New trend at startups: Open-for-all meetings

NEW DELHI | BENGALURU: As senior executives of payment gateway Razorpay put their heads together to ideate on a sales strategy, in walked a millennial uninvited — amobile programming executive. It isn't uncommon these days to see people of all ages attend meetings in startups.

These firms are also now experimenting with cross-functional engagements, including those where employees attend meetings that are outside of their job descriptions. Another trend is crisper and more productive meetings. For instance, in the US, San Francisco-headquartered Pivotal, a $2.8 billion enterprise-software company, has reduced its meeting time to as low as 10 minutes a day. As startups grow, some are embracing the open-for-all meeting culture, no matter which team is having the meeting — be it operations, product, or engineering.

Companies like Razorpay, Bank-Bazaar, Chaayos, CashKaro, Paytm, BabyChakra and Furlenco have seen increased interest in such engagements, as they seek to enhance their business model. "Millennials don't join a company to do just one job. They want to be presented with new challenges and tasks all the time. Promoting an open-meeting culture only helps companies encourage millennials," said Anuradha Bharat, head of people operations at Razorpay. The company has seen that this also helps with better retention. BankBazaar typically sees its senior manager staffers attend meetings of other teams as well, so that they can be aware of business trends. "Sometimes, fluid meetings allow for employees to speak each other’s language easily. We've also seen a big jump in teamwork,” said its chief human resource officer, Sriram Vaidhyanathan.



While this is not something BabyChakra has formally institutionalised, founder Naiyya Saggi said the process is part of its open culture. The company actively encourages teams to be part of each other’s meetings. "This often works very well when there are interesting problems to solve, as it allows for a broader perspective of looking at the subject and gives a multi-disciplinary approach," said Saggi.

Employees — especially millennials — do not want to be constrained by one role. They have the energy, enthusiasm and interest and want to learn and ideate beyond their own teams, said Manav Jain, associate vice-president Paytm. “It’s very common to see employees from across functions — be it product, tech, operations, sales or support — huddled together trying to solve a customer problem,” said Jain.

CashKaro cofounder Swati Bhargava said that the company has witnessed quite a few crossfunctional movements in recent months, thanks to employees attending meetings from across different teams. "They realised they wanted to work in that team instead, for instance, the company's current head of operations who used to be in customer relations.”

At CashKaro, an employee who started off in its international business team would sit in on meetings with the SEO (search engine optimisation) team to know more about how they worked with marketing and mailers, and ideated with them on different projects. “He later undertook his own research and presented us with a case-study as to why he should join the SEO team. He then made the shift,” said Bhargava.

Here, three whiteboards denote what meetings will take place, when. This is one way by which employees can keep themselves updated and choose to walk in to other teams’ meetings if they want to. Furlenco's chief operating officer Ashwin Venkatraman also said there had been cases where people attended meetings of teams they were not related to and wanted to get involved on a deeper scale. "We-’ve also had movements on the product front — one employee who was previously on the growth and acquisition team now takes care of product management," he said. At the Chaayos office, all team meetings are open meetings.

Anyone can become part of any meeting to listen in, and contribute later to the person who was leading the discussion.