Cost to Company

A meaty part-time role may seem like the best of most worlds. 

Your workload is relatively lesser. You have more time to spare. The money might be decent too. 

One major downside of the part-time experience though is that you lose out on important benefits such as paid leaves and health insurance. 

Or... do you?

In this episode, I speak to Saurabh Arora (Co-founder and CTO, Plum), Michelle P. (Communications professional + entrepreneur), and Naren (Independent software consultant) to understand why there’s been a rise in the number of part-timers, and why your new colleague might just to be a part-timer too. 

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This episode was written, hosted, and produced by Shreevar Chhotaria

In this special episode of Cost to Company, the tables turn. Snigdha interviews CTC hosts Sneha and Shreevar about how work and workplaces have changed in the last thirty weeks. The short version: they’ve changed dramatically.

This episode is the long version of that answer. Sneha takes us into the evolving relationship between the employee and employer, into how power has shifted in response to larger shifts in the economy, just in the past seven months. And how that has changed the way we work. 

Shreevar talks about how careers have changed in response; and what a resilient, enduring career now looks like. 

If there’s one episode of CTC you listen to, this is it. 

Everybody is cutting costs. 

Not because they want to. But because they have to. 

A few months ago, edtech giant Unacademy announced that they were making frugality as one of their ‘core values’ to focus on profitability. 

But can you really be a frugal company if it’s not in your DNA from the very beginning?

In this episode, I speak to Somnath Mukherjee (AVP Business, Zerodha), Rahul Deorah (Finance Lead, Dezerv), and Kavya Jain (Product Manager, FreeUp) to find out what its like working in a frugal company. 

And why every company can’t be frugal, even if they want to. 

Subscribe to The Ken: https://the-ken.com/

Hosted, Written, and Produced by Shreevar Chhotaria

Internships are booming. 

Internshala has been reporting jumps of between 30 and 80 percent jumps in internships listed by businesses year on year, depending on which year you look at. The same data says that more and more businesses are offering paid internships. Demand for interns is going up.

And if you ask recruiters, they’ll say that the number of internship applicants is also going up. Supply of interns is meeting its demand.

Both sides of the market are growing.

And because of this, workplaces and careers are changing. The fundamental lines we’ve always known and understood between education and career, university then job, those lines are blurring. In many cases, interns are almost indistinguishable from entry level employees, both to their employers and to themselves. 

This is making our workplaces younger, more innovative, and a little bit more prone to bursts of hormones, than ever before.

Gone are the days when unions were something that only caught the fancy of the blue collar workforce. 

After a slew of unending layoffs, white collar employees in the IT sector are finally waking up to the bells of unionisation. 

But it’s not without a myriad of unobvious roadblocks. 

The path to collective bargaining wasn’t easy. But no one knew it would be this hard. 

In this episode, I speak to Sreyan Chatterjee (Lawyer/Researcher; Ex-Reuters), Harpreet Singh Saluja (Founding Member, Nascent Information Technology Employees Senate) and Suman Dasmahapatra (National Convenor, All India IT & ITeS Union) to understand more about the treacherous journey towards white collar unionisation. 

This episode was written, hosted, and produced by Shreevar Chhotaria (@shreevz)

There’s a specific idea we have about moonlighting:  a trend that emerged in the pandemic.  Engineers tasked with sitting at home and delivering their product saw that their skills were so valuable, that it was possible to extract more money out of them by working in two places at once. So a person would either consult with multiple organizations on the side, or work in more businesses than one, using the skills they had already, to extract more income out of it.

But this episode, what we’re talking about is entirely different. 

This is moonlighting not to extract more money for the skills you already have, but moonlighting to demonstrate new skills and new experience. This is moonlighting to stay relevant.

And it turns out, even those with most professional experience find that they have to do it. To survive.  

What was once touted as the biggest work trend to emerge from the pandemic, is on its way out.

Companies are slowly but surely realising that the 'work from anywhere' model isn't sustainable in the long run. Or even in the short run, in some cases.

Meesho, for one, had announced an extravagant WFA policy in February 2022.

They scrapped it only a few months later.

But it's not just the employers who're putting the final nail in the coffin. It's the employees too. 

In this episode, I speak to Joel D'Souza, (Program Manager- Culture and Talent at Headout), Aditi Agrawal (Management Consultant at a Big 4 firm), and Saurabh Deep Singla (CHRO, upGrad) to find out how the golden era of work from anywhere is over.

Hosted, Written, and Produced by Shreevar Chhotaria

Earlier this month, Cost to Company received a striking message from a Ken subscriber called Uzma Rushdi. She wrote, “Mumbai is suffering from a lack of new talent inflow. Unless there are dramatic changes it will be Calcutta in 20 years :(”

Around the same time another thing happened. A group of 35 startups in Mumbai created something called TEAM (Technology  Entrepreneurs Association of Mumbai), with the the pointed goal to reinvigorate Brand Mumbai. 

But what happened to Brand Mumbai that it needs reinvigorating?

This then became our hypothesis for this episode of Cost to Company. Is Mumbai dying? Is it going to become Calcutta in the next twenty years? Is it going to be a city that the most talented professionals leave for better opportunities? And is the TEAM one effort to stop that from happening?

I’m Sneha, your host, and this week we are going to interview four, true lovers of Bombay, founders, CEOs, one product manager, and Uzma, and ask them where is their city of dreams, where is their maximum city, headed now?

In 2023, amidst the thick of the layoff season, you'd think that 'employee ghosting' (a phenomenon where prospective employees don't end up joining an organisation without any providing any communication) is a thing of the past.

But that's quite not true.

Although in a reduced state as compared to 2021, ghosting still exists.

Companies and their HR professionals are coming up with some ingenious way to jump the 'invisible gap' that exists between offer acceptance and joining date, where most of this ghosting occurs.

In this episode of Cost to Company, I speak to Mohammed Sufiyan Sait (Director - People Success, Toplyne; Co-founder, The Talent Deck), Sanam Rawal (Founding Partner, MetaMorph), and Sairam Krishnan (Founding Team, Atomicwork; Ex-Accel, Ex-Freshworks) to find out how.

Hosted, Written, and Produced by Shreevar Chhotaria

A good executive coach with many years of experience, working in an Indian metro city, typically costs between 20 thousand rupees to a lakh a session.

There are multiple reasons for this. First, training to be a certified coach is expensive. Second, executive coaches work with such a niche, small, group of clients, so they get to and need to charge to the world.

But this, the steep price tag, informs so much about executive coaching. The price tag shapes who gets to go to an executive coach. It informs the kinds of problems executive coaching tends to solve. That price tag is also why we understand so little about executive coaching.

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