The Year That Was 2021

How does one summarise a year? 

This week alone has seen two submissions, a few conversation threads with journalists, and has a lecture - yes a true-blue academic delivery to flesh & blood students - lined up in the last lap. And this is over and above the BAU stuff. 

So yes it has been interesting. I became an entrepreneur to push myself outside of my comfort zone, and this year has given us that bounty aplenty, and then some. 

Coming of age

If I have to use a Bollywood analogy, this year was like a Ranbir Kapoor movie. We came of age, in more ways than one. 

We grew, quite literally, and we became a proper tech start-up. 

While scaling was an endeavour we each of us three founders and indeed the entire organisation carried, Tech was led by my co-founder Rashmi and was a gargantuan and high-stake effort that came to fruition a couple of months ago with a hard launch. If you are curious about what it does, in short, it makes our selection process more efficient, more data-driven, and gives our candidates a better experience. 

The launch was a big moment for us, we had been planning for it for a year, and we knew it would change us, mostly for the better. We spent some part of that day celebrating, between the three of us founders, with the larger team, marking the significance it held for us. 

As far as Scaling goes, I have spoken about it in other posts, like this one, especially about the sales funnel that came with paid leads, and the consequent organisational changes we had to do. Apart from these, a few other initiatives came with growth, such as setting data systems in place for tracking, reviewing, optimising, putting layers in teams across functions, etc. 

Oh and adding layers to our teams came with multiple sweet rewards, not only did it relieve our bandwidths as intended, but also gave us the satisfaction of promoting our best and brightest. Seeing our people grow in an organisation that we have created from scratch is a different kind of high!

Culture and stuff 

It is no secret that culture is important to us here at FlexiBees, both a performance-oriented one and a great work environment for people to feel happy about working in; where they are able to manifest themselves as whole people with ambition but also families, hobbies, responsibilities and passions. While these are the broad contours, this year we did a few things to make it easier for people to connect with each other, to keep the channels of communication well-oiled. We did more all-hands team get-togethers than we have ever done before (but not as many as we would like), with agendas ranging from celebrating special days and milestones to farewells and a few that didn’t have agendas (the best kind). We played games, gave thanks, and even went deep a couple of times. 

One that stands out is the gratitude week we ran, that made us all feel like a million bucks and created enough goodwill to last us a storm (or a pandemic). Another initiative that we recently started was giving company-wide mental health days off, especially after big deliverables to help everyone refresh and rejuvenate before returning to work. 

Impact

Impact is central to our organisation. We started with the intent to help talented women professionals return to work, and unlike many others before us, decided to hold ourselves accountable to the most stringent metrics. We built our company and our business model for placement i.e. actual successful returnship. It has been hard but when we see the fitment work, a woman professional placed in a meaty role, a client happy, it’s immeasurably invigorating. 

Recently we did something new - towards the end of the year as part of an application we were working on we set in motion an Impact survey. The results of that survey are in, and we will speak about them in more detail soon. But suffice to say that it was the fitting end to a year that has challenged us greatly, seen us change a few fundamental aspects about our business, but has never budged us from our path and purpose. 

Be nice 2022

That was 2021 for us. Give or take a few. 

Today as we sit on the brink of a fork road that will determine how the next year will go, locked in, or making our way back to normalcy, even if an altered one, one hopes for strength. No matter how 2022 goes, may we all find paths to meaningful actions, big or small, that make us happy. Wishing all of you a happy end to 2021, and a wondering ushering in of 2022. S’long!