PODCAST · business
Cost to Company
by The Ken
Hear how your workplace is changing. Before you hear it on Slack.In this new weekly podcast, get answers to the biggest questions about how modern Indian workplaces are changing, often even before they become popular questions to ask. Sneha Vakharia, Shreevar Chhotaria, and Akshaya Chandrasekaran, take turns week by week with a fresh new story, fresh new voices, and a fresh take on the Indian workplace
Episodes
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Introducing The First Two Years, a brand-new early careers podcast from The Ken
There is a gap between what young people want from their careers and what they get. We’ve spent months trying to understand this white space, and we've distilled our learnings into a brand new careers podcast from the newsroom of The Ken! The first two years of our careers are hard. They are...
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A closing note
Thank you for tuning in every week. With this episode, Cost to Company is coming to an end. Do tell us what you liked about the show, what we can do differently, or if you have any fresh ideas in the careers space for us. Write to [email protected]. If you liked Cost to Company, we are sure...
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The Great Resignation to Resenteeism. What trends tells us about the changing workplace.
Each individual episode of Cost to Company is like a part of the elephant in the hands of a blind person. Only but a piece of a much larger story. In this special 50th episode of Cost to Company, the hosts discuss the sum of trends they have observed in workplaces. And what that tells us about…
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'Influencers' have arrived at the workplace – how to spot them?
Company culture (as we know it) is broken. Seventy-seven percent of the global workforce is disengaged and burnt out, says the latest Gallup report. In fact, there's a new term floating around – loud quitting. These are employees who stay in their jobs and take actions that directly harm the...
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600 working mothers told us how they navigate work, home and their careers
We released a survey for working mothers. The objective was to build a collective of the wisdom of working mothers. Ask them for their needs. And their hacks. How can families and businesses best enable working mothers? And how can working mothers enable themselves? As of writing this, It’s been…
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Why PIPs (Performance Improvement Plans) rarely do what they say
Failing to plan is planning to fail. But that's not the case with PIPs. Which, more often than not, is planned to fail anyway. In this episode of Cost to Company, I speak to Sharthok Chakraborty (Co-founder, Klaar; Ex-Cipla) Nimesh Mathur (Investor, Advisor, HR Leader; Ex-Haptik), and Sumit…
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How to spot a stable employer in a turbulent economy
Reverse reference checks. Combative questions during interviews. And employees on why it isn’t the employer’s market yet. With layoffs and recession fears, you would imagine employees are settling for less. You would imagine they are taking up a job, any job, to evade unemployment. Instead, they...
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Youngest startup talent doesn’t have deep skills
There’s hustle. And then there’s excellence. Startups give their employees abundance of the former, but not as much of the latter. In the long run, this can seriously hurt career prospects. This week, we set out to understand the skills startups give their youngest employees.. The skills they...
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The new 'hot' sectors for tech talent
If you ask any tech employee about their dream company to work at, it’s usually a Microsoft or a Google or a cool startup. Nobody aspires to work at a healthcare company or a bank, really. It’s where you end up. Not choose. At least that’s the perception all around. But what if I tell you, you’ve...
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Three founders on taking the right risks in your career
How do you evaluate the risks you take in your choice of jobs? The size, stage of the company you’re going to work for. The type of roles you choose. How long you wait in a particular role before you make your next move, look for the next jump. How do the risks we take, and don’t take, shape our...
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How to get hired in an employer's market
The tables have turned. But the mistakes keep spilling over. In this episode, we spoke to Ria Shroff Desai (People and Culture Lead, Blume Ventures); Udayan Walvekar (CEO, GrowthX); Bhakti Dhanak (Associate Vice President - Human Resources, CIIE.CO) to understand some of the unobvious errors that...
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Could you have priced yourself out of the job market?
For months and months now, there’s a word that’s been whispered among recruiters, founders, CXOs, and executives who are hiring for key positions in their companies. It’s a word used to describe a cohort of professionals whose salaries are out of sync with the reality of the market. It’s a word...
