When Naresh Harwani logged in for his daily virtual team meeting last Friday, he expected the usual updates from his team leads, but what the UK-based CEO of RemoteStar did not expect was to find one of his Gen Z employees show up with a towel and face mask.
What followed was a couple of seconds of silence while Harwani considered an appropriate response before saying, “What face pack is that?”
“Neem,” replied Vartika Bisht, 21, a senior business development representative with RemoteStar. As her colleagues struggled to keep a straight face, she added, “You should try some.”
A video of the incident went viral, garnering more than four lakh views, over a thousand comments, and close to five lakh shares.
Bisht later clarified that it was a prank that the marketing team had planned for the CEO. She told Moneycontrol that it has only been three months since she joined the company and praised its positive work environment. “I probably would not have done anything like this at any other company,” she said. “It’s only because the people here are so good and helpful that I agreed to go ahead with the prank.”
Speaking to Moneycontrol, Harwani said that although the prank caught him off guard, he doesn’t mind his employees playing around a little as long as it does not harm productivity. As the head of a company that specialises in building and managing remote teams, Harwani believes that allowing employees to have fun at work helps build better teams, especially when over 90 percent of his staff are Gen Zs.
“Building a startup from scratch is pretty stressful to begin with, and ours is bootstrapped, so having some fun is a good team-building exercise,” he said.
Why Gen Z employees are important for startups
Harwani, who has been running RemoteStar for six years, told Moneycontrol that despite the occasional surprises, Gen Z employees are crucial for his startup. “When you’re building a startup, you need fresh minds and that energy, from a cost point of view as well, because we can’t afford to have a lot of seniors. Moreover, with the ongoing AI disruption, Gen Zs are very much equipped to deal with the business.”
‘Rather have a fun workplace that delivers good results’: CEO
Recalling how his journey has been stressful and serious, Harwani said that as long as his employees are being productive, he doesn’t mind them having fun, or even pulling the occasional prank, while still being professional.
“In my journey, I have also been very serious about my work and have often been stressed out because of it,” he said. “But when I started building RemoteStar as a startup in London, most of the employees were Gen Zs. While working with them, I realised that you can achieve the same results or even better by having some fun at work. Of course, there’s a lot of slogging and stress that’s involved, but you can also enjoy the journey. In fact, I’d prefer it if my employees have fun while being productive and delivering good results.”