Career series (II): Spreading wide
How I built the best place to work.
I got into Cowrywise in the most unconventional way.
It was Post-Covid, I had left GE thanks to “budget constraint” due to COVID and had taken a second consecutive contract role that was going to be a full-time afterwards.
On a blessed Tuesday morning after a deep sleep under a thick duvet at my career guide’s place, I woke up to a LinkedIn DM from a familiar name , he was an alumni of my department in OAU and we met once during my undergraduate days. Although he’d later tell me he couldn’t remember.
He had asked for my email address or phone number requesting for a catch up. I shared immediately as I was excited to connect with someone of such pedigree in the finance industry.
We got on an engaging call about my career path so far (from graduation till that moment), asking and answering diverse questions and towards the end of the conversation, he said there was a Lead HR role at Cowrywise and he felt I might fit in.
He also said the role was outsourced and the Recruitment agency had started interviewing other candidates but he was going to share them my CV and they’d reach out. After the call, I smiled and my host and career guide (DD) asked why I was grinning , I told him; a miracle might happen to me before the end of the year.
3 interviews after, I got my offer as the inaugaural Lead, People and Culture at Cowrywise.
First Task- Talent Acquisition:
I resumed Cowrywise at a pivotal stage; as I love to say in tech terms, they were moving from Cowrywise version 1.0, to Cowrywise version 2.0. One of the most crucial things to get right at this time was hiring the right talents, the kind of talents that blended well with the culture I was trying to build, while having the right combination of skills and abilities to get the job done. As I wrote in my 100 days review;
“Interviewing over a hundred candidates in thirty days was daunting, but exciting. For a fast-growing company like Cowrywise, hiring the right talents is a must-do, a delicate task to be executed with perfection. This is why we embarked on a thrilling adventure of getting the best talents to accelerate our growth.”
The fact that I could look back to to all the first hires I made and be proud of the work they did at Cowrywise is one of my happiest moment as an HR professional.
Building the culture:
As I often say when I speak at an event, facilitate a knowledge sharing session with Startup-founders or participate in different HR conversations; culture is total way of life, and a company’s culture is the company’s total way of life. How do they talk? How do they write? What’s their primary means of communication? How open is their open door policy?
I remembered the first time I sent E, the Customer Experience Manager an email, then informed her on slack that I had sent her an email; she looked at me and said:
“Faith, is it something that serious, am I safe?” , this was because all our internal communication was primarily done on slack (a concept I will later explain to a late hire and he won’t be able to fathom because he was coming from big 4 where everything was done via email).
How then did I build a great culture- a clip from my 250th day review show shows how:
“Nothing is more pivotal to the success of a startup than the quality of talent they bring in. This is why we pay a great deal of attention to our processes. From recruitment to selection and finally, to onboarding, the process of integrating people and absorbing them into our culture is one we’ve hacked. Even candidates that are not selected feel like part of the company”
I remembered someone tweeting that I write rejection mails like love-letters; it majorly depicts how pivotal I treated every interaction with with candidates as I knew this contributed to how people percieve the company, the culture and contributed to our employer branding (a point I’d explain soon).
Open and honest communication wasn’t just a line item on our core values, it was our everyday mantra. From the relaxed atmosphere that working with each other on a first-name basis presents to the easy flow of communication and mutual respect and the relatively flat structure that ensures idea flows without bureaucracy. Ideas flows seamlesly from interns to department leads.
We leveraged collaborative tools to enhance cross-functional and cross-department interactions, ensuring people could iterate, ideate and explore their creativity without feeling caged.
Employer Branding:
During an interview recently, I was asked which part of HR I would love to specialise in the nearest future and EB was one of my answers. Everyone loved Cowrywise, everyone talked about Cowrywise when I was there. How did I achieve this? Well, grab your jotter, let’s read together.
The first was creating optimal employee engagement; creating an environment that was relaxing enough to birth creativity, and structured enough to enhance productivity. How did I do it ? (Well, that’s my secret). We had a retention rate of 93% in the first 180 days, and over my 25 months at Cowrywise, we had a retention rate of 90% plus, ain’t I an exceptional HR professional?
Drawing the curtains:
I was asked recently about which projects I was proud of; there are probably dozens of them, but three stands out for me.
