How we scale our Tech culture at Freshworks
“Culture forms the bedrock of everything we do at Freshworks.”
– Suman Gopalan, CHRO Freshworks
When the pandemic broke out in March 2020, at Freshworks we were apprehensive about a lot of things, particularly about how we were going to collaborate across teams in different locations and get things done.
Fast forward to September, we are quite proud of how far we have come, and of all the things we have been able to achieve. All credit goes to our leaders and employees who rose to the challenge. We could not have asked for a better team! Perhaps this is why our CEO, Girish Mathrubootham always reiterates, “Freshworks is an employee-first company” and “We want to maximize employee happiness”.
After all, if there is one thing that we take a lot of pride in and are thankful for, it would be our culture. At Freshworks, our culture is our DNA and it is more than just a plaque on our colorful walls; it goes beyond our mini golf, foosball tables, or free food.
Culture is about the values and behaviors we bring into our work-life every single day.
Our hiring culture is inclusive
Being an inclusive organization with around 22% women in Tech, Freshworks has always been focused on hiring a diverse set of candidates. Our Tech hiring process is specifically designed to test the technical skills, design capabilities, problem solving skills, and, most importantly, the behavioral or ‘culture fit’ of candidates.
For senior roles, we assess strategic acumen, managerial capabilities, thought leadership, and the ability to create an impact within the organization. As ‘a start-up to a scaleup’, we’re looking for passionate people who are self-starters and exhibit a strong affinity for action. Finally, we look to ensure if the person is a “cultural fit” — if the person is able to align with our culture and values at Freshworks.
We ensure a ‘red carpet’ candidate experience
At Freshworks, we believe that our culture should not only reflect within the organization, but should start right from candidate experience. All our programs strive to provide candidates a red carpet experience.
We are experimenting with multiple programs to achieve this. For instance, all Freshworks Tech interviewers are required to be “certified” to interview as part of the “TA Partner Program”. This program puts great emphasis on the importance of ‘owning the talent’ mindset and being a brand ambassador for Freshworks.
Another initiative is the “Discovery program”, which allows candidates to have an informal chat of around 15 minutes with our Tech team to gather insights and relevant information on the overall technical challenges and the exciting problems we are looking to solve.
We foster a culture of continuous learning
Enabling a continuous learning culture is also of paramount importance to Freshworks. Employees who feel they have the opportunity to learn or hone their skills are likely to be more engaged, productive, and loyal( i.e. have “Freshworks at heart”).
Hence we craft meaningful learning and development programs to give them opportunities to progress in their careers.
Some of our ongoing learning programs and opportunities include:
- Tech onboarding sessions for new hires: As we continue to attract talent via various channels, such as lateral, campus hires, and career restart programs, it is important for us to integrate every engineer well into their specific teams. They are given a detailed overview of the product, team structure, a Career Matrix, which details the competencies at each level, and a deep dive into our Culture Codes.
- High Impact Communication programs that emphasize on understanding storytelling techniques, building compelling narratives, and improving their overall executive communication skills.
- Ongoing Tech Learning challenges where employees sign up for a skill or a program that they would like to learn and compete against each other in a fun way.
- Our internal start-up accelerator program, Freshlabs, which helps engineers innovate, think, and work on ideas in the form of free tools and ship them.
- Career coaching and mentoring programs, which helps to break cross-functional silos and enable networking opportunities.
- Speaking or participating at external tech conferences, internal hackathons, writing tech blogs, and sharing architectural best practices with each other are all a constant at Freshworks.
Scaling culture
As our Tech organization continues to grow, one of the things that we were very particular about is that we want our culture to scale as well. We want a culture code that is simple, easy for employees to relate to, and most importantly, recall and practise. At the risk of stating the obvious, if there is one big growth derailleur, it would be the inability to preserve our culture. Culture cannot happen as an after effect. Rather we must consciously lead with culture.
Culture workshops
To enable the free flow of culture at Freshworks, our People Development team along with our HR Business Partners, launched a series of workshops in 2019, with their focus on an initiative called “Culture Conversations”. This program actively engages all employees through “Leader-led conversations”. The goal is to enable a shared understanding of the essence of corporate culture, and practise ‘CHAT’, the Freshworks Culture Code. We also introduced Remote Culture Onboarding sessions for new hires, and conducted separate sessions for managers on how to drive culture in their (now) remote teams.
Empathy rules!
Good leaders and managers are the actual drivers and advocates of a culture-rich organization. We want to build a culture of empathy, and this has to start from the top. Hence we strongly believe that investing in our managers’ development is key to harnessing the full potential of all our employees.
All our manager development programs are built around the principle of CAP-G, i.e., we want managers to be a Coach, build Alignment or purpose, help people take Pride in their work and enable Growth. One of the programs that we run for all managers is “Lead with Heart”, which guides leaders on how to build highly engaged teams, champion and drive change, and be a role model for teammates.
We also launched a series of interactive workshops post COVID-19 to beat the lockdown blues. These series, titled “Coping with Covid”, included programs for managers on how to “Lead Remote Teams”, which urges leaders to think about how they lead teams differently during COVID. Other workshops included “Developing a Growth mindset”, “Mental Health 101” and “Managing Time and Productivity” to name a few.
We deliver moments of WOW
While the future is all about AI and automation of tasks, humans are the chief architects of this evolution. At Freshworks, our employees will continue to be the fulcrum of our purpose and existence. Our motto is simple – anybody who comes into contact with our brand needs to not just be treated well but also given moments of WOW! This especially holds good for employees, and we will continue to invest a lot of time in developing them through various People Development programs so that they can excel at whatever they do.
Cover image: Vignesh Rajan
