Ep 3 - 'Ideal' Job Tenures? In Advertising? Lol.

No Google Docs, this is not an email draft. Stop trying to convince me that you are smarter than I am.

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Okay, so - have you ever been asked this question in an interview - “X, why do you have such short tenures at all the places you’ve worked at?”?

Now, from the perspective of someone who has been on the other side of that call, I can confidently say that 90% of HR folks don’t have the time for your Aesop’s fable. So the best thing to say is this: “I’m still looking for a place that is satisfactory in terms of both culture and compensation.”

But this one time, someone really invested in having me on board asked me,

"Shlok, I’ve seen that you have worked at a lot of places. What do we have to do for you to want to stay?"

Now, that got me thinking - what is an ideal employer for me? And why haven’t any of the places I have worked at qualified to be one?

I think the one thing that life did right by me was getting me a job at Never Grow Up. A rather underrated company, Never Grow Up is an employee wellbeing and employer branding consultancy. I don’t need to sell them to you, so all I will say is that they do a good job at helping a company’s employees feel happier at their workplace, along with displaying this shift in culture to the internet so that said company can attract more high-level talent.?

Asif Upadhye , a co-founder, did his best to make his own company a statement in terms of what they want to build for other companies. The culture shock I had when I started working for them was overwhelming, to say at the least. All the regular stuff was there - benefits, fair comp, everything else that you expect out of a company.?

But there was also empathy - the general company culture frowned at work calls or texts after 7 pm, genuine concern for one another across teams and hierarchies, no resentment or real negative feeling across the board. We’d be more than happy to hang out whenever we got to (covid times), but except for some really rare and important occasions, none of us were forced or even coerced to come in. When we were sick, no one would ask for any kind of ‘accounting’ about all the days we were out. There was a genuine sentiment of love and trust across all levels of the hierarchy. In fact, Asif once held a session on what an employee’s true cost to a company is, how things like laptops, internet connections, insurance and a lot of other factors add up to a cost to company that extends beyond your CTC on paper.

It is then that I understood what good corporate culture looks like; more than any other sentiment, it just needs to give empathy. Senior management needs to not only understand but also openly show that there is a lot more to life than work, so that teams can trust them when they say that the company cares about them. Fair compensation also comes under the empathy umbrella, to be honest - it is only when you pay people what they need that they will want to stay with you. That is why I like to say that an employee is cheap, a team member is expensive and also the only one worth the money.

I didn’t know better - which is why I left NGU after a year of working there, and it is still my longest tenure at a company. Ever since then, I haven’t found a place where I’d want to actually spend enough time to build memories and have an actual foundation, a reason to come back. I’ve despised people at work, not wanted to go in for days on end, and of course, quit.?

Now, I work at Stonks Studios and I couldn’t be more thankful. The best culture I’ve ever been a part of, with the most creative people and everything else I talked about in the last few paragraphs. (I have said too many nice things about Stonks on LinkedIn, I think I will stop until Tanisha Fagwani sponsors this newsletter)

Like all times, this piece too doesn’t have a conclusion, because there is no fun in me preaching to you and telling you what to do, with you coming back to blame me for the wrong advice. All I want to tell you is that cultures like this exist, in more places than you think, and that you don’t actually have to live through a toxic/underpaid job to survive. It is a fact. Not an opinion. You do what you can with that information.