XA Podcast 18 | Driving Change During Hypergrowth At Gojek | People And Talent Series

What worked as a new startup invariably stops working as you scale, especially so with people and teams. But the changes you need to make through various stages of growth can be surprisingly simple yet very effective.

Discussion Topics: Driving Change During Hypergrowth at Gojek | People and Talent Series

• Role of a Chief People Officer
• Thoughts about Culture in organisations
• Nurturing the culture at Gojek through hyper-growth
• Changes to make the hiring process more effective
• Simple things to improve retention
• People’s advice for early-stage startup founders

Transcript: Driving Change During Hypergrowth at Gojek | People and Talent Series

Sergio Salvador: Welcome to another exciting episode of the People and Talent series on the XA Podcast! So today’s guest is someone that I’ve been looking forward to talking to for a while. He’s currently the Chief People Officer at Gojek. But he’s also an ex-colleague and a good friend. We used to work together a couple of lifetimes ago. And our professional paths led us in different directions to end up in a very similar place. I am very, very pleased to welcome to the show today Sunil Setlur, Chief People Officer at Gojek. Welcome Sunil.

Sunil Setlur: Hey, Sergio. Thanks for having me on.

Sergio Salvador: It’s a real pleasure. Why don’t we start by having a very quick introduction, in your own words?

Sunil Setlur: Sure. Professionally, I’ve been at the intersection of people organisation, and culture for about 21 years. I studied labour relations and I spent the next 18 or 19 years in HR in different roles or in talent roles. So I’m what you call a lifer in people and culture roles. And I’ve had the distinct privilege of having the chance to work with some of the best companies in the world, in different countries, I have worked in India, I worked in the US, I worked in the Philippines, worked all across APAC, with Singapore being my home currently. And it’s been a tremendous journey.

Personally, I used to be and you’ll hear this a lot from me prior to my current role, I used to do a lot of things outside of work. Before the pandemic, I was an avid hiker and volcano climber, not a mountain volcano only. I used to collect comic books, and I’m still a very avid fan of animated shows. I have a two-year-old daughter. So she’s definitely an addition to the pandemic and has made my life very interesting.

Sergio Salvador: Fantastic. Well, thank you very much for that. And I have the impression based on how you were talking about those hobbies of yours, right, that we could have a podcast episode of every single one of those talking about your volcano climbing. I’m already very curious about it. Today, we’re going to be focusing on your experience as a people leader. And just to start with, what is a Chief People Officer? Can we just cover that for a moment?

Sunil Setlur: That’s a fantastic question. Well, in the simplest of terms, it is what the Chief HR Officer used to be called. But as organisations have evolved over time, what that role has been expected to do and what people want, the focus of that role has changed and I think people are much more all-encompassing for what the role does. There are different formats to the role, you have the traditional, you know, just HR roles. But there are lots of Chief People officers who are also responsible for anything that touches the quality of experience of people in the organisation.

It could be the workplace, it could be IT services, it could be HR processes, it could be business operations. So there’s a wide swath, and I think what a Chief People Officer means is different for different organisations and at different points in their growth. But for the majority of the world, the Chief People Officer is what the Chief HR Officer used to be.

Sergio Salvador: So for the most cynical of our listeners, wouldn’t that’d be a Glorified HR Leader?

Sunil Setlur: I would say, you could say that depends on how you define HR. I think, again, different organisations have defined human resources differently. I think the movement of the title from human resources to people shows a marked sort of psychological shift away from sort of an artifact mindset where you’re managing things to a more experienced mindset where you’re managing the experience of people. It brings into sharp focus how the organisation uses its constituent members, less as resources and more as people.

Sergio Salvador: So what kind of focus, what kind of activities project are the ones that a Chief People Officer like yourself, will be mostly focused on? And can you give us a few examples of things that you particularly have enjoyed doing in the past?

