Sree Menon is COO at Tophatter, the online discovery shopping marketplace with over 35M+ Shoppers that is built on the idea of marrying game mechanics and retail creating a way to make shopping fun. Menon heads a team that is spread across the US, China, and India. She came to Tophatter in 2017 as an eCommerce veteran, having previously run eBay’s fast-growing, Motor divisions.
With so many companies now depending on remote workers, many of them quite suddenly, we wanted to talk to Menon about stoking the culture and morale of a fully remote workforce during a time of such national and global upheaval. Menon tells us about her philosophies of work and management, as well as life, and explains what she means about the importance of remembering to slow down before you go fast.
Comparably: How you are approaching leadership when the future is somewhat murky? How are you coaching your mid-level leaders to manage their teams?
Sree Menon: If you’re a good leader, you are not going to make guesses about what the future holds, because nobody knows. I think the first step in leadership in a situation like this is to acknowledge that it is indeed uncertain and that it’s going to be hard. And then spend some time just connecting with people and hearing how they’re feeling about the situation. Find out what their perspective is, and just spend some time connecting, accepting, and acknowledging that it is uncertain. Then, once that acceptance happens, you start looking at, “Okay, within the confines of uncertainty, what are the things that we can control? What are the things we can’t control?”
Then the second thing to consider if things are uncertain is, “What are the possible scenarios?” Think through as many scenarios as you can. And then after having gone through them, start working on an action plan. Once you have an action plan, even if you don’t know how the context overall and at a macro level might change, you will have control in terms of what you can do and what your own action plan is for the moment. Figure out what is controllable and then figure out an action plan for the things you can control.
Comparably: What would you say is the most important thing that a manager should keep in mind while leading their remote teams right now?
Sree Menon: The most fundamental thing is that you can’t really see your employees. You cannot connect with them, even though you have Zoom. It really doesn’t provide the full context and the body language of expression. Each employee is going through all of these emotions. It could be about dealing with their own personal life. It could be about dealing with the fact that it’s work from home and they’re not used to it, they could have a loved one who is going through a tough time, or the employee is dealing with children who are stuck at home. There are so many things that are happening right now.
So I think, in terms of your tool chest, compassion now becomes the number one tool you have. The first thing to do is try to simply understand your employees. You have to be compassionate so that they can open up to you, so they can tell you what the situation is. And after you understand what they are going through, make adjustments in your expectations of where they are so that those employees feel supported. And then the cycle of trust becomes tighter and it becomes complete. And then just rinse, repeat. Be there for the teams and the issues that they are facing. There are just so many things out there. I would just say work harder to be more connected with your team and respond accordingly to whatever your individual team members’ needs are.
Comparably: How are you keeping your teams feeling connected and motivated from home?
Sree Menon: It’s hard. I try to spend a lot of time understanding each person’s situation. And I am much more available than I was in the past for them emotionally as well. So there may be things that have nothing to do with work that they want to share. Or maybe they have a situation with a colleague at work, and under normal work circumstances, they probably have other avenues to share these things and feel better about them. But they have less chances now to connect that way at the office. I try and make myself available.
As for workloads, instead of putting up an ambiguous situation and asking your staff to solve for it, give them more solid projects that will help make them feel more productive and feel more in control of outcomes. They can feel good after having completed those specific projects at the end of the day and feel more in control.
You have to keep finding ways to connect as a team. For the people who are local, I’ve tried things like meeting them at a park and bringing our own lunch, or sitting at a bar. Just even seeing each other after all these months cooped up. I’ve taken great walks with some of the team members, and being outdoors helps people to have a better perspective. So, when we look back on 2020 and all the tough times we have had, these are the moments that will make me smile.
Comparably: What specific tips do you have for managers that might be trying to boost morale on their team?
Sree Menon: The first thing is that those managers have to understand what is causing the morale to go down in the first place. So we talked about the personal situations that could be going on. It’s an emotional roller coaster being in this situation. So there’s that. But if the morale is work-related, it can be complicated. If you’re doing well, you may be working yourself very hard to maintain that. And that could cause morale to go down, to be working so hard so constantly. On the other hand, if the company is not doing well, people are really worried about what could happen to their jobs in that extreme uncertainty. So that could also be why morale could be lower. Each situation is different.
