Work From Home To Go On Till Year End For Startups as Bengaluru Startup Springworks Sets Trend

While tech giants like Google, Facebook announced last Friday that most of their employees will work from home (WFH) for the remainder of 2020, Bengaluru-based startup Springworks had already announced the move to WFH to all it’s employees last Wednesday (May 6th). The startup announced to its 120+ employees last Wednesday (May 6) that it’ll be moving to WFH till the end of the year 2020.

Springworks, a HR Tech startup, has decided to give up two-thirds of its office space and move to WFH till December.

“Last week we made a tough decision to move to WFH till December 2020.  It was a difficult decision to give up two out of three floors of our office space. Lot of hard work went into growing that space,” said Kartik Mandaville, CEO and Founder of Springworks in a LinkedIn post.

The organisation is now ensuring that the team is prepared for this ‘new reality’.

“To tackle the inability to mingle with colleagues in-person, we have started ChaiTime calls every weekday at 5.30pm. On some days we play pictionary using Zoom’s whiteboard feature or someone creates a quiz and the participants vie for the title of Quizzard. The quizzes we did on Zoom were fun, but we went ahead and created our own app that virtually allows you to play 100s of quizzes right inside Slack, ” said Kartik on the issue of tackling loneliness.

Meanwhile, Springworks has also created a common pool of leaves for employees who need extra leaves due to kids and parents at home or just due to increased housework. This common leave-pool is made up of donations of paid leaves from the other employees who are relatively free and wish to help their colleagues who need it more.

“Apart from this, we do virtual mindfulness sessions every day, celebrate birthdays over Slack and Zoom, do meme-sharing and chit-chats on random channels inside Slack, ” he said.

Springworks has also recognized the challenge some of its employees are facing with power and internet issues. A one-time INR 10,000 per person WFH setup reimbursement has been done for those employees.

"We're also doing Internet reimbursements for all employees with a salary under INR 7.5 lac pa. This includes interns as well," added Kartik.

They are also shipping monitors, keyboards, other accessories, and a few office chairs to folks within Bengaluru.

To ensure camaraderie within the team, Springworks has launched a tool for Slack that lets its employees acknowledge each other’s good work.

“We realized that with no in-person discussions it was much more important to celebrate team spirit. We've built a tool that gamifies this whole experience now,” said Kartik about the soon-to-be publicly launched tool.