Phil Kunovski is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Kymira, who specialise in the smart sports garments for elite sports and medical applications - using technology to develop market-leading garment tech that can provide insightful details into sport performance.
In a recent poll, we asked tech professionals who had moved jobs in 2021, if they would feel confident about moving to a new job now. It came as no surprise that 75% said they would feel either confident or very confident, reinforcing the severity of the skills shortage and highlighting the confidence about easily landing another job should they want to switch at any time.
With meaningful work being one of the top priorities when seeking a new employer, what are Kymira doing to promote this and ensure employees are working towards a meaningful cause?
Phil Kunovski said: “Meaningful work sits at the core of our business. Kymira’s vision for 2030 is to have positively impacted or saved a million lives through our medical product offering. We make a conscious effort to promote our vision and ensure all our employees are aware. It’s our mission, we need to ensure everyone is bought in, in order for us to achieve it.
“Keeping this ‘buy in’ to this vision for all our employees is pretty straightforward for us as we are relatively small. For example within our office, you can overhear the CEO on the phone explaining the vision, so we are really lucky to have that daily reminder. We’re a close-knit team and we’re all on the same page.”
Meaningful work is so important, you can break it down into every level of our work. Its meaning when you come in, its meaning as you stay, and its meaning in the overall vision of the business. Which satisfies everyone.
Maintaining employee engagement.
In a recent interview with Wired.co.uk, Joy Nazzari, the founder of British proptech startup Showhere, who is desperately trying to hire 16 people — a combination of senior-level developers, project managers, and designers, commented on the difficulty of attracting talent:
“It’s never been harder or more expensive to hire new people,” she says. “Yet you also have to defend who you already have, because they’re seeing the bright lights — being hit up on LinkedIn and hearing stories of friends attracted by big salary packages.”
Commenting on how to keep Kymira’s workforce engaged, Phil said:
“We do our best to relate all our daily, monthly, quarterly and yearly team conversations around our goals. They need to know what is going on, they need to feel part of the team and be able to help us shape our strategy. Every employee is of incredible value to us.
We also host quarterly updates for the whole business throughout the year and twice a year have ‘town halls’ where all employees are able to ask any questions they like to the board.”
An inclusive culture.
We want to ensure that people can be themselves. This aligns closely with our vision and onboarding we pay a lot of attention to ensure that we select the best people in the interview process who share our values.
“To ensure that we keep our company culture strong, especially since the pandemic, we nominate a ‘social secretary’ - someone who is responsible for getting people together physically, as remote working can be difficult. I find these social events are really good occasions to talk about meaningful work, as the team can better connect and this is how we can get some cross pollination between departments.
“Personally, when I work remotely I only get what's needed from teams - but when I go into the office, I have a lot more conversations with people as they feel that they can grab me for five minutes which is great.”
Keeping up with the competition: salary and benefits.
Research suggests that the job sector with the highest salaries on average was in Tech, with the average salary being £51,000. Benefits are also improving too in order to stay competitive in the war for talent and businesses are experimenting with all kinds of wellbeing measures to entice talent. For example, in January, Pinterest bulked up its fertility benefits and parental leave; in December, fintech company Finder introduced an extra five days on top of paid annual and sickness leave entitlements; and On Purpose, a New Delhi–based communications consultancy, launched seven days paid leave for pet adoption from February onwards.
Phil comments on how Kymira stays competitive and benchmarks salary and benefits:
“With us being a start-up it's only recently that we have started to consider these things, employees that join a start-up kind of understand that they might take a hit with their salary as they are joining as we’re building our brand.
“Now that we are in a position to focus on market rates for staffing we are finding in the current climate that is quite difficult, as very junior candidates are asking for ridiculous salaries. Which makes me think ‘what are they spending all this money on?’ [laughs]
“We can’t compete on salary alone, as we have some of the big competitors just down the road, such as Microsoft. The way we compete for talent is to offer ‘stickery things’ such as share options, more recently now that we are in a position to do so offer more advanced benefits such as pension schemes. One thing that has gone down quite well is the offer of a ‘menu’ of benefits to our employees and enable them to prioritise them into say a list of ten. “For our employees, I imagine that at the top of that list, might be pensions or private health insurance as you get a lot of long term thinkers in our industry, but you never know it could be subscriptions to gyms and apps such as Spotify and Netflix. With this menu we could then offer a number of these options out to our employees based on their seniority.
We have a strong focus on our review process on personal and career development which enables our employees to have a clear progression path within the company. Also everyone has a development budget which is between 5-10% of the employees salary. This works really well for us and is a good investment as it also benefits the company as the skills learnt are relevant, no one has asked to do a skydiving course yet [laughs].”