My 5 years of learning at Indiahikes. - Head - Operations Indiahikes Employee Review

I am Vishnu Benne. I worked with Indiahikes for 5 years. The major part of the 20s I spent at Indiahikes, and it has been the best years of my professional career. I joined the organization when I was 23 years old in an entry-level role. Over the next 5 years, Indiahikes put in a lot of effort to build the right skills and the values in me to help me grow. Both in my responsibilities and as a human being. When leaving the organization, I was heading the Operations team for Indiahikes Over the past 5 years, I have had a plethora of learnings. I want to list down my key learnings here. These learnings are quite generic to everyone who works at Indiahikes. It speaks about the culture and the kind of professional life you can look forward to if you are planning to apply and work with Indiahikes. 1. Indiahikes taught me how to look at work One of the first things Indiahikes taught me was how to look at work. Before this, I worked for a corporate and the way I looked at work was very different. Indiahikes taught me how to be completely involved in the work you do. Your work is not something that you do from 9 to 6 on weekdays. The work you do should engulf you and affect you deeply. You look at work like an entrepreneur who has started something new and is extremely passionate about taking things forward. This is the only way you create something new. I call it the Steve Jobs way of looking at work. Indiahikes showed me the importance of having deep emotional ownership towards work. This means the outcome of your work affects your emotions. You feel sad when things go wrong, angry if someone devalues the work your organization does. This level of care that you show towards your work, help you do something that is impactful to society. Indiahikes taught me not to differentiate between work. One of the first things that I learnt here was that the organization is much bigger than your team, or yourself. It is important to always put the organization first and do work that helps take the organization forward and not think too much of yourself. It is important to not choose the kind of work you do. You are not bound by the designation you hold, and you should be ready to roll up your sleeves and get into any kind of work that helps the organization. It is important to be an ideal team player to be respected and grow. Trust me when I say, this was not easy, and it took me years to even understand and accept this. But, when you see the collective work that you do impact society at large, you realize the power of this. I feel I still have a long way to go on this front. Indiahikes showed me the joy of doing impactful work. Today I am proud to say that I was part of the team that enabled hundreds of trekkers to go to the Himalayas and have a life-changing experience. I feel privileged to have been part of the team that defined the future of trekking. There is immense satisfaction when you are recognized in society for the work that you do. Indiahikes changed my perspective and ensured I do work that adds meaning to my life. 2. Values and culture of an organization are key factors to long term success Indiahikes is a value-based organization. The founds, Arjun and Sandhya have been extremely careful right from the start to build a strong value system at Indiahikes. Any decision that is taken here is purely based on the value systems and nothing else. Let me highlight a couple of them. Indiahikes taught me the power of relationships. As an Operations Manager, I had to constantly deal with partners outside the organization. To start with, I was always encouraged to call them partners and not as vendors. It was important to treat them that way. The money came secondary and the relationship with them was given more importance. It was important to know them and care for them. I remember Sandhya’s words - Business is always a result of having great relationships and not at the cost of it. Indiahikes showed me the right way to look at customers. Here we never looked at them as customers but as trekkers. I have been a witness to multiple occasions where trekkers were given refunds even when treks did not run due to external factors. Trekkers are always encouraged to come to do a trek for free if they have done it once. The policies of the organization show the level of importance given to the values of the organization. Money is never the driving factor. After 5 years, now I am beginning to understand the importance of having strong values for long term success. This learning was strengthened more during Covid when we had to call off all our treks. The kind of support and love shown by our trekkers was unparalleled. Indiahikes not only stood strong during this time but made a complete shift in how we internally operate. This is showing dividends now when things have eased a bit. I will always have this grouse of leaving the organization right when I was starting to learn how to build a value-rich environment for teams to work. Indiahikes looks at people working in the organization the same way. The organization is extremely caring towards your growth and well-being. Arjun and Sandhya, the founders, are always concerned about what is good for