Tired of poring through the latest business blogs, books, best-sellers, to find out if you are doing the best for your business? Entrepreneurs and business owners find it difficult to believe in the insights from their own experience, and tend to second-guess themselves on all strategic decisions.
If you tend to do that, stop! While getting valuable advice from mentors and friends is excellent, books and seminars can never take the place of your experience, garnered through direct involvement in your business. So, here are 3 CRITICAL values that will enhance your understanding and assist you towards arriving at practices for the success of your business. And no, we did not get these from any books or conferences. They are based on our growth pains as our company grew from 7 people in 2009 to 55 in 2012, while creating 3 distinct brands – Suyati, Content Crossroads, and Voraka.
Attitude is everything
A core value that our HR director looks for in employees, vendors, contractors, consultants, freelancers, and partners, is ATTITUDE. And lots of it! Of course, we refer to attitude of the right kind. The ability to work under pressure, learn from mistakes, and help others while helping themselves – all these critical values come from having a great “can-do” attitude.
Judge no employee by his skills alone
Forget organization charts and job descriptions. While these are great during the hiring process, and to chalk out a training schedule initially, throw them out of the window the moment your team becomes productive. Instead throw open all the different projects that each team is working on. Encourage different teams to talk to each other about their challenges and issues. Openly ask your teams for help in honing the company’s sales strategy. In short, judge them by what they are capable of, not what they are doing right now.
Work, food and fun go together
We have lost track of the number of times we gather in the cafeteria for celebrating a birthday, purchase of a new car, losing a football game (yes, losing!), or for completing a sprint successfully. Food is always a critical part of these celebrations, not to mention rubbing the birthday boy’s face with cake. In fact, we do not need a reason to get together and have fun. We just make them up as we go!
At Suyati, each one of us lives by these values, day in and day out. And when you are looking to choose an IT partner, there’s no better than the one who can help strengthen your values, and in turn your business.