AMA

Haha! This is the most asked question. The role of HR has evolved a lot for good. In my company we haven’t spent on rangoli even once (6 years and going on) :)

I could speak for my startup here. We are highly focussed on culture. Business and people are two sides of the coin. Without people, no business; without sustainable business model or revenue, no people.

I am seeing a trend that companies will become more people friendly, specially the ones who are working for the long term. The generation these days do not just want money, they need a proper culture to grow. This demand will influence the supply.

Culture should not be evaluated by perks (Google’s example). Those are add-ons and are a function of revenue/profit. Culture is and should not be a function of revenue. It is something that is dependent on internal factors only.

You're heart seems to be in the right place. One thing I've noticed is this all gets lost in translation and hard to scale and implement beyond a certain company size. It's easy to control for culture when you're young as you filter during hiring process, but gets harder and culture effectively dilutes as you get close to IPOs. I've seen this in many companies. How do you plan to tackle this?

Compensation benchmarking is one of the most complex process for any company, more so for startups. The recent layoffs, aggressive hiring, limited good talent pool leads to a wide fluctuations.

We use benchmarks reports and also use open data available (just for referencing).

Variables we look at are criticality of the role, relevant experience of the candidate, and to some extent past compensation.

Industry standards are usually the reports provided by HR consulting companies like Aon, Mercer etc.

Thanks a lot 🙌🏻

I'm looking for a genuine conversation. Would like to update my bias if this is untrue. My bad if this comes acros as accusatory

I am working as a mid manager in one of the HR functions in a well funded mature startup (decacorn) and will try to answer this. There is a huge misconception among tech bros about HR - HR only does rangoli, send mails, run POSH committees, hire & fire etc. However, the spectrum of HR is very wider than what it appears to external folks and it all boil downs to Ceos / founders on how they view the humans as resources.

A smart one knows that people can make/break the business in long term and explores the HR spectrum (learning, growth, wellness, culture, values etc.) to optimise for better business outcomes. End of the day, if my founder is not pushing me to execute creatively to manage humans, I will not do it. Same goes with any other function in any organization.

There are a very few Indian companies where HR can push back the functional leaders and call out on any possible employee exploitation. It all depends on how the top management want to play the people game and HR themselves being the employees of the company will have to stick to that.

In our company, we dont have esop options for all. It is given to senior members. However we offer esops to people (across levels) if they have completed certain years in the org. We dont have a fixed formula as of now and it depends on what the candidate is seeking (cash vs esop).

I know of startups who offer esop from the range of 0.5x to 2x of CTC as esops.

Industry: deep tech