How to WOW your engineers without budget

The best tricks of an EM at Flipkart for making your team feel seen (not dinners, parties, pizzas and cakes)

The article is a guest post by Lakshmi Narasimhan, whom I’ll introduce after his intro.

---

Every few months, 2-3 newly graduated engineers arrive at our company.

Their manager asks them to write a few sentences about themselves and then email them to everyone, saying something like ‘X, Y, and Z joined today, please welcome them’.

One day, I got sick of those boring emails. So, I decided to do something special for the next batch of engineers: give them a welcome they would remember for years.

I spent a few minutes on Canva, and created a “newsletter” with the info they shared, and their photo. The result was something like this:

I then sent those ‘newsletter excerpts’ instead of the regular welcome email.

The responses were amazing! Instead of the usual 1-2 ‘Welcome!’ replies, there were more than 100(!) replies to that email. People actually read the ‘newsletters’.

Even more important, I remember one of the engineers telling me how much he appreciated it, that this gesture made him feel seen.

Of course the next time people arrived for my team, the expectations were even higher - and in the years since I enjoyed coming up with more and more original ideas.

A few months ago, I decided to share them with other managers, and compiled them into the book ‘19 Tech Tips to "WoW" Your Team’ (sold for $1).

Today, I’m excited to share with you 5 ideas to wow your team with zero budget!

---

Today’s article is a guest post by Lakshmi Narasimhan. Lakshmi is a Senior Engineering Manager at Flipkart. We met on LinkedIn and exchanged some messages, and he agreed to share his ideas in the newsletter (not sponsored/affiliated).

---

1. Welcoming new members

For you, the first day of a new employee might be a little exciting. For them, it’s SUPER exciting, and also scary and overwhelming (especially if they are just starting their career).

With just a few minutes of your time, you can make their day.

I already mentioned the fake newsletter idea, here are a few more:

• Create a temporary website just for them. With ChatGPT it’s super easy: “Hey create a sample UI code using HTML and CSS react to welcome a new team member”. Paste their photo and text and host it somewhere free.

• Use what is currently happening in the world as a context to welcome someone. For example, when India won the world cup T20, I wrote the subject line “T20 Champions are back and a Champion Joins us”.

• Do another poster in Canva, in a different format for each team member. It can be a ‘wanted’ poster (saying ‘finally found our backend ninja’), or anything else that comes to your mind.

2. Promotion

HR sent out an email that a promotion that I had put up is now confirmed. I thought to myself, how can I etch this moment in her memory?

I came up with the idea of displaying a placard to her. I scheduled a call for the next day, and went to the local stationery shop to buy placards and sketch pens. I wrote with a nice design “Pavithra - SD II, Congratulations!” (name changed ).

During the meeting the next day, I asked her for any guesses on what this meeting was about. She thought it was a regular 1:1, and then I showed this Placard over the video.

Instead of a boring email, or just saying “Congrats! You got the promotion”, I put in a bit of effort, and I saw in her eyes how important it was for her.

Another simple idea is to create a ‘promotion timeline’ for the email announcing the promotion. Here’s an example (name changed):

For you, it’s a regular day. For them, it might be an event they waited years for.

3. Anniversary/birthdays greetings

Usually on birthdays/anniversaries the HR just sends a ‘congrats X’, and some people respond.

I decided to make it a bit more interesting and fun. In our company, we use Dashboards very heavily, specifically Grafana (but it can work with any tool).

I modified one of the Widgets to display Anniversary and Birthday Wishes. Our engineers open them daily, so seeing the greeting in a usually professional context brings an instant smile to their faces.

4. Surprise catch up

For the 3/5/10 years anniversary, I like to set up a catch-up meeting with very senior leaders. The interactions were always very good and left a long-lasting impression on the engineers.

5. Books

This one is the only action requiring a (small) budget.

For my engineers, I used to send the “Startup of You” book and to my peers, I have sent “Radical Candor” as a token of appreciation for their contributions. On a few occasions, I have also given newsletter subscriptions as a token of appreciation.

Anton here: when I left my last company, I bought books for the 7 people closest to me (my direct reports and manager). I bought each one a different book, that was based on our conversations and what I felt they would enjoy. People really appreciated both the book and the thought I put into it!

Final words

Thank you Lakshmi for the article and the great ideas!

I believe that those few minutes you will spend to make your employees’ special days a bit better will be the minutes with the highest ROI of your day.

For some reason, those ideas reminded me of the

Tom Orbach

thought process 🙃

What I enjoyed reading this week:

1. How to push back on bad ideas (without killing your career) by

   Taha Hussain

2. 5 Engineering Management Misconceptions I Wish I Knew Earlier by

   Adler Hsieh

3. 10 Tips for Turning Around a Platform Team by

   John Cutler

4. Why you should judge your coworkers by

   Stay SaaSy