udaan Capital: Building Resilience

Founded in 2016, udaan operated India’s largest B2B e-commerce platform, which catered to millions of vendors registered on its application and trading a wide range of products. Its Capital arm focused on enabling the country’s multitude of micro-enterprises with financial services and products, so that sellers and buyers could grow their business with easily accessible trade credit. Having crossed the “small start-up” stage, the HR team at udaan Capital was weighing its options to grow the organization with structured yet empowering processes and policies.

The case goes over how the Head of HR architected a performance management framework along contemporary lines. Its philosophy laid emphasis on combining organizational targets with employee aspirations via constructive dialog around goals. Skill ladders were drawn up to help employees at different career stages to navigate their path within the organization.

The case reader is invited to contrast this approach with rank-and-yank approaches, which rely on assessments that craft a score to guide actions on rewards and layoffs. Managers were integral to this framework rollout and had to be carefully equipped to conduct productive conversations with employees. A technology tool captured the reviews and tracked the milestones of the exercise. Insights derived from these conversations informed the HR organization about the next steps.