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The rise and rise of discreet reference checks
Some call them discreet reference checks, some call them back channel checks, some call them ghost reference checks. They're growing rapidly, and recruiters are leaning on them like never before. In this week’s episode, host Sneha Vakharia takes you behind the scenes into why they’re growing, how...
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'Are you a Lion or a Pig?'
This time last year, companies were giving away eye-popping rewards to retain talent. From BMW bikes to sponsoring vacations, they did it all to lure top talent. Times were good. Talent was scarce. And start-ups and companies were flush with money and endless capital. But, not anymore. On today’s...
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The 'job switch' hike isn't a wise decision anymore
The situation has changed. And the equation has too. If the past two years were all about throwing money to attract top talent, 2023 has seen a general sobering up of appraisals and job switch hikes. In a strange turns of events, some employees are okay with taking a cut on their annual...
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Is your business at war?
This week your host Sneha will take you inside businesses at war, through the voices of those fighting in the trenches. We’ll hear how the same war — the war against inflation, a funding winter and shrinking markets — is being fought differently in different businesses. We’ll see how war…
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MBAarbarians at the gates
MBAs – love them or hate them, but you can’t ignore them. Over the years, they have taken over every business vertical – general management, sales and marketing, growth and strategy, human resources, and even product and technology. Name it, they have been there and done that. But there was one...
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Amazon and Meta are wrong about managers.
In the last few months alone, Amazon, Meta, and Salesforce announced that they were going to begin the process of flattening their organisations. That they were going to have fewer and fewer hierarchies in their organisations. Fewer hierarchies means fewer managers. The pattern here appears to be...
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Vibe Check: Gen Z on what Gen Z wants
You've heard about them. You've worked with them. You've thoughts around them. But have you really heard from them? In this episode, I speak to Kaavyya Kesarwani (Growth & Community, Juno), Sherina Poyyail (Policy professional, Ex: The Quint), Bhavya Narula (Founding team, GrowthX), Sindhu...
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Here's how to empathise with your manager to get what you want
Here are some messages Cost to Company has received over the past months. “I believe working with GenZ is the toughest thing I do at work. They look at their jobs as a means to the next job. This has dramatically reduced their qualitative output, even if their quantitative output is enough. “...
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Your new colleague is a part-timer
A meaty part-time role may seem like the best of most worlds. Your workload is relatively lesser. You have more time to spare. The money might be decent too. One major downside of the part-time experience though is that you lose out on important benefits such as paid leaves and health insurance....
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Special episode: how work and workplaces have changed in 30 weeks.
In this special episode of Cost to Company, the tables turn. Snigdha interviews CTC hosts Sneha and Shreevar about how work and workplaces have changed in the last thirty weeks. The short version: they’ve changed dramatically. This episode is the long version of that answer. Sneha takes us into…
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What's It Like Working For A 'Frugal' Company in 2023?
Everybody is cutting costs. Not because they want to. But because they have to. A few months ago, edtech giant Unacademy announced that they were making frugality as one of their ‘core values’ to focus on profitability. But can you really be a frugal company if it’s not in your DNA from the very...
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The interns are rising.
Internships are booming. Internshala has been reporting jumps of between 30 and 80 percent jumps in internships listed by businesses year on year, depending on which year you look at. The same data says that more and more businesses are offering paid internships. Demand for interns is going up.…
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IT Employees Are Finally Unionising. But There's A Problem.
Gone are the days when unions were something that only caught the fancy of the blue collar workforce. After a slew of unending layoffs, white collar employees in the IT sector are finally waking up to the bells of unionisation. But it’s not without a myriad of unobvious roadblocks. The path to...
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Moonlighting, not for money, but to upskill.
There’s a specific idea we have about moonlighting: a trend that emerged in the pandemic. Engineers tasked with sitting at home and delivering their product saw that their skills were so valuable, that it was possible to extract more money out of them by working in two places at once. So a person...
