Growth Between Lockdowns: How Startups Overcome the HR Challenges of Covid-19

2020 is over, and what a year it has been! It’s hard to think of any aspect of our lives that wasn’t completely transformed over the past 12 months. Remember what the phrase “I’m at work” used to mean? According to McKinsey, more than 80% of US employees state that the crisis is affecting their daily work lives. The boundaries are extremely blurry, and in this confusing reality, startups discover that there are no free passes. Customers, employees, and, yes, investors are all expecting to see results.

As part of the Calcalist Startup+ competition, I recently had the pleasure of hosting a fascinating discussion with executives at two promising SOMV portfolio companies. Hadar Ron, VP HR at Pliops, and Aviv Noy, Co-Founder and CTO at Rivery, shared their thoughts and experience on startup growth, remote work, and everything in between.

Pilops, a growing company that combines both software and hardware solutions for advanced cloud and enterprise data management, continued to grow its team and expand its business during the pandemic. Rivery, which leads the emerging DataOps segment, grew a small team of five people to a 30-employee company operating across multiple locations. Both companies proved that it is more than possible to thrive during challenging times and were kind enough to share their insights with me and the world.

They say that “managing a startup is an exercise in recruitment” because getting the right people to join your team at the right time will make it or break it. Co-founders, business partners, employees, and investors are the startup’s pillars of success. But how do you keep growth, innovation, and just plain fun going when the world is facing a pandemic? These were some of the topics we discussed.

Exponential growth: Protecting the company’s DNA

Startup growth can be tricky even during ‘normal’ periods. Maintaining the startup vibe and making sure not to lose the company’s original DNA is challenging. Add a little Covid-19 to the mix, and you’ll face the test our startups had to overcome.

Hadar described it perfectly by saying that “growing startups don’t have the privilege of taking a break, even during a global pandemic.” Reaching the highest levels of excellence, innovation, and teamwork became a focal point for many companies. Here are a few principles that helped our startups succeed:

• Take things personally: Create a personalized work environment that sees the employee as an individual and caters to their specific requirements. For example, a recent survey found that diverse employees struggle the most during this time. Companies have to be attentive and make sure to take into consideration each employee’s schedule and family needs. Hadar and Aviv both agreed that new employees needed that extra attention for the onboarding process to succeed. Online and sometimes in-person meetings helped introduce new recruits and make sure they’ll never feel like strangers. The test, according to Aviv, is how comfortable they feel to approach company founders with questions and ideas.
• The virtual water cooler: Another challenge was creating that special connection and “togetherness” despite the fact that most communication was done remotely. Spontaneous brainstorming sessions aren’t a waste of time; they are the fuel of innovation. If you think of startups as disorganized businesses, think again. Aviv and Hadar mentioned the importance of setting clear goals and guidelines to rally everyone around the same company vision and action plan. Tech platforms help us sync on a technical level but establishing open communication channels is up to the company.
• Employees just wanna have fun: Startups have learned that you don’t need cupcakes to have fun as a team, and if you do, they can always be delivered right to employees’ doorstep. Aviv and Hadar mentioned remote escape rooms, hackathons, and happy hours. Just remember that while employees appreciate these efforts, they also need their managers to allow them to get some work done in between entertaining sessions.
• It’s a small world: Many startups operate multiple locations and normally fly back-and-forth or encourage relocations to form a unified, global DNA. In this crazy new reality, Aviv hasn’t met his founding partner in over eight months. How do you overcome the disconnection between company sites? The secret recipe includes focus and prioritization, a strong relationship with customers, and lots of communication between teams. Have we learned that founders don’t necessarily have to move to the US to grow their business? Not exactly, because understanding your target market is still critical. But the added flexibility created during the pandemic helped everyone keep an open mind and collaborate.

While we all want Covid-19 to be history, we can also appreciate some of its blessings. If we’re creative enough, we just might be able to keep the enhanced flexibility and productivity around long after the pandemic is over. One thing that hasn’t changed is the importance and value of investing in people. Putting employees first makes all the difference, global pandemic or not.

Nir Adler
General Partner, SOMV