-department communication.”
For gaming company Junglee Games, one of its periodic poker nights led to the creation of a new variant of the popular three-card game 'teen-patti', called Royal Teen Patti, which has attracted almost 2 million users.
Not just this, but LivSpace, a home design and decor platform held a 48-hour design hackathon that included beer and pizza in the office. The designers were presented 1,000 photographs and design software and "we asked them to create beautiful imagery," said co-founder and CEO, Anuj Srivastava. The company revamped its website with these images, and has been attracting at least 10,000 page visitors since June, from about 3,000 earlier.
"Designers haven't worked in the crazy internet world. They come from partner-driven firms where the culture's different, where owners are God. They take calls from them and here we ask for ideas," said Srivastava
Anand Lunia, founder of seed-stage venture fund IndiaQuotient and also an investor in DogSpot however says, "Startups have realised (that) in their world it's not the number of people but amount of efficiency and effectiveness of each employee (that matters). This needs an environment that is conducive. Ordinary people have to perform extraordinary tasks and have to go beyond their past results."
Even so, investors, too, are beginning to ask entrepreneurs about how they plan to build their startup's work culture, although this is not a prerequisite to signing a cheque. "Smart, experienced investors understand that apart from numbers and metrics it's important to build an organisation, especially at a time where companies are growing fast," said Varun Khaitan, co-founder of UrbanClap, which is backed by SAIF Partners, Accel Partners and Snapdeal co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal.
But the litmus test will be when the chips are down, said entrepreneur-turned-investor Ronnie Screwvala. "If you are 15 days late with salary, will it make a difference if you have a dart board in the office, are eating 'pani puri' on Wednesdays or going to the pub on Fridays? I don't think so," said Screwvala.
"No one has gone through that right now, because they are still in their multiple funding rounds," he added.
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