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The Golden Era of 'Work From Anywhere' Is Over
What was once touted as the biggest work trend to emerge from the pandemic, is on its way out. Companies are slowly but surely realising that the 'work from anywhere' model isn't sustainable in the long run. Or even in the short run, in some cases. Meesho, for one, had announced an extravagant…
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Bombay is running out of talent.
Earlier this month, Cost to Company received a striking message from a Ken subscriber called Uzma Rushdi. She wrote, “Mumbai is suffering from a lack of new talent inflow. Unless there are dramatic changes it will be Calcutta in 20 years :(” Around the same time another thing happened. A group of...
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How Are Companies Jumping The Invisible Gap Between Offer Acceptance and Joining Dates?
In 2023, amidst the thick of the layoff season, you'd think that 'employee ghosting' (a phenomenon where prospective employees don't end up joining an organisation without any providing any communication) is a thing of the past. But that's quite not true. Although in a reduced state as compared…
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Executive coaching is true luxury.
A good executive coach with many years of experience, working in an Indian metro city, typically costs between 20 thousand rupees to a lakh a session. There are multiple reasons for this. First, training to be a certified coach is expensive. Second, executive coaches work with such a niche…
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What This Year’s Appraisal Season Is Trying To Tell You
The winds of appraisal season seem all too familiar. HRs deciding the budget for the cycle. Employees frantically trying to put their best tasks forward on a scrappy Google document at the last minute. Managers bracing themselves to negotiate pay hikes with their reportees. And HR. But this year,...
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A career in delivery tech is a ticket out of India
This episode is about a group of Indians, who worked in food delivery and ecommerce startups in India. Now they work in food delivery and ecommerce businesses around the world. Starting with Jakarta and Singapore, but now also Seoul, Berlin, Amsterdam, London, Buenos Aires, and Riyadh. We’re…
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The Biggest Hiring Trend in 2023? Skill-Shifting.
For the past 19 episodes, we at CTC have spoken about hiring in many shapes and forms. But what do the numbers tell us? And more importantly, what do the numbers hide? To kick things off this year, we spoke to Ruchee Anand, Senior Director of Talent Solutions at LinkedIn, who shared some...
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Your HR is being eaten by software
Tasked with keeping us together and happy, the advocates for employees in most organizations are usually in the HR department. The people we complain to when management systems break, when there's a sexual harassment complaint, when we aren't receiving the recognition and reward we deserve…
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The Hiring Freeze Is An Opportunity
Unlike its dubious cousin 'the layoffs', there's not much brouhaha around the hiring freeze. And with good reason. Most hiring freezes are unofficial. They're never really revealed to the world. But that's not to say that the freeze hasn't gripped Indian companies. What if the hiring freeze is an...
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Why are crypto's biggest believers leaving crypto companies?
A group of men set out to build a Brave New World. A world with new ideals. A world where the old structures of power are destroyed, and newer ones, more fair, more transparent, rise from the ashes. A brighter world, a better world. They dream of community and belonging. Eventually they live long...
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How To Take A Career Break Without Hurting Your Career
Breaks always seem tempting. But in a job market that is as brittle as it is in late 2022, does a career break even make sense? Even if the times were better, what happens after you take a career break? Does your career ‘rise from the ashes’ once you’re back? Or does the pause affect your growth…
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The Great Layoff Tamasha
The CEO of Better.com fired hundreds on a Zoom call. The CEO of HyperSocial posted a selfie of himself crying while he did it. Byju Raveendran wrote to his employees saying that he would be laying off 5 percent of them but that he was losing 5 percent of Byju, meaning himself. This was so poorly...
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The To-Do List Is Dead. Long Live The Calendar.
In a world where your to-do list doesn't seem to ever end, should you create task lists or block 'chunks' of time? More importantly, what does your manager at work want? We speak to Arpitha Desai (Legal & Public Policy professional, ex-Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas), Tara Khandelwal (Founder at...