Sunil Setlur: Absolutely, I think if you at my role, specifically right now, it covers the entire spectrum of activities, right from the sort of hire to retire lifecycle of employee activities. So I have a key role to play, or my team has a key role to play in how candidates experience us as an organisation, how they experience us on onboarding when they first come on. And through the different transitions and milestones they experience within the organisation, whether they take on new roles, get promoted, move to different countries, etc all the way down to when they exit the organisation hopefully, they retire. But sometimes they move on to other opportunities, how do they experience the organization.

So there’s a compendium of experiences and there is a strong need for a singular editorial voice of that experience, which manifests the culture of the organisation. So one of the key ways anybody experiences is in a very tangible way, what the organisation’s values are through its people processes, because people processes are how you treat your people, how you manage them, and very interesting moments in their life and that’s usually hyper exaggerated emotional moments in their lives like you’ve got a promotion, you’re related, you’re having a tough performance review, you’re dejected and you’re questioning yourself, or you’re moving on to a larger role and you’re wondering how you can do this.

These are all exaggerated emotional moments. And the care sensitivity of thoughtfulness that organisations invest in their people is usually reflected in their values and those values manifest as processes, particularly people processes.

Sergio Salvador: You’ve already brought up a couple of times a very interesting word. And I think you were also alluding to it in your explanation, the word culture. How do you see culture in organisations? What are your thoughts about it in general?

Sunil Setlur: So culture is an interesting thing. In my entire career, I think I’ve heard hundreds of variations of definitions of what culture is. But I think the strictest sociological definition is a shared collection of habits, behaviors, and beliefs. And I think, if I take that definition, at its very root, that’s what it is an organisation, in a sense, is a micro-community that operates within a larger community. So when you come into an organisation, or you’re a member of this organisation, you have to subscribe to certain very specific ways of thinking, believing things that are important, is the customer important, or is something else supposed inventory important.

For example, is the process important or is the outcome important depending on which organisation, you’re in which industry those things can vary. And I think that’s the role people in culture teams or HR teams play, which are you take what’s the desired culture, because there is obviously an organic culture, which is unintentional, it’s formed, anytime two people get together this culture there, right, because they start forming a very unique pattern that’s unique to them.

Now compound that by a factor of thousands of people, or hundreds of people, and you suddenly have a unique group that’s behaving in a very unique set of ways against very unique belief systems. So some of that’s codified and intentional, it’s like, we want to put the customer first, for instance, non-controversial, many companies have that as one of their values, that’s codified and intentional.

Some of it is unintentional, like whether you are direct or not, it’s like, I’m going to give you feedback directly, maybe that will work extremely well, in a culture like in Israel, it will work very poorly in Japan, where you want to ensure that the person has saved their place, and you get them the feedback, but in a less direct manner. So you have to operate within the bounds of the cultural context of that community.

So what processes do and what organisational mechanisms do is take the intentional parts of the culture and codify them into hard actions. So a good example would be how you promote people. There are some organisations where it’s as simple, the manager thinks you’re ready for the next job, go for it, and you’re promoted, right? And other organisations are like, no, we want this to be a bit more of a committee-led process, we want consensus, we want to make sure that your manager and their peers feel like, this person is ready for the next job.

We certainly have now democratisation of that decision, and the power to make those decisions has been removed. So there’s a reliance on process over the individual’s judgment. So that’s an example of a direct culture, which is more judgmental so you’ve empowered your managers and they can make all the decisions. And then you have a slightly more process-led organisation where you say, Yes, we value judgment, but we also want to get everyone else’s point of view on this. So it manifests in different ways.

Sergio Salvador: All right. And in that sense, you have been with Gojek for a few years now and these years were of significant growth for the company and of course, increasing achievements and milestones in the company. Now how does this philosophy thinking about culture help you kind of do your work with the organisation from when you started, which was a much smaller organisation in terms of employee’s size, you name it right to where it is today?

