Next-Gen Entrepreneurs: Strategies for Tomorrow's Transformative Era Ep.1 Future of Workspaces

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Welcome to MySensei, the podcast for entrepreneurs and founder led businesses that are looking to navigate the dynamic world of business. As usual, I'm your host, Denise Creisson. And today I'm joined by my guest Ravi Ranganathan, who is joining us from Chennai. Ravi, welcome to the show. Thank you. So we're doing things a little bit different for the next few segments. What we are going to be doing is having a discussion. My guest Ravi is very influential in the space of entrepreneurship. So we are going to be covering different areas that are quite key to entrepreneurs right now in the current business landscape. So Ravi, can you please introduce yourself? Please tell us about your background and also about your work with entrepreneurship. Great. Thanks, Denise. And thank you for the opportunity. I want to start off by saying that I did my schooling in the States. And even though, I come from a kind of well to do family, I learned the dignity of labor when I went to the States where I was able to do small jobs at minimum wages. But still be very proud and happy about doing those jobs. And it was good because as a youngster, I could be independent and at the same time have dignity of labor. Which is very important and I felt over the decades, this was 1980s. Over the decades now, I see this even more important with the youngsters today. They want a lot of dignity in what they do, whatever that might be right. And it's very important at this point in time. My first professional role I was a product manager with United Distillers working with alcohol. And I launched a few multinational brands in India. Prominent one was Vat 69. And then I worked with an automotive organization like Ford Motor Company, and we set up a few dealerships in South India. And then I worked with Enzo's Bank as a Retail Bank Manager. And then subsequently as a Marketing, Merchandising H ead. And then I was lucky to get into entrepreneurship, right? So I was proud promoter of practice education in India. And being an early pioneer in this field we were able to set up a franchisee network. Even though one aspect of it is a passion for education and, why I took up the domain of learning and development. The other aspect is people development in terms of entrepreneurs, right? I'm proud to say that I was able to develop 100 plus entrepreneurs who are able to create an autonomous, flexible self employable revenue source for themselves, who are not under the stress of a work environment. So one of the challenges in the work environment is not really the money, right? So a lot of people make good money as salaried employees. But it's the flexibility and autonomy that you get, the empowerment you get as an entrepreneur, which gives the drive to entrepreneurship. I was able to experience it myself. And I saw that in a lot of people that I developed. Interestingly, after a decade of entrepreneurship, I also realized that entrepreneurship is not rosy heaven, where everything works out well, if you want to have a stress free life, a salary job is a much better job. A lot of people think, you're an entrepreneur, you're actually stress free, you don't have the pressure of workspace. But then I felt that. Workspace gives you a lot more comfort because you know the salary is a particular date every month. You also know that there is health and safety for your family, you also know that there is a social circle that you can belong to because it's established by the organization. All of which is not there for an entrepreneur, right? Entrepreneur has to create his own social network. They have to support their health and family. And they have to keep driving themselves. There's no respite. There is no end to some of the things that we do. Every time you make a million, then you're going to go up to 10 million. It's 10 million. Then it's 30 million. Then it's 30 million. It's a hundred million. It's not going to stop. You just keep running. And that is just that an entrepreneur has. Salary job gives you that comfort. So I realized that learning and development was my passion. So I got that for a large IT company called HCL Tech where I was able to travel across the globe. And I was also in leadership development with 10 Blanchett certification and a few other certifications. Finally I set up a cybersecurity academy with an organization called K7 Computing. And I also headed EduTech technical skilling business for L& T EduTech, which is a very large industrial conglomerate in India. And I was part of that journey as well. I'm passionate about entrepreneurship and more than that, I believe that in another decade's time. Most of the people are not going to be employees. They're going to be self employed and a more autonomous, flexible, career oriented people. I see that in youngsters today, they want that. And I think organizations will respond that way also. So it's, how am I going to prepare myself for that world? Thank you, Ravi. You've got a wealth of experience and we're very excited to have you on the show with us and we'll be continuing the conversation with you over the next couple of months as well. So the topic for this series is going to be what does the future of the workspace look like? And there's a number of areas that I wanted to ask to maybe explore today. So I'm going to start off with the trend of increase of remote work. What are your thoughts on that? I think you mentioned it nicely because during one of our discussions, you said that I started using the word workspace rather than workplace, right? Workplace is what was trained in the industrial era, right? We all go to a workplace and we work and there was a productivity increase. There were people who are studying, motion and they were optimizing it. And, you are