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Sexual Harassment is not a compliance issue. It is a culture issue.
The Metoo movement normalised calling out bad behaviour, but it concerned itself much more with naming and shaming individual harassers. Not the workplaces that emboldened them. Not the cultures that created conditions for it to happen. But sexual harassment isn’t an interpersonal issue. It’s...
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What Really Goes On At The Founder's Office?
The roots of the founder’s office may lie in bureaucracy, but the allure of it has managed to seep into the world of business. Almost suddenly, the smartest and brightest minds from some of the country’s top B-schools are embracing a whole new kind of an obscure yet attractive career track....
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Businesses are Going to Therapy to Find Themselves
CEOs, executives and business leaders have discovered therapy as a weapon to build better products. There are now therapists who are specialised in working with founders and business leaders. There are now therapists stepping into roles that would have been otherwise led by HR. This is therapy…
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Your Hefty Job Title Is Weighing You Down
Titles are a funny thing. In organisations, they’re supposed to denote the work that you do and your position in the hierarchy. But more realistically, they’re a currency. A currency used to trade respect. And when ‘inflation’ strikes, this ‘currency’ is bound to show some side-effects. In the...
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The Prisoner's Dilemma of Unlimited Leaves
Myntra announced unlimited wellness leave. So did Meesho. So did Gojek. Netflix brought its global unlimited leave policy to India. Makemytrip announced uncapped leaves. As did Inmobi. A number of smaller startups like Nova Benefits, Pega Systems, Zuddl, have all announced unlimited leaves. Even...
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Why Are Tech Companies Designing Your Farewell Experience?
Tell us your story ideas around careers & workplaces and become a part of the show: https://theken.typeform.com/costtocompany Goodbyes are never easy. But they were never this important either. In a market where great talent is scarce, companies are paying top-dollar to ‘offboard’ their employees...
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The Product Manager is a Politician
Every product manager has their own voice, their own style. In the beginning, it’s all about gut instinct, intuition and understanding why humans do the things they do. From that point on, the paths digress. Some communicate as little as they need, some bring all stakeholders on the table with...
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What Does Gen Z Really Want From The Office?
“It’s a chicken and egg problem, honestly.” - Abhishek, a management consultant who recently shifted to Bengaluru. As the pandemic slowly begins to recede, many offices are opening up. Employees are (voluntarily and involuntarily) shifting back to cities which house their office spaces. But…
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It's Time to Build Your Brag Document
Bruce Lee says this utterly enjoyable thing. “Showing off, is the fools idea of glory”. But there’s also the core human need to be seen, understood, recognised and thought worthy by those around us. And when it comes to work, there's material benefit, money, promotions and growth, that can be...
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Middle Management Is Silently Cracking
“As middle management, we know for a fact that there's really nothing much in our control.” - Ishaan*, former manager at a prominent e-learning startup. In the 4th episode of Cost to Company, we’ll speak to four middle managers who’ll tell us, no holds barred, about what it feels like to be...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Hear how your workplace is changing. Before you hear it on Slack.In this new weekly podcast, get answers to the biggest questions about how modern Indian workplaces are changing, often even before they become popular questions to ask. Sneha Vakharia, Shreevar Chhotaria, and Akshaya Chandrasekaran, take turns week by week with a fresh new story, fresh new voices, and a fresh take on the Indian workplace
HOSTED BY
The Ken
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Cost to Company have?
Cost to Company currently has 53 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Cost to Company about?
Hear how your workplace is changing. Before you hear it on Slack.In this new weekly podcast, get answers to the biggest questions about how modern Indian workplaces are changing, often even before they become popular questions to ask. Sneha Vakharia, Shreevar Chhotaria, and Akshaya Chandrasekaran,...
How often does Cost to Company release new episodes?
Cost to Company has 53 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Cost to Company?
You can listen to Cost to Company on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Cost to Company?
Cost to Company is created and hosted by The Ken.
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