Welcome to The Memo by Vecto.
I’ve been laid off twice in my startup career, and the two experiences were as different as chalk and cheese. The second of those experiences was at Jumo, during Covid in 2020.
The company decided to exit its India D2C app launch and preserve its runway. The global organization was restructured, and ~20% of the workforce was laid off, including the entire India GTM team. We were all given a month’s notice.
There is no good way to make a layoff feel good, especially in the middle of a global lockdown, but over the next few weeks I saw how much thought the company had put into how to carry it out with intention.
Let’s dig in.
Handling a shitty situation 101
When the restructuring was announced, all information, financial and otherwise, was laid out openly. Employees were invited to suggest anything that might help the company do this differently, in case there was something the leadership had missed.
In the following week, managers had 1:1 conversations with their teams, both to explain what was happening and to hear individual requests.
One colleague asked if his medical insurance could be extended by three months so his family would not lose coverage while he figured out what to do next. The company agreed.
During the notice period, HR ran sessions to help people land as well as they could, from interview preparation to helping us update our LinkedIn profiles.
On my last day, I had one of these sessions and discovered that the HR rep helping me had herself been laid off and that it was her last day and call too. Despite being in this shitty situation herself, there she was, making sure I had all the tools I needed to go out and find another job.
While none of this took away the sting of losing your job in a difficult market, it made the experience so much easier to cope with than if our login access had been cruelly revoked at the end of the day (looking at all you gazillion-dollar tech companies).
Choosing to make room for humanity within a painful business decision doesn’t get you any awards, but it’s the right thing to do.
In the years that followed, I realized how exceptional Jumo’s handling of the 2020 layoffs was. It displayed what it valued even though it could’ve gotten away without doing any of it.
That’s culture.
On the other hand, we’ve all seen how companies repeatedly restructure without any thought to the aftermath, even when money and resources are abundant.
That’s culture too.
When a company is under pressure, you see what gets protected and what gets ignored. You notice whether people are still treated with care even when there is no business case to do so.
A ‘Values’ poster can tell you what an organization wants to be, but these real life moments tell you how much of that poster is actually true.
Big, small choices that become the norm
I learnt some more about exceptional behaviors at Hunger Inc., although in a very different way.
At Hunger Inc., being hospitable isn't only about how you treated a restaurant guest. It extended to how you behaved with colleagues, vendors, guests and everyone in general, even when they didn’t expect something from you.
A manager bringing water for their team when they all sit down for lunch after a busy service is the norm. When Mumbai floods, keeping the restaurant doors open to offer refuge to anyone who needs food and shelter is also the norm. An employee staying back after their shift to help another teammate with their computer lessons homework, that’s the norm too.
Does a business need to do any of this? Nope.
Does anyone on the team need training or approvals to execute any of this? Nope.
But it gets done anyway. Consistently, across the board, and without much fuss.
That is what made these culture-defining moments so beautiful to me. They weren't grand gestures, or posters on the wall for a social media campaign. They were small decisions made consistently, often enough and by enough people to become a way of life.
A leader's choice becomes a team's behavior —> The team's behavior becomes an expectation —> The expectation becomes culture.
So what happens when doing the right thing is inconvenient?
Culture is created through repeated choices, especially when doing the right thing is inconvenient. If a standard is upheld under pressure, people learn that it matters. If it disappears when it starts to affect revenue, they learn that too.
A single outlier doesn’t change an entire organization, but when people repeatedly see standards bent for the person who brings in the most revenue, or difficult behavior overlooked because someone is too valuable to lose, they understand what really matters.
Over time, these actions become unwritten culture. They are passed from manager to team member and picked up by new employees, shaping how people make decisions in real time.
Those choices, repeated over time, are what create culture.
Which is why, when I think about culture, I find myself paying less attention to a Values poster on the wall and more attention to the difficult choices that come up during the course of managing people, product and profit.
Next Time: Codify
Once you start noticing the choices that create culture, the next question emerges:
How do you make those right choices more visible and intentional in a way that everyone can understand them and take action?
That’s where we’ll go in the next memo.
Until next time,
Shweta.