increasing productivity by reducing waste. But then today. It's all about freedom, autonomy, and also the flexibility that we want as human beings. We don't want to be a machine. If I have to do the non autonomous or monotonous work again and again, I can make a machine do that. Even things like today reading news, a bot is able to do that. A teller in a shop, a machine can do that. So some of these things are not anymore enriching as a human being. We wanna do more interesting things. So remote work gives you that flexibility. The first thing more than the commute, the safety of health and other things, people after the pandemic have been given this opportunity to relook at their career drives and they realize that being with loved ones doing things that you like to do along with what you do as part of your career makes things so interesting for them. Another thing that kind of happened along with this is a concept called moonlighting. Where I'm able to share my expertise with multiple interested employers. An employer is not owning me anymore. I have my ability and I have a knowledge and I can sell it to the highest bidder. So this is a challenge that many organizations face. And there are entrepreneurs who are able to embrace this. And actually encourage certain audiences to do this so that they were able to give the best to them. And there were certain organizations which found it very difficult to handle this. So they said, if you're doing moonlighting, they're going to bar you from work. Or we are not going to give you the opportunities that we would otherwise give you. And some of the organizations are pulling back remote work because they feel that there is a loss of control, but I think it's something that you need to accept. And from what I heard in the U. S. Already 20 to 30 percent of work has migrated to remote kind of role. In a role there is a huge migration that is happening, especially in the tech space, remote is happening in a big way. But I also see this in legal area. Law is another area where remote is picking up big time. Banking, it's picking up. IT, it, it's a given, right? So technology space, a lot of people are comfortable doing remote, but then it's moving out of that also healthcare legal support marketing. Design architects. So a lot of people are now moving to remote space, which is very encouraging. And I think it is a trend that it's just going to get bigger and bigger. I agree with you on that. And I've got some experience working in organizations that are 100 percent remote. And one of the interesting things that I found I was working as Head of People is that for those that were Gen X, like me, I absolutely loved working in the remote working environment because I was able to fit it in well with my work life balance that I had, it was during COVID and, I had a small child at home and I was having to navigate trying to do homeschooling, which was really a poor quality experience for me, even though with my teaching background, teaching my own kids was something else. And it seemed absolutely fantastic and that everyone would love to do it but in conversations with some of the younger demographics in the organization, they mentioned things like loneliness and not having the opportunity to form strong bonds. And I think back to a time working in a bricks and mortar type environment where we would often meet at the coffee machine or meet in the canteen with people from different departments and you were able to build relationships through non work specific related like tasks. And I realized through these conversations that young people were at a loss for not having that type of environment. So some of the solutions that I'd implemented at those type of companies was, creating socialization as part of the work that we were doing. So important. Yes. From my experience when I said remote I'm saying organization should embrace remote. But not go a hundred percent remote. In all of these organizations, which I talked about, they specifically have programs for socializing. So they have a movie night. They have lunch together Friday afternoon. Everybody's expected to be in the office because they're going to have a great lunch together. It's pizza on the house kind of a thing. They ensure that they incentivize employees to come to office. Food is a great way of incentivizing people. It absolutely is. I'm sorry. It's many organizations have two, three days where they have lunch together. Another organization that I had they ensure that all their team meetings was not virtual meetings. They actually came to office, but it was not on a daily basis. It used to happen once in three days, once in four days a thing. But they ensured that team meetings were face to face. So the leader in that group, they decided that team meetings will happen together. Another organization I talked about gave a movie. They'll screen, latest movies and they'll have some snacks available, popcorn and a few other things. So people would come there, they'll talk about work and they'll also, do something fun there. It's a hybrid model where you create social areas where people can meet and gel and still give them the flexibility because, as you rightly pointed out demographically, right? People who are below 30 would find it very difficult to be alone and, not socialized. Be at home and sit in front of the laptop and work all the time. At the same time, people who are above 30 or people who have created families for themselves would want that flexibility because they understand they have multiple roles beyond the work life balance kicks in there, right? Maybe as a parent or as a child who's taking care of their elderly in the home, or a person who's supporting the partner, or pursuing something social past that they want to contribute to the society that they live in. So they have multiple areas of interest. And that demographic that's 