rePurpose Global Reviews

Thank you for your feedback and frank observations. We are taking the necessary steps to build a better work culture at rePurpose and we strive towards being a great place to work for every employee and stakeholder partnering with us. While we have listed below more specific responses to each of the points brought up in your review, we did want to flag an important point - as of April 2021, we have never had to date a “Head of Business Development” in Goa, and so wanted to communicate to readers of this response that this review was most likely left by a candidate from our recruitment process with whom we ultimately felt there was a less than perfect fit in light of where we are trying to go as an organization. That said, we do take these observations and critiques in stride, and have already enacted several specific measures to tangibly improve our work environment. Specific responses to observations: On the point of leaves/ work expectations over weekends: Our Team Manual - a work in progress codification of our culture and expectations from all team members, structured as a team-wide Google Doc to enable all team members to play an active role in contributing to the development of our culture - clearly states the importance of weekends to be kept for personal time and all of us in the organization take that very seriously at rePurpose. Here is a direct excerpt from our manual: “We also recommend spending the weekend with family, friends, loved ones, and most importantly, yourself.” If you could share more details about when you were asked to make up leaves with “weekend work”, we’d love to have a conversation to understand the context and take corrective action. Our initial response would be that unless absolutely essential, this should not have been the case. On your point on our culture: We would like to respectfully push back on your characterization. While we acknowledge that our culture is a work in progress, we are extremely excited to see our team come together as a community over the last year, all despite being a fully remote team during the pandemic. However, to more deliberately create a culture that keeps all team members energized, connected, and fulfilled - both to their work and to each other - we are currently enacting several new initiatives. Most importantly, we have elevated this as the number one priority of the organization - as we scale we recognize the importance of curating the right culture for the organization to thrive, right from the critical early stages of our journey. To this end, we have brought onboard an expert organizational culture advisor to directly support us with identifying culture gaps and establishing a tactical culture building and refinement roadmap for the venture. On remuneration: In the quest to build an all-star team, we recognize the importance of offering competitive remuneration and compensation to all team members. We strive to maintain remuneration levels at rePurpose Global at or above par with the industry. We are actively trying to break the perception that to work in the impact and sustainability sector, one has to take a “discount” from “traditional” corporate jobs. We’d love to have a conversation with you regarding why you thought our offered compensation structures were not suitable for you. On your point about retention: Again, we would like to respectfully push back on your observation by sharing our perspective. We have learned firsthand how effort-intensive the hiring, recruitment, and onboarding process can be. In light of this, it is absolutely critical for us to work as hard as we can to retain our team members and foster a sense of belonging - it is in our interest to do so, as not only does it save us the time and effort in embarking on frequent recruitment cycles, but more importantly, because it allows for the long term compounding of knowledge, organizational understanding, and personal rapport, to ultimately enable us to improve our work overtime. There is honestly no reason for us to let go of quality employees we have painstakingly recruited. Hiring consumes a large amount of the organization’s time and the intention has always been to reduce the time spent on hiring and instead focus that time on capacity building of all team members. To this end, we have enacted several policies that can help build the long term knowledge and skill base of our team members, such as: - “weekly wisdom” calls to share learnings amongst the team - curating a comprehensive “Onboarding Learning Program” with over 50 hours of reading and learning material on topics ranging from the circular economy and plastic pollution to fostering creativity and productivity. - initiating a learning and development budget for all team members to pursue learning and certifications outside of work, paid for by rePurpose. However, as an early-stage sustainability social enterprise with audacious goals, we do believe it is important for us to have a laser focus on ensuring that there is an ideal fit between our organization and any new candidate we recruit. To this end, we deliberately structure our recruitment process to explicitly test how a candidate would actually apply their skill sets to the unique problems that are very specific to rePurpose (through assignments-based interviews as opposed to “behavioral” questions that we don’t think shed much light on fit) and test how they would actually approach working with our existing team with a paid “exploration project”. The exploration project is an extension of the recruitment process wherein any candidate that has moved past the “final interview” round, moves into a 1-2 week period where we invite them to work with us on a self-contained, paid project to assess their fit by actually working together with them and having them collaborate with internal team members. We have found this to be immensely beneficial to both parties as each gets a sense of what working together is really like. Conversely, if there is a less-than-ideal fit, we believe that it is better to be upfront about this right at the outset, as opposed to both parties moving into a sub-optimal employment relationship which would not be tenable in the long run. On the observation on work hours and productivity: We completely acknowledge that in the early stages time consumed over zoom meetings were high and as an organization, we suffered from a lack of punctuality, caused by “over-committing” time with back-to-back meetings booked without buffer times in between. However, today punctuality and time management have become a big part of our work culture and we are striving to become better at this every day. However, we would like to point out that we do try to establish a sense of work-life balance, by taking each individual team members’ specific situations into account, inviting them to set their own boundaries and being mindful of these when booking meeting times We appreciate the time taken to make this review and we take it very seriously to make the necessary changes to grow in the right direction. However, we have not yet recruited a Head of Business Development from North Goa, and therefore would like to reiterate that this feedback is most likely from a candidate who was doing an exploration project with us. As mentioned above, the expectation of the exploration project is to assess the fit of the candidate, and the possibility of not moving forward is made clear at the start of the exploration project.