ZaLife blog | Read about Kulizans, our culture and the fun things we do

We are looking for a smart marketer to lead Kuliza's social media marketing initiatives

We are looking to hire a social media marketing manager to own and manage the online marketing initiatives at Kuliza. The social media marketing manager will work with Kaushal Sarda and Kavita Arora in launching new initiatives and growing present programs.

Kuliza is a very different kind of company (in the kind of work we do, the way we market and present ourselves) and hence a marketing job would be more initiative driven than job description driven.

Over the last one year (since Kuliza’s marketing department was incepted), we have launched our marketing initiatives in the following directions:

1. Social: All our marketing initiatives have been social since we believe in this philosophy
2. Research: We invest a lot in research and publication. We have a research publication – Social Technology Quarterly and a research channel
3. Thought leadership: We believe that our thought leadership in the social technology space is our biggest asset in marketing. We share our expertise with the world with our blog, publications and speaking
4. Engagement: We try to engage our audience rather than bombard them with business opportunities. We do this through our channels on Facebook, Twitter (@Kuliza) etc.

We are looking for a smart social media marketing manager, (2-5 years work experience) who can take this momentum forward. So although it would be difficult (and also wrong) to tightly define the job, we have tried to create the sandbox in which we expect this person to contribute to the company. The social media marketing manager would be looking after the following things:

Own Kuliza’s communities (Content management and user engagement):

• Managing content and quality check of the blog and website
• Content Management and Community management for our STQ Facebook page
• Content management and Community management of Kuliza’s Twitter channel along with some other key employees / thought leaders ( @kuliza)
• Content management and community engagement of Kuliza’s research channel on slideshare

Cake and Video

We all learned something new on Friday – System Administration Appreciation Day.

Even our infrastructure team didn’t know about it! It was first organized by Ted Kekatos in 2000 and has been celebrated every year on the last Friday of July. You can read an interview with him here.

We marked the day with a cake but I will leave the words of appreciation to Praveen Kumar:

To all the sysads (infra team), who toil every day in relative anonymity ensuring the services we rely on stay operational, I say thank you.  It is you that make things work, keep the users, developers and the managers happy day after day.

For a more amusing celebration check out this video on the UK’s Unix & Open Systems User Group website.

People are the key

Dinesh Tantri recently shared his experience on how Thoughtworks is overcoming their “distribution complexity” and improving knowledge and collaboration.  Along with selecting the right platform, he talked about the organization and people practices that Thoughtworks have built to support a collaborative work culture:

• Our belief that culture is the long term advantage not business models
• Small Offices – We limit the number of people in each office to 150. People get to know each other better, there is better trust and deeper knowledge sharing
• Open workspaces act as change agents – None of our offices have cubicles – None in leadership team have a private cabin
• Loose Hierarchies – our organizational structure resembles a fishnet with “temporary centralization based on purpose and need“
• Smart Incentives –Peer recognition and intrinsic motivation drive collaborative behavior
• Informal Communities – We have always had thriving communities & fantastic conversations. None of them are “official” per-se. Most of them are self-assembled groups of passionate people – Irrespective of the platforms we have used in the past [Mailman, Google Groups etc.,], we have always had intense conversations and debates in these communities. This is a side effect of the kind of people we hire and the traits we look for. Face to face community meetings are another key aspect of the culture. Every region has its own style and rhythm – Friday Pubs, Lunch and Learn sessions etc.
• Transparency and trust – This is a key part of our culture – Giving people on the ground access to resources they need and letting them make decisions is a major way of engendering trust. The rule of thumb on the transparency is “as much as people can tolerate “

For me this really brings out the absolutely crucial importance of selecting people that will contribute to the culture that you are building.

Some helpful studies when thinking of how to motivate employees

While we have been detailing how ZaLife will work, adding the game layer to it and to our Thought Leadership ladder, we have been very conscious about understanding the current thinking and research on motivation and pay.

The current views on motivation are influenced by Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.  The theory suggests that people are motivated to fulfill their basic, physical needs (food, warmth, sex) first before the need for personal esteem and eventually growth needs (creativity, problem solving) take priority.

