How we helped the fast-growing Digital Media Agency to build a thriving Culture by designing People Practices to drive productivity and team development
Client
About the Client
SoCheers Infotech is a fast-growing full-service digital media agency based out of Mumbai and Bangalore. SoCheers provides digital marketing services to brands that don't just include digital presence but immersive experiences too. From heart-touching DVCs to catchy jingles, and interactive microsites to engaging content, they have done it all.
Website: https://socheers.net/
Problem
Being part of a fast-growing industry, the management team (Rajni Daswani, Mehul Gupta and Siddharth Devnani) wanted to build strong People practices that would help drive retention, development and growth of their people.
Project Timeline
October 2019 - Ongoing
Project Title
How we helped a fast-growing Digital Media Agency to build a thriving Culture by designing People Practices to drive productivity and team development
Approach and Findings
We had interactions with every unique role in the organization to understand their current roles, challenges and areas for improvement in process. This led to identification of opportunities for setting processes, improving efficiency, role expansion and role clarity.
During the process, we understood that most of the managers were first time managers, homegrown and young, and hence needed more processes/guidelines on all aspects. We also came across a very interesting challenge - how to assess the subjective areas of a role in a structured and consistent manner.
Based on the findings and possible solutions, we suggested the roadmap that best suits the management's vision for the business and culture, where they wanted their team leaders to be effective leaders, undersand the business metrics and create a strong team which promotes a learning and high growth.
Work Done
Once we had an agreement on the roadmap clarity, we started working on a new performance management system that was simpler and more effective. Our approach was to have lead indicators for mid-management & junior roles and a combination of lead & lag indicators for the team leaders and management to ensure we focus on both efforts and outcomes at a business level. We also wanted to address the most critical issue of setting KPIs in a Digital Agency which is setting a systematic approach on reviewing subjective areas of a role (like design, content writing, etc.)
We delivered the following during the project.
- 1. Key performance indicators, measurement criteria, rating levels for each unique role in the company.
- 2. Data trackers, input forms and automated reports to have supporting information for each metric.
- 3. Subjective assessment parameters common across a role or department/s
- 4. Communicated the KPIs, trackers, subjective assessment parameters to the entire team to ensure that everyone has understood their KPIs and how it is going to help them improve their work
- 5. Ensured that the trackers and subjective assessments are done as per the set timelines
- 6. Conducted structured reviews where we helped the managers identify the feedback pointers so that the feedback is communicated in a constructive manner with clear action items across different roles.
- 7. Parallely worked on improving business accumen of team heads to help them understand profitability for a team, cluster, client and service.
- 8. Identified team members who needed to be put on development and improvement programs, created a structured 3-6 month program customised to suit each team member based on their strengths and weaknesses. Rolled out the programme and saw it through.
- 9. Designed a gamified induction plan to have faster ice-breakers with the team to help the new joiner reach their full potential much sooner.
Outcome
Team size at SoCheers has grown 3 times over the last 3 years and 95% of the team leaders are retained. The team leaders are leading teams of upto 90 employees (earlier average of 15 employees). On an average a person who joins SoCheers has been promoted atleast twice within the 3 year timeframe.
SoCheer works with brands like Amazon Prime Video, Neemans, Mahindra, Cipla, Lupin, Nick, MX Player, Bosch, Jaguar, Deltin Group, Amazon Prime Music, Triggo, etc.
Frameworks used in the project
People & Culture Framework
Efficient Systems and Processes Framework
Digital Transformation Framework
Performance and Sustainability Framework
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