you. They always push you towards being a better human being first. The culture in the organization is very strong. As an organization, everyone here is very simple. Simple in the way they lead their life. Right from the founders to anyone here, is very conscious about what they buy, how much they buy. If you are someone who is putting a lot of money in consumerism, I would ask you to rethink before applying here. You will find it very hard to fit in here. Indiahikes is an extremely sustainable organization. We are always looking at how we can reduce the impact on nature. Basic things like avoiding packaged items, taking your own Dabba to the shop, composting the food waste that is generated at the office, are a few things that you will commonly see here. Even the lunch here is different. People sit down on the floor, right from the founds to everyone. We bring lunch from home and never order anything from outside. All these rituals are carefully designed to create a certain culture at Indiahikes. Indiahikes strives hard to constantly build an environment rich with values and strong culture. The work here at Indiahikes always happens within the boundaries of these values and culture. 3. You are on the same journey as the CEO It is rare to see an employee and the CEO or founder of the organization being on the same journey. In other organizations, the work that you are doing usually is very confined to your team or your department. You do not generally know what the CEO is thinking and what is the direction in which the organization is moving towards. This is NOT the case at Indiahikes. Imagine a cricket team. The captain of the team, the players, the young ones who have joined the team, the support staff, the coaches are all part of one big team playing different roles, but everyone is working towards one singular vision. This is exactly how it is at Indiahikes. From my first day at Indiahikes, I have always enjoyed the transparency of the founders and the leaders in the organization. The problems at hand were always discussed openly and my opinions were considered no matter how small they were. Be it about something big like deciding the vision of the organization or even the day-to-day decisions that must be made, everything was discussed openly. Even when I was a leader in the organization, I was always encouraged to do the same with my team members as well. The consultative approach to work is ingrained very deeply at Indiahikes. You are your own boss here. There is no manager or supervisor who is looking into your work. The organization trusts you to look at your work just like an entrepreneur and take things forward. The founders put a lot of trust in you to make the right calls and show at the most amount of care towards the organization. Both the founders take a lot of time to guide and build that strong value system in you to make the calls. Everyone at Indiahikes is working towards one vision, to ensure everyone treks. If you are thinking of applying to work at Indiahikes, ensure that you are extremely passionate about the vision and care as much as the founders do about the vision and the organization. If you can do this constantly, your growth here has no bounds. 4. It is important to make the right mistakes. This is another big learning that I have had at Indiahikes. Very early at Indiahikes, I was encouraged to try new things and not be afraid of whether they will succeed. This gave me a lot of freedom to express myself at work. I can give you a personal example. I took up a big project of tracking all our equipment in our stores across the Himalayas and understanding the life of each piece of equipment. We have thousands of equipment in our inventory with more than a hundred different types. My idea was to print a unique QR code printed on cloth and stitch it on all our equipment. I went ahead with the implementation of this project. There was a lot of initiation time and labour involved. After close to 3 months into the project, the project failed. I had not considered the amount of time it takes to take equipment out of its cover, scan it and put it back in. It was not realistic when you have treks running and you have very little time to get your equipment ready. When the project failed, the only thing the founders asked me to do was to sit down and reflect on what could have been done better. Indiahikes taught me that it is alright to make mistakes if your intentions are right, and you have put in attention to detail. It is okay to make mistakes if they are also aligned with the vision of the organization. What to keep in mind before applying to Indiahikes • You believe in the vision of Indiahikes. You are extremely passionate about taking trekking forward in the country. • Have strong values which align with the organization. Read the “Work with Indiahikes” page very carefully. • You are ready to take feedback in the right spirit and work towards improving yourself daily. • You are used to working as an entrepreneur and are comfortable working in a space where there is very little guidance. • You also believe there is nothing called work-life balance. Life is work and work is life. If you have to do meaningful work which impacts society at large, you cannot be looking at it as a 9 to 6 job.