It’s true that remote working is not for everyone – some of us prefer the office environment, others find it impossible to concentrate while working at home or a co-working space, and some of us know that our company’s culture and communication styles would not thrive in a remote setup. But, there are some common… Continue reading How to make remote working efficient
Inefficient Meetings at your Startup?
According to research, 65% of managers say meetings keep them from work and deep thinking 30-40% of the hours we spend in meetings aren’t productive Are there ways to improve meetings? The HBR article “Why Your Meetings Stink – And What To Do About It.” by Steven Rogelberg goes into detail about how to make… Continue reading Inefficient Meetings at your Startup?
Scaling your Startup's Culture without Ruining it
Scaling from Team of 5 to 10, to 20+ When you’re first starting out, your entire team is close to the founders and everyone has a role that’s obvious and crucial to success. The organization is ‘flat’. You’ve avoided hiring the wrong talent. Then what happens? You grow, and “Unique Jobs are lost, Conformity is… Continue reading Scaling your Startup's Culture without Ruining it
Bad Manager Behavior
What constitutes bad manager behavior? It looks like over the past 5 years, there has been somewhat consistent interest in this topic (see graph below)! “People quit their managers, not their companies.” That quote rings true to many, and as Jack Altman of Lattice notes: the manager relationship is highly correlated with employee engagement. A… Continue reading Bad Manager Behavior
Toxic Beware: Bad Startup Culture
With scandalous stories about the less than stellar culture at unicorn startups like Revolut, Uber, Theranos, Zenefits, etc, it has a lot of us thinking about how bad culture can really get, why, and how to ‘fix’ it. Nipping Bad Startup Culture in the Bud First of all, What is a Toxic Culture? Where the… Continue reading Toxic Beware: Bad Startup Culture
Incivility in the Workplace
There is a great interview with Dr. Jody Foster on the knowledge@wharton podcast regarding workplace incivility. There is some focus on healthcare/Penn Medicine but the lessons can be applied to any industry. It also highlights the difficulties of changing a culture vs creating and nurturing one from scratch. The main takeaways: If you’re clear about… Continue reading Incivility in the Workplace
Perks of Flexible Working
Sahil Lavingia, the founder of Gumroad gave this outstanding interview where flexible working is a central topic – pretty different to most of the Founder content we get these days. Flexible working – more important than remote work? Apparently it is! Among the main takeaways: Flexible working arrangements are more important than remote work, profit… Continue reading Perks of Flexible Working
Giving Feedback the Right Way
Giving feedback is hard – sometimes we don’t even know how to give positive feedback in the right way, and it becomes even harder with remote team members. In The Feedback Fallacy, Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall tell us how we’ve been doing it wrong. The article is best accompanied by the podcast episode, What… Continue reading Giving Feedback the Right Way
How to Build a Startup Culture
In this post, Ozan Dagdeviren writes about how culture is just as important as product-market fit (well, 2nd most important 😉 ) The way he defines culture is simple and if you’re just getting started on the while topic, it’s worth a read. Your culture is how you recruit, acclimate new members, set goals, measure… Continue reading How to Build a Startup Culture
WTF is Work-Life Balance?
Here we have 3 good articles to understand why we all seem to be struggling with work-life balance, and start working improving it: Dottie Chong rounds up the ways in which we can avoid vacation-shaming at startups. Late Night Froyo gives us 3 steps to taking control of our life that seem simple but are… Continue reading WTF is Work-Life Balance?