The first was our Compensation and Benefits Policy. I launched a lot of positive initiatives from the Relocation Assistant Policy (that enabled us to get the best of talents outside Lagos) to the Vehicle Assistant Policy, and Education Policy, I woke up everyday asking myself one question:
“How can I create an environment that optimises productivity for employees while equipping them with enough resources to help achieve business goals and objectives?”
Through these different benefits policy I spearheaded, the quality of life for our employees improved, and a bit of HR analytics depcited outstanding success of policies.
The second was the one month Learning and Development sprint I did with LinkedIn. This had happened few months after we were nominated as one of the top-ten Start-ups to work, thanks to the culture I built. I had reached out to LinkedIn, asking that we try out their learning program (for free, as this often costs a thousand dollars depending on the number of employees) but thanks to my excellent inter-personal skills and convincing selling skills, I was given the chance to.
Not only did we experience a company-wide experiential learning, LinkedIn also ranked us as one of the top learners for that month and the Learning Director for Sub-Saharan Africa wrote me a recommendation I won’t forget in a long while.
The last was launching internships for our Cowrywise campus ambassadors. I have a lot of story to tell about Cowrywise campus ambassadors, as it was one of the many outstanding projects I worked on, but it is probably not my story alone as very brilliant minds like Feri, Oye, Michael and now Timi coordinated the success of the program, however, I co-launched the first set of internships birthed through the ambassador programs. It was a strategic way of implementing a succession plan as we had one-off interns who came back to the company, or who moved through the pipleine to become NYSC or full-time staff e.g Timi. More importantly, Cowrywise have had amazing interns who went on to be champions in their diverse spaces, and they would always trace their foundation back to Cowrywise.
To recount my work, my efforts, and the amount of impact I had at Cowrywise will probably keep you here for an hour, so these days, when people ask me about my time at Cowrywise, I probably say something like
“Google Emmanuel Faith, and put Cowrywise at the front”.
I could keep writing but I would love to take a pause here and highlight a couple lessons my time at Cowrywise taught me.
- Capacity stretches you: Coming from GE where I have had to dig-deep to Cowrywise where I had to stretch wide, I was super-grateful for the capacity built at GE. At Cowrywise, I had to begin to apply all the knowledge I assimilated and acquired at GE, without having any HRBP to report to. At first, it was difficult, but as I iterated, ideated and implemented, I began to have more success than failures, and this accelerated my learning process. Do not run away from responsibilities, especially at early stage because you do not know what capacity you’d build along the way.
- Build Career Capital Early: I touched on career capital in the first part of this series. The fact that I wasn’t shy to take up responsibiltiies, get things done and implement with obvious results made the co-founders trust my competence and capability more. There were a lot of times I had to defend my decisions, especially as we hired more experts with array of experiences and fucntional competencies, but I wasn’t afraid to stand my grand when I needed to, especially when certain that I was fighting for a talent while protecting business goals and objectives. This also gave me the boldness to implement more policies without getting questioned.
- Show your work: If you are my friend, you will know that this is an important part of my day to day activity. Towards my the end of my journey at Cowrywise, a lot of things happened and things could have gone awry if I wasn’t documenting my work and showing them.
- Know your biggest stakeholders and learn to manage them: This helped me a whole lot, at some point my biggest stakeholders were the co-founders, at some point, they were the team-leads, at some point, it was the finance manager, whoever it was, I ensured to get to know them and manage them to make my work easier and more productive.
- Be an Outlier, believe in yourself and own your genius: One thing that affected my success and how I have sold my success at Cowrywise is that I doubt myself and ask if I did all that, guess what? I actually did all that and I have evidences supporting this brilliance and array of lasting impact. Always believe in yourself even when everyone arounds you water down your work, and don’t forget to own your greatness.
I often say when I am pitching that every startup should hire either a builder or a seller. At Cowrywise, I was both. From building the culture of the best place to work, to leveraging my multiple talents and social capital, to influencing in other roles like my contribution to football saving goals,
I bloomed fully, I did my best work, I redefined what HR should look like and changed the narrative and negative PR that people had about HR, and if you knew about my time at Cowrywise, please leave a comment below and share your thoughts about this.
Till the next part (most-likely the closing part).
With love,
Your Favorite HR buddy
P:S- You can read more about my works at Cowrywise via the links below.
P.P:S- If you are a Startup Founder, NGO founder or an HR professional looking to build the best place to work or want a personal connsultation on people and hr related challenges, please stop by this link and let’s have a chat.