30 to 40 would actually really appreciate this. And there is this above 40 who, again, interestingly, want the brick and mortar model, right? So they are settled or they're in a space where they want control and they feel that giving a lot of remote work makes them lose control. So they feel that people should be around them. They should listen to what they're talking about. They should understand and they should see the person working. There is a tool called Sapiens which actually monitors the number of hours person is in front of the screen. It irritates some people because I don't want to be monitored by a machine, right? It's a tough thing to do, but they are selling it as a solution in certain organizations. And this is not a very comfortable zone for certain groups of people, right? So end of the day it is a fine balance between flexibility and autonomy. So it's something that you need to think of. So I have a view on that. I see it as policing. And if you need to resort to policing in your organization, then you've got to work on the culture. So I think it's an opportunity. Feel that they need to have that control or they are losing control for maybe a bit of upskilling for them to learn how to navigate the 100% remote working environment because it does provide a lot of advantages. Now, some of the solutions that I've used because it hasn't always been possible to actually have a hybrid model, like one of the companies I worked for, the staff was scattered over several countries. And so it was having to create opportunities for socialization where we're able to be inclusive and be able to invite everyone. So managing time zones was a challenge for me, but we were able to do it like I'd implemented happy hours, which we did every month and it was the last Thursday of every month. So again having a specific date that, the whole organization knew, the last Thursday of every month for the last hour of work, we would all get together and we would play games, and some of the games that we played involved splitting into teams and these were not in their work teams. These were like just randomly selected in the game that we would be playing, and they had an opportunity to really start to form relationships with people from other departments. We always had the SLT or the senior leadership team, coming and joining in. And this helped with managing up creating the lines of communication from the ops level, tactical level all the way up to the strategic level of the organization because they've spoken to these leaders already through the socials that we had. It opens that line of communication for the different levels of the organization. We also had a coffee morning every Wednesday. Now the coffee morning was to replace the water cooler situation where people could go in and meet at the water cooler and do pass-timing and just talk about what programs they're watching on TV or what's trending in the news. And these were really very interesting events. It was meant to be for 15 minutes, the first 15 minutes every Wednesday morning and it was anyone that wanted to join, they just knew, if they felt like joining that Wednesday morning, we'd always be having a coffee morning. We had different people dipping in and out. And you really got to know the staff and start to get to know what they were interested in. And there was also a lot of conversations that were very innovative because they were exploring what the organization was doing, and leveraging some of the weaker ties that we actually had, and they were bringing in fresh information that was actually helping the senior leadership team to say, wow, these are some of the growing trends that are actually happening and these are areas that we need to explore. Can I just reflect on what you just said? Yes, just two lines. If I may. So the first thought is you mentioned a lot about leadership and that's critical, right? For remote work to happen, you need a leader who understands remote workspace and who understands managing people in virtual environments, right? It is not the same as handling people in front of you, right? It's a different ballgame. And as a leader, you have to take a decision. Am I equipped to handle people in a virtual space? So that's very important as a leader because if the leader is not comfortable in this environment, a lot of things can go wrong. So I think that's a very important point that you mentioned. And the leadership's buy in and the leadership's drive to make remote work is critical for success Another thing that you mentioned and I felt many things that you said, I can basket it under one large topic about organizational culture. What is culture in an organization? It's events it's values that we commonly believe in. It is the interaction that we have with people. It's the communication channels that are created in the system. These are all aspects of the organizational culture. So whatever you mentioned, if I can put it into these baskets and build it around a model and say that for remote working, you need to tune the organizational culture to drive remote work, right? So one, I think the most critical one is to get a strong buy in with the leadership. And understand that remote workspace is a ballgame. Some people who are adept understand how it works and they adapt to that space, some people don't. And that's a big difference between success and failure and how it works. Second thing is once you've got that in place getting the culture tuned to make the whole process work is very important as well. That's, just a summary of what I my understanding is. Yes and you've mentioned something that's really key, which is on how the leaders set the climate in every organization. And it's important as a leader to make sure that they are creating the right culture through some of what, they are celebrating. Now this is particularly key because what you celebrate