The story behind Chargebee's Adaptive Workplace Model
Some background:
About 3 months ago, the System Design team at Chargebee piloted a co-working project as part of the Adaptive Workplace Model in India.
What is the Adaptive Workplace Model? Why are we writing about this? And why now?
Let's work through the questions in reverse order, shall we?
Why now?
2.5 years into the pandemic, the Future of Work seems to be a constantly evolving topic — one that places the employee at the heart of running a successful business. Not a novel concept by any means. But the expectations of and from employees have changed significantly. It's not about the foosball tables or free food or fancy workspaces anymore. The needs of employees significantly differ now, depending on the stage of their life or growth. For instance, Gen-Z employees and managers seek personal interactions and networking opportunities. Employees who are also parents seek a lot more flexibility that actively supports work-life balance without having an induced fear of missing out. New employees seek to acquire tribal knowledge and align with culture when they join companies.
Add to it, retention has become a bigger challenge now more than ever. Companies are still grappling with figuring out the perfect balance between high productivity and flexibility. We did too. It's a tricky rope to walk on.
Why are we writing about this?
We wanted to document our learnings in the process of figuring out what works and what doesn’t. Before we delve into that, let us paint you a picture — probably one that you lived.
Thursday morning, 12th March, 2020, 9 AM IST:
Much like any other Thursday morning, folks at Chargebee trickled into the office. Some were playing their first round of table tennis. Night shift folks were headed back home. Client calls, team standups, some laughter here, some yawns there, conversations everywhere...
Someone even sneezed and loudly and jokingly proclaimed, "Don't worry, it's not Covid", without quite realizing how severe this word would likely become in the future. As folks broke for their evening break, we get this email from our Senior VP of People Success.
Thursday evening, 12th March, 2020, around 4:20 PM IST:
Just as 400 or so laptops disconnected from the office Wifi one after the other, never did we have a clue that it would be a goodbye to the office internet.
Does anyone still remember the old WiFi password/s 😃? Has it been more than 2 years already? Why does it still feel like 2020 on steroids?
Lockdown Woes
On the night of March 23rd, the first Covid lockdowns were announced and in an instant, things changed forever for all of us.
For the Chargebee tribe, it was a first in many ways: A totally remote working option was explored and initiated for the 400-strong employee base.
The next few months posed a new challenge in many fronts: Managing family, managing work, and taking care of ourselves (harnessing the power of ME TIME is underrated).
The New Normal
As the days and months passed, the employees and the organization took baby steps trying to navigate through, understand, and grow in the situation together.
Zoom meetings shifted from the couch to the living rooms and balconies as the new normal had everyone trying to make the best of every available option.
But, with home offices playing a big role in the development of an individual and the organization, there were a lot of questions:
What will the future of work look like?
What would be the productivity levels if we continue the current work mode?
What are the employees thinking about the current situation?
What can be done to empower and enable employees better in the current setup?
A more pertinent question that was posed by our Co-Founder and COO, Rajaraman Santhanam was, "How are we going to operate as a company post-covid in terms of mobility?"
We realized we needed to think long term, with sustainability in mind.
A few months into going fully remote while continuing to add more folks in different teams, it was important to understand the pulse of the organization and empower every employee to bring their best to the table.
To understand the situation better, the System Design team conducted a study in which around 85+ employees from various teams, levels, and locations within the organization were contacted one-on-one to discuss their individual experiences, difficulties, and expectations during early 2021.
This was followed up by an org-wide Pulse Survey in the June of 2021.
The pulse survey was instrumental in helping us analyze and understand various data points on individuals, teams & their locations, nature of work, networking, collaborations, and their every day emotional well-being in a remote set-up.
The results indicated that around 87% of our employees felt their productivity levels either stayed intact or improved.
Although this was a big plus in terms of productivity and business, it came with a host of challenges around social connect, work-life balance, cross-functional collaborations, and peer bonding.
Also, as 60% of the employees felt a need to connect with their team in a physical space occasionally, it was an early indication that we might as well start looking for office spaces.
These data points, in turn, assisted various team leaders and managers to identify specific challenges around work-life balance, infrastructure, and the need to create a sense of belonging to the company. A comprehensive plan that would cater to and solve these challenges was needed.
The Regrouping
We continued to visit and revisit the drawing board to create a thorough working plan and maintained a close eye on any teams that felt they needed an office space to function more efficiently.
On the other hand, as we took steady strides in our journey to expand as a remote-first organization, there were noticeable changes all over as we now had a chance to hire from an extended, deeper talent pool across the nation.
Career pages were updated and the talent acquisition team was empowered to accommodate recruitment from every part of the nation as we saw a steady growth in the employee numbers.
The Chargebee tribe was now 600+ in India alone.
In August of 2021, a plan was finally made ready to address the challenges we discovered during the survey.
Due to the uncertainty caused by the pandemic, the organization was looking to put together a work model that can evolve and fit into any situation and empower the employees to be at peace and perform at their best.
In short, the work model needed to be “Adaptive”.
What is the Adaptive Workplace Model (AWM)?
The AWM was a working model created with adaptability and flexibility as the two arms that reach out and tackle every challenge relating to the business, employees, and situations without compromising any of the organization's current systems and procedures..
This model had 3 important work modes based on roles, responsibilities, and functions.
Office - Employees with roles that require an office space would work in this mode and will be residing in the same city/ location as their team for the ease of access.
Hybrid - Depending on the roles, responsibilities, and the availability of workspaces in a region, employees may work out of dedicated office spaces two to three times a week and work from home on the other days.
Remote - If the roles and responsibilities of an employee do not demand a physical presence, they may continue to work remotely. This work mode is also applicable to regions that may have environmental and situational restrictions such as the pandemic.
These work modes were enabled via mediums like social meet-ups, workations, and co-working spaces (reimbursable by the organization) as part of AWM.
Adaptive Workplace Model also included our regular offsites with clear agendas and compliance protocols around vaccine status and health checks.
AWM: Some Noteworthy Features
AWM gave the employees the room and flexibility to do everything we wanted to and needed to, without compromising our work.
Whether it was working from a beautiful resort in the Himalayas, taking some time off to catch up with our friends for an evening game of badminton, or even having some time and support to tend to an ailing friend or family member, AWM was instrumental in lending a helping hand to make lives a little easy.
AWM enables the employees with a chance to experiment with Asynchronous or ‘Async’ work mode (Async is a flexible working style that is aimed to empower employees to break free from live meetings and work on their own timings unless there was an urgent dependency) to tackle challenges surrounding collaborations, networking, and time management across the organization .
*Since these challenges seem to be ever evolving and ever present, Async is just one of our experiments in our journey to find a comprehensive solution in the future.Well, if you have been with us this far and are curious to know about how we have implemented the AWM model at Chargebee, subscribe to Chargebee’s Substack!