Sunil Setlur: That’s actually a really good question. I think, if I were to say Gojek’s superpower is a sense of purpose and impact it has. Any person who’s worked with us or interacts with us in any meaningful way will tell you instantly that they experience that sense of purpose and impact throughout the organisation. So in a sense, I had it a little bit easy because I had a core anchor, we always want it to be relevant to our constituent base, whether it’s the drivers, the merchants, the consumers who use our app, or anyone in the ecosystem that’s affected by us. So that became the core sort of root of what we were building against.

When I joined I joined thinking, hey, its Gojek companies, you know, everything you said, it’s relatively small to be exciting, but it was actually an incredibly complex organisation. The month I joined, I found out we had acquired nearly 18 companies in the preceding two years and they were at varying stages of being integrated. So it was safe to say I walked into an organisation that had many different cultures, which had many different ways of thinking about people and talent, and what was more important and less important. And certainly many founders who had come on board as these companies had acquired or merged with us.

So the important thing became less about, okay, what do we do about integrating these cultures and more about how do we anchor all of us to the common mission and purpose, what is the common mission and purpose going to be, and that was a labour of love. It took the better part of six to nine months to get to an agreement of all the key decision makers, you know, key influential people in the organisation, to say, this is something we can get behind, this is something we can build, like the whole one Gojek identity.

Because prior to 2019, we had local brands, we were in different countries, but we were in very local brands, again, they were acquired or merged or partnered with. And in 2020, we made this big push to say we’re all going to be one Gojek and it is going to be one experience. And that became the plinth for people as well as like, you can’t be one sort of consumer brand, and one technology product, one set of experiences for all your users and have like, dozens of organisations operating their own way. So you have to integrate the people’s narrative and the people’s story as well. And that was the plinth we use to really rally everyone to this is the way we will think about people and culture.

So really putting in place ideal state processes that we felt addressed most needs, and then cajoling really people to adopt it. One of the things I’m very proud of is barring things like budgets and compensation framework, which was kind of a top-down decision, everything else was a co-creation, how we constructed jobs, we constructed levels, how org design happened, it was very much a co-creative effort through the organisation.

And it took its time, but it was worth it. In about I would say conservatively about a year, we made about 90% of the changes we needed to make. I’m not going to say there were no challenges, there were plenty. But it was an amazing achievement that, you know, hundreds of people got together, aligned behind a mission and a vision, and tried to figure out what is the best way to articulate that for the people.

So in 2020, we introduced a new way of book managing performance, introduced a new job and career architecture, introduced a new compensation framework, we introduced new levels and titles. So it was as you can imagine, and it was also the pandemic years so it was a lot going on. So we had to switch to work from home and for a company that’s significantly feet on the street as well it was a big shift. So 2020 was like a pivotal moment for us.

Sergio Salvador: I can see that. And well, one of the things that you touched upon is the, in this tremendous growth of the company has as seen, part of that growth comes from the next amount of people to the company bringing them in on hiring and I believe that this is something that is important to many of those in our audience maybe they are looking at the same challenges. How do you go about hiring? We all know that talent has been difficult to come by most recently, well, most recently, possibly in the last few years, right? There’s talk of a war on talent if you want to put it that way. How do you go about it as an organisation? What was your philosophy?

Sunil Setlur: So, in 2017 and 2018, our hiring processes were very decentralised. So each team ran its own thing. And this is very common in early-stage companies because you’re optimising for speed and agility overall, as because having that person having that button seat, so to speak, has tremendous value in terms of the outputs, you can achieve so asymmetrical impact to just having someone enrol doing the thing.

But as we grew bigger, and as we started hiring people, a lot more people with similar skill sets, but at different points in their experience, it became interesting because we had to find ways to A) be more systematic about it and B) more just consistent in the way we went out to market because prior to and one of the ways we did that was we centralise the recruiting process, we hired a recruiting leader, who’s done a fantastic job over the last couple of years.