The most important contribution to the motivation debate recently has been Drive by Dan Pink. In the book he describes 3 activities to encourage intrinsic motivation:

Autonomy: People want to have control over their work

Mastery: People want to get better at what they do

Purpose: People want to be part of something that is bigger than they are

Providing people with these opportunities at work will help build their intrinsic motivation. Although I feel there are a number of shortcomings in his book (e.g. equating only monetary incentives with extrinsic motivation; extrinsic = bad, intrinsic = good) it is important to be aware of the ideas. He covers the key ideas of the book in his TED talk. I prefer the live animation version by the RSA.

However, providing activities that build intrinsic motivation will be pointless unless the essentials like food, health, financial security, and home (Maslow’s safety and physiological needs) are taken care of by compensation. Only then will people focus on satisfying their intrinsic motivations.

Companies that have gotten the balance right are few and far between. But there are some interesting studies on pay, bonuses, rewards and equity that help understand how best to utilize these from an employee and a company perspective:

• Companies that target stock options to specific groups of employees produce no improvement in performance. This is possibly due to the ‘free-rider’ effect. One way to mitigate against this is to link the granting of stock options to the performance of the company
• Financial rewards can reduce intrinsic motivation. In a 1970s study by Mark Lepper, participants were invited to play games for fun. Rewards were then added, however once they were taken away participants stopped playing. When performance was rewarded, a fun game became work
• Even though employees prefer cash bonuses, “a gift-in-kind results in a significant and substantial increase in productivity” over cash bonuses. This suggests that the value of the gift is less important than the fact that a gift is actually given. The study suggests that that from an employer’s perspective it is beneficial to provide extra benefits to employees as they “are more likely to reciprocate positively” to these

The challenging task for us with ZaLife will be to maintain the element of fun and ensure that employees feel valued by Kuliza and rewarded for completing their missions!

A 'biking to work guide for dummies'

When you spend a mini fortune on a Trek 4300; evangelize biking to whoever you talk to; tell your parents that your son has bought a ‘cycle’ (apparently for them there is not much difference between Atlas and Trek 4300 – after all they are all cycles); bike about 50 -100 kms every weekend on biking treks and commute to work on a non noise making, non – gas guzzling, non – jam creating and mechanical driven two wheeler – the most common question you get from people is – Why?? Why bike to work post James Watt invented steam engine? So here is a list of reasons why I commute to Kuliza on a bike:

a) It is faster: Hard to believe for non bikers, but a good sports bike can easily pick up good speeds and has very good controls. So if you are commuting between 3-7 kms a day, there won’t be much time lost if you commute on a bike as compared to if you commute in a car (plus you save time in parking hassles).

More importantly, you rarely get stuck in traffic jams. You can peddle on the road sides, move between the jam packed rows of cars and in worst of the cases, when nothing is moving, pick up your bike and carry it with hundreds of jealous eyes staring out you – now who is laughing, eh!

b)  It is greener – Switching to bike is a great way to reduce burden on the oil reserves. If you commute alone, commute less than 10 kms a day, you should switch to biking to be more environment friendly. Just think, considering an average mileage of 15 Kms/ per liter and a 15 km per day to and fro commute, you are saving 1 liter of gas a day and 310 liter of gas per year just by commuting to work. And contrary to believes, it is not at all tiring. In fact it is the most refreshing way to begin your day!

c) It is fun - And that is the most prominent part. These sport bikes are such a great way of riding roads and perhaps the best way for getting a workout (especially for those ingrained in the sedentary lifestyle of technology development) .

A few of us Kulizans who are biking enthusiasts plan hikes on weekends, the recent one being a 100 km biking trip to Bangalore International Airport and back. In fact I am trying to get in touch with a few more bikers for more exciting trips in Bangalore

d) And finally, it is cool - You can buy a car or a motorbike and be one among the thousands on road or buy these cool looking sports bikes and be one among the very few.

It is great to see this emerging culture in Kuliza for biking to work. @saini_vaibhav and @apnerve have already joined the club and we are encouraging  many more.