Experience is often said to be the best teacher, but leadership expert John C. Maxwell said that this only applies to the experiences that have been evaluated.
Living off this principle, Swingvy co-founder and CEO Jin Choeh takes the lessons from his previous venture and implements it in his current one.
As if testifying to the quality of these lessons, Swingvy has successfully raised US$7 million from Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, making it the first of the South Korean tech giant’s investment in Southeast Asia.
The all-in-one HR, payroll and benefits platform was founded in 2016, and has services with 5,000 companies and reportedly achieved a revenue increase of 390 per cent last year.
In an interview with e27, Jin Choeh shares the lessons on the work culture that he incorporated at Swingvy –after experiencing burnout while managing people.
Also Read: Swingvy, an online HR platform for SMEs in Southeast Asia, raises funding from Aviva
Giving employees authority
As a founder a burnout can be a common phenomenon; it ranges from purely physical exhaustion or even a more emotional one. Jin Choeh begins by explaining how the burnout happened in his previous company.
“In my previous startup, I believed in myself too much. I worked the hardest, and realised that it turned out to be the biggest inefficiency in the team,” he says.
In order to cope with it, and to prevent himself from making the same mistakes in the new company, Choeh resorts to hiring individuals who are more qualified than him.
He believes that it has helped him manage the team better.
“I hate the word ‘management’ and would only hire qualified people who are better than me. My role is not to say we do this or we are going to go there; it is more about setting goals and letting the team navigate in their way through,” he noted.
Also Read: A look at workweek hours and differences in work cultures around the world
Clear communication
As Choeh speaks about hiring experienced people, he also stresses communication as a major focus of the startup, which is why the company encourages good and transparent communication practices.
To support this process, the startup implements the Agile Scaling structure as used in streaming giant Spotify.
As explained in this article, Spotify arranges its engineering team into seven different roles, with squads being the smallest unit and a chief architect as the leader of all engineers in the team. This arrangement puts emphasis on autonomy and trust in each unit.
“In Swingvy, we follow the squad structure inspired by Spotify, where one product manager manages all team members. This way, there is alignment across teams, and often allows us to set the kind of aggressive goals that we want,” Choeh says.
“Our team is dispersed in four different countries and we have decided that having a squad structure would be the way to properly share information in the clearest way possible,” he continues.
In his opinion, Choeh explains that because the squad structure tends to be smaller, it is able to enhance communication between the team members. This has something to do with the Chinese Whisper Theory, which says that having too many members in a team might distort the communication process.
These factors about employee experience have enabled Swingvy to rise as a startup and enabled its highly remote team to deliver results in the best way possible.
The team is also preparing a fresh product line, offering new value by the end of the second half of this year, according to the founder.
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Image Credit: Swingvy
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