And one thing that was important instantly was the way candidates were experiencing us was just super fragmented because the hiring manager was driving the process. So if you’re a very involved and capable hiring manager, they got an excellent experience. If you had someone who’s kind of drowning in work or is struggling to figure it out, they got a slightly worse experience than anyone else. And centralising did a couple of things. I think, one, it allowed us to manage the touch points with the candidates.

So how candidates were reached out to was very standardised, we could raise the bar because we’re using common templates to do these outreaches. We had a dedicated sourcing team, recruiters were more able to share their pipelines with each other. So if team A had a good candidate, but they weren’t quite a fit for that team, earlier, we would have just dropped that candidate. But now it’s centralization. They’re like, hey, look, this person’s good, maybe not in my team, but may work for your team.

So they started seeing the power of the team coming together. And that was step one, step two, was actually training hiring managers to ask structured standard questions. We didn’t have codified hiring rubrics in all our functions and that’s partly because our jobs were not very well defined. Broadly, yes, you’re like a software engineer, but are you a backend engineer, are you a front-end engineer, are you a UX engineer, or are you test engineer, all of that was kind of a process of discovery during the interviews.

So when we introduced the new jobs and career architecture within the company, it became very clear that okay, this is what different types of engineers do, this is what we should ask for questions like, if you’re a test engineer, do you have experience running automated test environments? If you’re a product engineer, are you good at running experiments and iterating? And I think those became important, and they fed into the hiring rubrics, what that did was it allowed us to ask highly standardised questions and get responses.

So when we were comparing and Gojek is a very democratic culture, it’s very bottom up. So that means that when we do hiring, we do it in a panel. So it’s not just one person, but like, a panel of three or four interviewers, even though the size of the panel was debate, right? Should it be 11 people? Should it be 2 people? Shout it be 1? Should it be 4? We ended up with 4 is like the hiring manager, the functional expert, if you’re in a people manager role than someone who’s either a people manager or an HR, and maybe one stakeholder from the business that you’ll be working with, or whose business you’ll be impacting.

So I think that became our panel. And I think what that did was because we were asking highly A we were reaching out to candidates in a structured way, B we were controlling the experience, we were sharing pipelines and C we were asking standard questions, so we could compare candidates much more quickly. So it sounds like a lot of bureaucracy being put in place, but it actually accelerated a lot of stuff. Because now you have standard things to do. Hiring managers don’t have to wonder what questions to ask which templates to use.

So our throughput of hiring really increased a lot. So our capacity to hire or interview just went up tremendously. I think our recruited productivity is 2.5x in the span of eight months, having introduced some of these processes. And then we frequently hired back in the day, at least 1000 people a year and that’s not a small number for the kind of people we need to hire. And to address your question on the war for talent, I think there never was a patch in my career where there wasn’t a high demand for good people. Like there’s always going to be high demand for good people.

Sergio Salvador: Fantastic. Very, very helpful. Thank you. So that’s very useful. We have discussed culture, we have discussed attracting people, and we have discussed a little bit of the philosophy that you follow in your roles. We haven’t discussed yet retaining, which is also important, especially during the pandemic itself. That challenge pretty much every single one of us, right, we’re not quite even done yet. But thankfully, things have got so much better already. But what do you observe in terms of, you know, we all had to develop a level of resilience? What do you observe in your organisation on how people dealt with it, how the organisation supports them, and what can companies do when there is a crisis in order to support people?

Sunil Setlur: I think it’s a very good question. There were a couple of things. And again, this is me, reflecting after the fog of war has cleared, and then looking back on the year but this was very much a process of discovery as we went through the journey, one of the things was, that was very important was getting everyone to look at the same facts and figures. Because what can happen in organisations very quickly is you become led by narratives versus data. You say, Oh, there’s attrition everywhere, it’s so high, I can’t do anything because the attrition is too high.

