In any organization whether it is a start-up or a well established company, the actual success of comapny is mostly determined by how happy the employee is and it also includes the satisfaction of an employee at work. Below is the survey by xto 10x which sums it up.
xto10x surveys 50,000 startup employees to determine the 7 startup secrets that employees love
xto10x (https://www.xto10x.com), a scaling platform for growth-stage startups, surveyed over 50,000 employees across 150+ startups in a detailed culture study titled ‘Startups Employees Love (SEL).’ The purpose of the study was to comprehend what makes employees happy at work, what makes their organisations successful, and what needed attention/improvement. In the study, organisational culture and eNPS (employee Net Promoter Score®) across startups in India were examined.
Varying levels of employee satisfaction!
Employee Net Promoter Score®, the primary indicator of employee happiness, varied greatly, according to the SEL survey (eNPS). On a scale of 1 to 10, the eNPS gauges how satisfied employees are with their workplace and its culture. High levels of employee satisfaction are indicated by high eNPS scores.
The SEL survey revealed that the eNPS ranged from 97 to as low as -3, demonstrating that while some have discovered the key to employee satisfaction, the ecosystem still needs improvement. The research also revealed:
- . Only 15% of the organisations surveyed received an eNPS score of over 70. The majority of the businesses polled had an eNPS score averaging 50-60, which shows that while there is room for improvement, startups are moving in the right direction.
- The team members of a company are its most valuable resource and strongest competitive advantage. Organizations’ eNPS scores, however, started to decline as they became larger than 100 people, showing a rift in the culture caused by a lack of alignment with the corporate objective and additional layers of hierarchy that gave rise to subcultures.
- There are, exceptions to this. The highest eNPS score was obtained by Leegality, a document infrastructure platform for Indian businesses – a score of 97! They achieved this by concentrating on performance management, manifestos, and rewards despite a 1.7x expansion in size.
Some key areas emerged from the study that are important drivers of the eNPS:
Managers play a vital role
- The Managers Recommendation Index (MRX), a metric that measures how likely an employee is to refer their manager to friends, was used in the study to assess its effect on total eNPS. It was discovered that as MRX declines, the eNPS also does.
- 20% of managers got a low MRX rating.
The main causes of a poor MRX score were disregarding other people’s ideas, unfair treatment, a lack of technical proficiency, and lack of empathy.
A sense of pride amongst employees
- Most employees resonated with the problems their companies were solving 97% of the employees’ surveyed expressed pride in being associated with their organisations.
- Additionally, 95% of employees trust their teams – showing a culture of support and growth.
On the flip slide, as startups scaled, a decline in the “sense of pride” was also noticed. This is due to a variety of factors, including an inability to help employees visualize the impact of their roles, a lack of unique organizational identity, a lack of inclusivity, and stagnant career development paths.
Mental Health and Work-Life
The distinction between work and life has blurred further in recent years, elevating the importance of employee wellbeing on both a physical and emotional level. According to the results of the SEL survey:
- More than 20% of startup employees believe they have no work-life balance at all.
- The majority of respondents also stated that the lack of a work-life balance had a detrimental effect on their mental health.
Employee productivity suffers greatly when they are both physically and mentally exhausted. Additionally, they are not content at work, which leads to high attrition rates.
According to the SEL study, this issue is frequently caused by a high workload, ineffective working practices and unsatisfactory implementation of leave policies. .
Women employees play a key role
- Companies that had over 40% women in their leadership teams scored a better eNPS on average
Greater representation of women led to more inclusive corporate policies, more role models for women in the system, and signalled a lack of gender-bias up the ladder.
Performance Management and Compensation
- Nearly 80% of startup workers thought they were fairly compensated for their contributions and efforts.
- About 70% of respondents praised the people-friendly benefits practiced by their organisation.
This is great news!
Startups that performed poorly in this category generally had outdated compensation policies, inadequate ESOPs planning and communication on rewards, and a dearth of hygienic perks like insurance and reimbursements.
Employee interests over that of the Company
Employee-first practises, such as allowing team members to work from any location or allowing them to take afternoon naps, have been found to significantly improve employee morale.
The good news is that nearly 85% of employees surveyed feel their organizations have employee-friendly policies that motivate them
The survey also found that:
– Flexible policies prevent employees from becoming disgruntled.
– There is a lack of internal parity of policies in startups. Different teams have different policies. Even logically designed policies that appear unfair on the surface can cause internal turmoil.
The Efficient Decision-Making Machine Over 15% of workers believe their organisations’ decision-making processes are inefficient, and 14% believe they lack the freedom to make their own decisions.
Employees highlighted issues such as ineffective decision-making processes, ambiguous decisions, giving priority to short-term results, and a lack of empowerment.
Neeraj Aggarwal, Co-founder and COO, xto10x, said “Our daily conversations with startups reveal that organizational culture is not taken seriously enough. For a company to be resilient and stand the test of time, it needs a strong organisational culture as one of its key foundational pillars.”
He further added “The SEL survey reveals key aspects companies must not ignore when building a strong organizational culture. Our aim is to highlight the impact of a strong organizational culture.”
ABOUT xto10x
xto10x was founded by Binny Bansal, Saikiran Krishnamurthy and Neeraj Aggarwal in 2018 with a vision to help startups with strong product-market fit scale into great companies. While many founders struggle with similar problems, they don’t have access to deep practitioner knowledge. The founding team saw an opportunity to provide companies with a simpler, faster, and more systematic way to scale. Over the past 2 years, xto10x has worked with over 250 growth-stage startups across all aspects of the scaling journey – business design, org design and hiring, OKRs, people & culture, customer experience, operations and branding.
xto10x offers learning programs, operating services and software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based solutions for startups and has raised series a funding of $25 million.