Employees Are Like Family Members And Human First: Sarbvir Singh

For Policybazaar CEO Sarbvir Singh, “employees are like family members and human first.” During the current times of social distancing, he feels bringing meaning to the lives of employees, regular communications with them, and de-cluttering the focus areas at work should be the key areas when it comes to leading a team.

He feels, “there is one set of companies, which had a huge loss in business due to Covid-19 and are struggling to figure out what should be the business model. Then, there is another set which is getting a lot of business and learning to cope up with demand, and make sure that they continue to serve customers. Both sets of companies have a very human problem - which is that every employee is a family member, and is a human first.” 

He was recently speaking at a webinar organized by YourStory Education on ‘Team Management in the age of social distancing,’ which was hosted by Shradha Sharma, Founder, and CEO of YourStory Media.

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COMMUNICATE WITH YOUR TEAMMATES
“You really need to over-communicate in a situation like this, even if it is not super required. We used to have regular meetings and we make sure that we continue to do that in this period as well,” Sarbvir said.

Since the beginning of nationwide lockdown, most managers at Policybazaar have been doing daily morning meetings with their teams to discuss their daily plan of actions, which for some managers are followed by evening briefing and follow-up sessions.

DECLUTTER YOUR WORK
“The second important thing is to de-clutter because the truth of the matter is most business leaders know their goals. The problem is that we know what we should be doing but we do other things also,” he said. 

Sarbvir feels managers should stop doing discretionary activities. He said, “there’s no point in creating artificial stress and doing things. So, if you can declutter, focus on a few core business objectives that your team has, then it helps to set the tone of the theme”.

BRING MEANING IN THE LIVES OF EMPLOYEES
For Singh, it is really important to bring meaning in the lives of his teammates. “A good leader is somebody who doesn’t impose their objectives on other people. It's rather to make those people achieve their objective which in turn will help you achieve yours because if you get yourself on anybody else then it tends to fall apart,” he said.

“We told the employees that people want health and life insurance policies in the middle of this crisis and we should provide them because it will give them some comfort and satisfaction. Our employees could identify with this message and felt that it's a logical thing to do” he added.  

Talking about an insurance during the current lockdown, he said “We had an instance when we had to make a product live and they had to work the whole weekend for almost 48 hours but they worked not only because of loyalty to the company and the business but also because they felt that it was a worthwhile thing to do.”

(Article edited by: Sunny Lamba)

(video courtesy: Yourstory Education)

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