But when you actually look at it, the attrition is in pockets. You’re okay, on the operation side, and you’re probably okay on a commercial team, the country will probably have concentrated on tech. But in this specific team in this country working on that product, we have to get really surgical about the way we framed our problem statements. The second thing is we’ve all known what it’s meant to be a good team and sort of what it takes to retain people. And if you look, we were very experience-oriented as an organisation so we polled our employees and our staff.

So that is quarterly pulse surveys, we asked surveys on an experience during the performance management process, which is twice a year, we have an annual survey and after every key process, like performance, promotion, etc., we send an experience, how did you feel about this process. So we have a ton of data and that’s something we do very, very religiously as an organisation.

So when we look at the data, it’s clear people want career growth, development, and the ability to see a future for themselves in the organisation that goes beyond just their current job. And then now those top two or three categories haven’t changed and of course, compensation keeps going up and down, it’s always there, but it keeps going up and down and priority and importance. So when we look at what we did as an organisation, earlier, the quality of the feedback was, I don’t know what to do beyond my job.

Later, it became okay, I know what to do, but I don’t know how to go about it. And that’s because as our processes and programs kept maturing, it now became okay, I know what to do, I know how to do it but I’m scared to make the transition, who can I talk to, I’m looking for mentorship and coaching. And we found that largely in teams, where managers were not doing hygiene things like career development conversations, etc. that’s where there seemed to be a spike. And we don’t want to blame the manager when we look at why managers are not able to do those things so we put these processes in place.

And I think teams that have lower adoption of those processes saw an outlier amount of attrition. That’s not to say that, you know, they weren’t more macro issues, because we have a bulk of our team in India and Southeast Asia, and those markets saw insane levels of activity when it comes to early-stage company funding, which meant people were getting very, very generous offers and sea level titles at very early points in their career, which becomes very hard to compete with when you’re at a certain scale and size. So I think we made a conscious call.

So one was what did we do as an organisation, we got everyone to look at the data in very precise ways. And we reported on the data in very precise ways. So that helped narrow the problem statement and make it seem like it removed the perception that the whole company was on fire, that only there were pockets of fire.

The second thing we did was we really doubled down on the hygiene factors. Earlier there were optional things to do for managers, we slowly made it part of manager expectations, to do IDPs, to do career development conversations, and to have slightly longer-term things. We looked at structural things as well, we reduced friction in our internal transfers process, we had a fairly high friction process you needed to get approvals, you needed to have certain performance, contribution score, etc. We changed all of that a little bit. So talent mobility became easier within the company. So we responded to the feedback.

These were things I would like to believe we would have done anyway, without the attrition but the attrition really has, you know the environment created a situation where it gave us extra motivation to get it done quickly. So people have fewer things, pushing them out of the company. We could do very little about the pull factor. But the push factor we could certainly address. That was the second thing. And the third thing we did was a leadership team. And this is the hardest thing to do. As a leadership team, it took about, I think, a quarter for all of us to accept that this is going to happen and this is going to happen for a while. And that we just have to plan around it. And I think that was the hardest one to get to.

Because otherwise, you feel this, as a leader, especially you feel very, very motivated to address the issue. And it’s very easy to take attrition personally if you’re leading an organisation, so you’re navigating those feelings and agreeing as a group that we had to work together and write this out. And I’m really glad we did because attrition has fallen, it’s going back to pre-pandemic levels, we had very low attrition always, even through the peak of it I was talking to colleagues and I was actually mildly glad that our attrition was lower than our peers in the market.

Sergio Salvador: Fantastic. Well, I think we have time for a couple of short questions. And I guess the first one will be you know, obviously you work now you’re the Chief People Officer for a very large organisation. But as I like to remind people, even Google, Amazon, and Microsoft were startups at some point. So would you have any brief thoughts for early-stage company founders that are starting to think about the people aspect of their organisations?