in an organization will form what that culture is in the organization. Because there's a saying if I try to remember Something like infants cry for it and men die for it. And it's it's recognition. And we all fundamentally are looking for how we can gain recognition. And it may be an unconscious thing that we do. But for you as a leader, whoever, whatever you are recognizing and celebrating in your organization will form the organizational culture. So I remember seeing a case study where there was a company where there were two individuals. A gentleman that was struggling in his role and was having to work until 2 a. m. in the morning and was, very disorganized. And there was a lady that, driven and motivated by having to do a lot of the child rearing, had to finish work by 5 p. m. to go and pick up her child. That had motivated her to be very organized and make sure that she had completed her deliverables by 5:00 PM every day. But in the mornings the boss would come in and celebrate the gentleman and say,'this is the type of people that we want, that are putting in long hours', very strong case. Yeah. Yeah, it happens. And so many people would be lost because of, the understanding of communication that was It's a very sad situation. I can really empathize with what you're saying, but it's something that I think organizations have to be cognizant of because just because somebody is organized, somebody is able to deliver in spite of their challenges because they're delivering, we don't go deep into understanding what kind of challenges that they face. We assume that it's a cakewalk for them and really don't know how much they're paying as a price. What you said makes a ton of sense. And I hope that empathy comes with leaders and they are able to connect or being able to do a proper audit so that they can diagnose where loyalties actually lie, because here was a case of efficiency that was being overlooked for someone that was presumably, putting in many hours, but they were actually inefficient. So you know, this person that is working until 2am perhaps needed to get some support on how to, maybe be able to manage their workload better. It's a big challenge because I was facilitating integration in Denmark, right? And Danish people, when I interacted with them, I understood that they are very focused on how they spend time because time is a very limited resource they have. The waking hours are very limited. If 9. 30 is office hour, 9. 30, everybody's at their desk. They don't even take too many coffee breaks. They take a big jug of coffee and it sits there. And even lunch breaks are limited. They finish their work early and they leave by say four o'clock or an hour before the scheduled time. And I had a group of Indian people who were posted in that space. Now they're used to coming a little late in the office because they work late. The culture was such that in India, they were naturally, tuned to coming late to office. So they built that same discipline there and they would come to office late and then they would go directly to lunch and have a good lunch break. And they will effectively start working at two, three, when the Danish people are finishing their work, and they will sit till eight, nine in the evening. And they'll finish all their work and talk to their Indian colleagues also who are supporting them from India and they were thinking that they were doing a great job, but the Danish counterpart was saying, my God these people are not tuned with what we are doing, I have to finish my work I'm dependent on this person, but this person, even though their office timing is and so they're starting late and that's putting my work off. So there was a sense of conflict there. Yeah. So then we had to talk through this thing and once they opened up and they shared their thoughts the scheduling was easier things were working in that way. So it's all about communication, opening those lines. So sometimes we don't even understand what the problem is. Instead of branding, saying, these people are like this and these people are like this. If you talk, things can make a world of change. And Ravi, that's an area that I think that we need to add our list of topics, the cross cultural management and the friction that can arise from not having effective communication and understanding how the different cultures actually work and being able to navigate with having two or more cultures working together and, the different working styles. Thank you, Ravi. And I think on that note, that might be a good place for us to end today's segment. And it's been a wonderful conversation that we've had today. I think we had said that we'll do 10 minutes, but as you can see, there's a lot to uncover. And for those listening in, please join us for more sessions. We've got a lot of topics that we want to cover over the course of the next couple of months. We'll be doing releases, I think bi weekly for the next couple of months. Just to remind you that if you looking for other resources, please do visit our website, which is www.mysenseihub.com. And we look forward to you joining us in future segments. We are going to be having an open mic as well. So I think, once a month we'll do that. We'll invite you as the audience to come and you can ask us questions on any of the topics that we've covered or any questions that you like as well. Put us on the hot seat and test us. I'm sure Ravi won't mind as well for us doing that. I'm excited. End of the day it's lovely to connect with people who want to make the world a better place. I'm all in for it. Thank you, Denise, for making this possible not just for me, but for the audience who might really need what you're sharing with them. Thanks again and to you as well. I'm your host, Denise Creisson, and I'm here with my co-host Ravi Ranganathan. And we look forward to bringing you our next segment later on in the week.