Alphaus Inc.
Improving motivation and shaping company culture for a growing and geographically diverse team
Headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, with its global development center based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Alphaus is a tech startup which provides a series of B2B SaaS tools, including their product, ‘Alphaus Cloud’, a leading CFM platform, all aimed at helping customers manage, monitor, and optimize their cloud spending.
With a workforce spread across locations, Alphaus’ teams started working remotely even before the pandemic, and encountered the challenge of maintaining motivation and uniting teams across geographical locations much earlier than most other companies. Now, however, they are looking to build strong foundations for evolving their company culture in the midst of hyper-growth, in which motivation and inter-team communications will play key roles.
“As every growing startup experiences, Alphaus will soon face changes in terms of team characteristics, from a cozy, family-like, small team in the early stages to a well-organized, governed group of specialists to pursue higher business goals that cannot be achieved by maintaining the previous team dynamic,” says Shungo Arai, COO at Alphaus. “The process of reorganizing the team may not be easy, as it is difficult to change one’s own habit, behavior, and way of thinking, or at least the attitude towards work.”
Focusing on the Foundations
Alphaus recognized early on that the key to building the culture they want starts with fostering a better understanding about their teams. The company has a culturally diverse workforce that includes eight different nationalities, and their hope is to strengthen communication and improve team motivation by first developing a deep knowledge of team dynamics and encouraging colleagues to gain a better understanding of what makes each other tick.
Originally, however, a platform like Attuned was not part of the plan, as Arai explains: “Initially, we were most keen to find solutions for talent management. We thought we might need to try and find a solution to manage people evaluation or performance reviews regularly because we were about to establish and implement our own process. However, now I understand that Attuned addresses a much more foundational level, and it should have come way before we started looking for a solution for performance management—especially since the way of performance management or the points to be evaluated can change from phase to phase, while the company always has to try to understand each co-worker’s lever for motivation.”
“Initially, we were keen to find solutions for talent management. However, Attuned addresses a much more foundational level, and it should have come way before we started looking for a solution for performance management.”
A Smooth Start
According to Rishanty Navaratnam, People & Administration Lead at Alphaus, implementing the initial motivation assessment was a lot more straightforward than expected, and they opted to have their teams take the engagement survey twice a month as a way to keep tabs on potential fluctuations in engagement levels.
Alphaus’ teams are primarily grouped by function, with individuals from different geographical locations working within each team, so they reflected this team structure on the Attuned platform. This allowed them to develop a better understanding of team motivators based on function and location, all of which was clearly visualized in the Company Summary section of the Dashboard, and easily interpreted at a glance.
From there, the Attuned Customer Success team helped deepen their understanding of the platform—including the different ways in which they could leverage its various features—through in-depth training sessions, while also answering any queries and sharing useful resources. “The Attuned team has been doing a great job checking in with us regularly and responding to our requests and questions,” says Navaratnam.
A Call to Action
Attuned also helped the team at Alphaus pin down some initial elements that would be crucial for their journey towards building a strong and cohesive culture. The first of these was to have a close eye on emerging trends within individual teams and the company as a whole.
Attuned’s Company Status feature allows users to see the trend for each motivator over a period of time, which is visualized as weather symbols that range from thunderstorms for areas that need to be addressed urgently to sunshine for those that are going well. Through this feature, Alphaus noticed that their Financial Needs motivator was consistently low and trending downwards. This proved to be a vital early indicator of a potential problem, and identifying it quickly helped them rectify it before it had the chance to snowball.
A few members of the team at Alphaus.
The Actions feature, on the other hand, was something the team paid little attention to in the beginning, focusing more on understanding and evaluating the results. “But what good is information without a proper action plan?” says Navaratnam, who prompted the team to use this feature to build out the performance management and compensation system they’d wanted prior to Attuned—except now it was based on data and more deeply aligned with the team’s motivations and values.
“Now that Alphaus is stepping into the growth stage, we have to allocate our management resources more on building up a highly motivated team, retaining and bringing the best out of our talents,” says Hajime Hirose, CEO at Alphaus.
“Attuned clearly displays the motivation factors for each co-worker and we would like to utilize the information that is available to facilitate our daily communication, as a reference for company health checks, and for member-related decision-making,” he says, adding: “We will continue to look for ways to utilize Attuned for our upcoming cultural shift.”
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