Sunil Setlur: I would say my number one advice is to keep your talent bar incredibly high, for as long as possible. The first 100 to 200 people in your organisation will make the culture and they have an outsized impact on the culture. So have a very high bar on the people you’ve hired, the behaviours you expect of them, and their level of commitment to the organisation. My favourite story from when I was at Google is, you know, most of the first 100 employees are still there after all these years, the few left, but the majority are still there. And that’s a huge signal and indicator.

Like, that’s advice number one, as long as possible and as much as possible stay involved in the hiring process in the selection and in the evaluation space for those people, for your first 100 to 200 people that’s very, very important. It’s painful in the beginning but you’ll thank yourself for doing it later. The second thing is there is this disease of best practice, thoughtless best practice adoption, just because a big successful company does things a certain way in the talent space, your like, the belief is, if we do the same thing we will have similar outcomes is very pervasive, especially with younger founders or early stage companies, it is very tempting because it’s a successful model.

What you have to realise is people’s processes, follow a certain maturity curve, you don’t need everything all at once. And certainly, if your pre product market fit, you don’t need very much, you just need a very good selection and hiring process and you need very good sort of role management within the organisation. So you don’t have too many overlapping roles and responsibilities. That’s about it. Everything else can just be because you’re going to be iterating, you’re just experimenting, you’re going to try and fail a few times.

And you know, don’t get committed to a structure too early on. But once you’ve hit product market fit and you’re confident in product market fit, then it’s a question of scaling. That’s when all the formal processes kick in. And it’s like, okay, I need like 20 marketing people, I need 100 operations people, I need 50 engineers like then you’re solving scale problems, then you start introducing formal systems. Don’t be in a rush to introduce processes to manage people too soon, wait for the critical moment. Don’t wait till it’s breaking, have a good sense of when your system is running out of bandwidth to do things and then start institutionalising mechanisms. And if you’ve done the right thing, hiring smart people, you won’t have too much to worry about in terms of rules and regulations.

Sergio Salvador: Fantastic Sunil. Maybe a bit of a last question for you, perhaps more of a recommendation, would you happen to have a book that perhaps you have read recently that you have enjoyed that you might recommend to our audience?

Sunil Setlur: So that’s a trick key one, I think if you’re an early-stage company, and you’re a founder or you’re part of the founding team, I would strongly recommend reading this mildly cynical book called The Dictator’s Handbook. It’s written by two Stanford political science, academic teams. And why I say that book because incentives, structure, and power play very outsized roles at early-stage companies and smaller organisations. And it’s very important for everyone to understand the flow of those three things, the interplay of those three things, and this book does an amazing job explaining it. And I personally still go back to it.

Sergio Salvador: Fantastic. Very good handbook. It sounds very promising. I’m already looking for it for my Kindle. Well, Sunil, it has been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us. Really appreciate it. I have learned a lot. And Sunil, thank you so much again.

Sunil Setlur: Thanks, Sergio. Thanks for having me on.

Our Guest: Sunil Setlur

Sunil Setlur is the Global Chief People Officer at Gojek. He joined Gojek in 2019 and currently leads all aspects of human resource (HR) management at the company, with his function supporting thousands of employees around Southeast Asia.

Sunil is a seasoned HR leader with more than a decade of experience in the industry. Prior to joining Gojek, he led HR for Google’s Partnerships business in Asia Pacific and was a Senior HR Business Partner with Amazon, where he was in charge of HR for groups spanning multiple functions and business lines. He started his career at Accenture and took on a number of leadership roles during his time there, including leading HR for Accenture’s Healthcare Management Operations Group in the Philippines.

Sunil holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Industrial Relations, Economics, and Sociology from Bangalore University, India as well as a Postgraduate Certificate in Human Capital Management from XLRI Jamshedpur, India.

He is interviewed by Sergio Salvador, Chief People Officer of Carsome. Prior to joining Carsome, Sergio was a Leadership and Development Advisor at Egon Zehnder and earlier had stints at Google, Electronic Arts, Yahoo!, and Nokia as well as his own startup.