Fostering Psychological Safety Amidst Industry-Wide Layoffs

First-time founder navigates recession and builds transparent culture

Speaking of fear, the news today is pretty scary for anyone who works at a tech startup, especially the founder. Headlines read, “Valuations are slashed in half!” and, “Tech Company X laid off 23% of its workforce.”
 

As a seed stage founder, I’ve been granted a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build an idea from scratch and hire a team to make it happen. However, I must say that it is not all rainbows and butterflies. The entrepreneur life may seem glamorous in magazines and online but throughout this journey of building enterprise technology, my co-founder and I have faced many different obstacles as women of color. Nevertheless, one of the most meaningful aspects of creating a company is the ability to build a diverse team and cultivate an inclusive culture. As the founder of a company on a mission to “open up the workforce,” I surely can’t drop the ball on that. I have a commitment to our investors, customers, team, and our community of believers.

During this critical time of the market recession, I have had to take on a great challenge that I had not faced before. In the wake of all these tech layoffs, it was my duty to work to ensure job security and psychological safety for our startup team. However, as the founder, I have learned that it is difficult to gather candid and transparent feedback from everyone (especially in remote settings). I needed to know how the team was feeling and work to create confidence and assurance.

So, I created an anonymous survey for our team to share their true concerns and rank their level of confidence in the company and our long-term success. Creating the survey was the easy part, reading the results with an open mind took a lot of courage. At first, I was nervous when I opened up the survey, but I knew that moving forward and strengthening our team and culture meant hearing hard things and proactively improving them. You can’t grow unless you do this!

The survey results taught me that our team wants more transparency and would love to hear more about our investor relations. It gave me clear insights and helped me take actionable steps. Therefore, I organized a follow-up all-hands a few weeks after and put a strategy in place to commit to addressing the team’s needs and feedback. I wanted to demonstrate that I am wholeheartedly committed to our team and everyone’s success, and I immediately set things into motion.

After the meeting, I launched another anonymous survey to see if we had made strides. I was thrilled to see the results and understand that people felt heard. It led to over a 30% increase in our team’s confidence in our company's success. I understood that facing my fears about hearing hard truths during uncertain times is the first step in the process. As a leader, one of my mottos is, “I’m not here to be right, I’m here to get it right.” Symba and our team humble me each day because I do make mistakes and I’m not perfect, but I strive to carry this humility with me and grow throughout this process of building a team and culture. It is the most rewarding gift and meaningful endeavor I have ever pursued.

Author Bio

Ahva Sadeghi is a passionate social entrepreneur and co-founder of Symba, an award-winning, venture-backed, and women-founded internship platform that combines program management and data analytics tools to facilitate equitable access to jobs and wealth creation. Ahva is an economist and researcher focused on remote work and workforce development. Prior to launching Symba, Ahva worked at the US Department of State in the Human Rights Bureau and completed a civil rights fellowship with Congressman John Lewis in Atlanta. She was recently named Forbes 30 Under 30 and a Global Entrepreneur Scholar by the US Department of State. Connect Ahva Sadeghi