Certainly, when things are going well, especially in the tech sector, people are not taking a break. There is no downtime, there can be ambiguous boundaries if you’re remote, and you can be pinged in the night and suddenly you’re working. I think as a leader, you can also do things like take a day off with no meetings, randomly give people time off, or remind them that you’re off the clock as well by not sending Slack messages and emails in the middle of the night. Show them that you’re having dinner with your family or going outside. Give your team the permission, so to speak, to be able to take care of themselves. Check in on them that they are taking care of themselves, and force them to do so when you feel that they are not. And that’s for the people at the companies that are doing well.
This is all much harder when the company is not doing well and the morale is low because of that. In that scenario, you should be upfront. Be as transparent as possible. Do you have some information about the company that it might help them to know? You should share it and then connect it to the business and help them see it. People feel much more in control when they have the information, even if they have no control over the situation. And then personal connection and leadership come into play. Tell them and show them, “Look, everything is going to be alright at the end of the day. It’s a job. And let’s say the worst happens and the company falls apart, and we all lose our jobs. We will all come back. Someday things will turn around.” Make people feel good about that, because it’s true.
Comparably: So what would you say is the most important thing to keep in mind for a remote or a semi-remote future?
Sree Menon: The semi-remote future is very complicated because in that case, you want to have a homogenous experience across all the workers, and that is where it becomes hard. To replicate those experiences that people who are not remote are having for those folks who are remote is very tricky. There is a company I know that has a policy where they force even the folks who are in the office to actually get on their individual computers and get on the Zoom call just so that everybody has a similar experience. I don’t have experience with trying to maintain that balance because we haven’t yet gotten to that point. We’re obviously thinking about this and looking at best practices.
A fully remote situation is easier in that regard, and we’ve done a pretty good job. The core theme is going deeper into transparency. We have a lot of meetings that are open invite, which means you can just go if they’re interested. If you’re in Marketing and you want to go attend a Product meeting, you can just go on the open calendar, see what product morning meeting is happening, and attend. And vice-versa.
It has made people more transparent than we were when we were in-person. If someone is meeting in a physical meeting room, it’s hard to knock on the door and just go in just to listen. When it comes to doing the same thing on Zoom, it’s much easier. I’ll just go for a walk and I listen in to a particular meeting, right? And we try and keep notes of every meeting we have. We use a tool called Notion and it’s very well indexed. It’s organized by initiatives and all the meetings are recorded. So if you just want to go and read and consume the information, you can do that.
Comparably: How do you manage a remote workforce’s level of calmness when it seems like everything in the world around them is changing?
Sree Menon: I think the important part is for managers to say they are going to build a plan for the foreseeable future, which could be three weeks or three months depending on your business and the cycle time. But then also make sure that the team knows that we all need to be flexible and pivot in the environment. We have to make sure we don’t become so emotionally attached to a plan that we have trouble dropping it and starting over when the situation demands.
And I would say that when you’re thinking of a short term plan, make sure that you think through the second, third, and fourth-order effects of that plan. I have experience personally here where I’ve taken a position that helped the company at that moment in time, but that then had negative second and third-order effects. And so, spend some time to slow down and think through all those impacts that you’re having as you’re trying to deal with the current situation. Try to think ahead and build out a process so that you can reduce the impact of the second or third-order effects.
Comparably: Can you tell us a little more about slowing down to think? How do you make that happen?
Sree Menon: My philosophy is to slow down to go fast. Often when you’re driving, you’ll have this other driver out there who is trying to cut around slower drivers and go faster. And then you both are there, looking at each other and stuck at the same traffic signals. That other driver didn’t get anywhere with all that effort. I think that’s a good analogy to use in this scenario. Slowing down really just implies more thoughtfulness. It doesn’t necessarily mean don’t act fast. Just spend some time thinking through what the long-term effects could be. If you’re doing something on the supply side, you should bring in the people from the buyer side and have them think through all of the issues that could happen if you did this. Really what you’re doing is spending more time thinking about everything before you move fast.
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Originally published in: https://www.comparably.com/news/slowing-down-to-speed-up-an-interview-with-tophatter-coo-sree-menon/ by Yancy Berns.
