Last fortnight, I used two examples to illustrate poor treatment of employees inside start-ups. One was a strange job posting by a leading food delivery start-up founder where the employee had to pay the salary to the employer and the other was a comment by the founder of a quick commerce company that work-life balance was something he recommended to his competitors. Sadly, this is a topic that keeps on giving.
Last week, the human resources manager at a Gurgaon-based luxury salon services start-up posted on social media their concerns about the mental health and wellness of their employees. Seemingly, the HR manager surveyed all employees with some questions and also asked them to rate their individual stress levels. I was very impressed by this initiative and felt more start-ups must take similar steps. The twist in the social media post was right at the end. Post survey, the company decided to (you won’t believe this) let go all employees with high stress levels. Apparently, this was done to bring down the overall and the average stress levels in the start-up. I was speechless. Undoubtedly, the mathematical goal in absolutes and averages were met but did this pass the smell test?
Owing to stressed marketing budgets, start-ups constantly try to create viral content to build awareness about their company. A popular approach is to treat any news, including bad news, as good news, as opposed to the traditional thinking that no news is good news and bad news is terrible news. The important question is how consumers respond to a start-up’s image of their corporate culture. A few years back, when Uber was an upstart and the media was full of news about them fighting local taxi groups across many cities in the world or how the company treated the drivers and the stressful working conditions inside, how many of us chose not to use their rides? I suspect hardly any. We read about poor employee practices or toxic behaviour by founders at popular start-ups; do we stop using their services? Conversely, assuming an airline company has built a solid image as an employee friendly company, how many of us would buy their Chennai-Delhi tickets over a competing airline even though their tickets are 10 per cent higher priced? None, I am certain.
The truth is, consumers rarely base their buying behaviour on the corporate practices of service providers. Our shopping is based on two pillars — fear and greed. Recent results show that revenues at the popular food delivery and quick commerce firms I mentioned earlier have been surging. Start-ups know they can get away with all kinds of employee transgressions, confident that business will not be affected. It is important for founders to understand that treating the workforce fairly without breaking their trust should be a non-negotiable internal culture and not a revenue-dependent tactic.
(The writer is a serial entrepreneur and best-selling author of the book “Failing to Succeed” He tweets @vaitheek)