For a company that is helping enterprises contend with rapid market changes and technological upheavals, success starts from within.
The Managing Director – Priyantha Bethmage, Finance Director – Tharanga Perera and IT Director – Uditha Wijesundara of Sana Commerce shared insights into what makes the company one of the Best Workplaces for Millennials in Sri Lanka.
Sana Commerce is a fast-growing Dutch B2B e-commerce solutions provider with development centres in Sri Lanka, Colombia, and Ukraine. Its Sri Lankan operation, which began in 2014 with a small team, growing to nearly 200 today, is not only a development centre but provides IT hosting and corporate services like finance and HR for the whole group.
In mid-2020 Sana Commerce was listed among the 13th most significant B2B commerce suites providers by The Forrester Wave. Sana is on a mission to provide businesses with a shortcut to e-commerce with customized solutions to overcome unique challenges that confront businesses in a world of rapid technological overhauls.
The company specializes in building customized e-commerce solutions that extend to manufacturing and industrial platforms with Microsoft Dynamic Navision and SAP. It hopes to acquire 200-300 new customers annually and grow its client base to 10,000 by 2030. Sana is aggressively expanding its reach across Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand, opening opportunities for Sri Lanka to grow its contribution and importance.
What makes your company one of the best workplaces for millennials?
We believe that ‘If You’re Good Enough, You’re Old Enough’, so age is not a barrier as long as you sparkle. Sana Commerce promotes diversity and inclusion, and as such, we do not single out millennials. However, our thoughtfully crafted values and organizational policies just so happen to resonate with this demographic at a deeper level. We have structured development and training programmes to build their careers and give them opportunities to take on additional responsibilities. We provide consistent and constructive feedback and reward initiative.
Whenever there are opportunities, employees can also apply for other roles if it matches their interest and business requirements, irrespective of the current team or the disciplines they are currently serving. We are not a rule-based company. We are a principle-based company. Our office is an open plan where the management and staff work together, enabling us to check their pulse. Everyone has ups and downs. Every week is not the same for various reasons, and people can have personal or work-related challenges, so keeping a check on their pulse helps us to support them. We also have different tools to collect feedback and openly discuss solutions. Sana Commerce believes in giving people a voice irrespective of age, gender, race or religion – it is the wow factor that endears the company to its people.
How do you keep millennials engaged and motivated?
If you ask why millennials love to work for Sana Commerce, they will tell you it is because we give them the freedom to innovate and live up to the core values. We work with three cycles: the first stage is the comfort zone, the next comes the phase when you are wondering what to do, and then the learning cycle, the third. We keep pushing our employees through these phases or cycles, ensuring constant growth in their personal and professional lives because to end a learning cycle means entering a new comfort zone, and the process keeps moving, never stopping. Change is hard, but we provide all the support to help our people grow.
Millennials value constructive feedback and relish opportunities to assume additional responsibilities, and we have those at Sana Commerce.
Everyone and every team have clear OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) for each quarter and year, but we also encourage people to set their own development-related goals for each quarter. These may not necessarily add value to the organization, but they should provide a development-oriented result for those individuals. That is one of the key ways we keep employees engaged, motivated and aligned with our business objectives.
We also promote cross-functional collaboration and strategizing. If interested, an employee can contribute to achieving the goals of another department or team. We allow that because it demonstrates an entrepreneurial mindset to think out of the box. More importantly, during each employee’s journey, more than their progress, we try to discover the hurdles and devise solutions to overcome them. We encourage failing fast and learning fast.
Millennials care about growth prospects, giving back to the community and being part of something more. How is Sana Commerce meeting these expectations?
Growth Prospects: Promotions and rewards are performance-based, transparent and clearly defined. Every quarter each employee is reviewed, and based on the average reviews at the end of the year, we offer promotions and salary increments. We also recognize and celebrate our top achievers every month. Apart from those, we introduced a system where employees can celebrate each other. We have core value cards, so whenever someone wants to praise a teammate, they can pick an appropriate card and send it to them as an appreciation for a small act of kindness or encouraging words, thus, creating a culture of appreciating and supporting one another.
Being Part of Something More: The purpose of Sana Commerce is clear to all our employees. Everything we do, every little task and individual contribution, is about building solutions that empower economies, enterprises and consumers with digital technology. We go beyond our customers and transactions and create deep relationships that help them realize their potential. That is how we see ourselves as a business. ‘Prioritize Relationships, Not Just Transactions’ is our value statement that inspires everyone at Sana Commerce.
Giving Back: We have an ongoing programme that funds rural schools to improve basic facilities and foster IT education by hiring teachers and building computer labs. We invite kids from those schools to visit our offices and experience what it is like to work for a global company. Being a tech company that believes in its power to empower and transform, we need to make it real and show kids what is possible for them to aspire to become tech professionals. We expect some of these kids from rural Sri Lanka would someday join Sana Commerce and contribute to reimagining the global e-commerce industry
We also help universities outside the Western Province build capacity and develop curricula. One such initiative is the SAP training programmes we conduct for university students. We are creating opportunities for university students because SAP skills have high demand here and overseas. In the past five years, we have sponsored an annual hackathon for female IT students of the Uva Wellassa University to develop their skills, foster the spirit of enterprise and innovation and promote inclusion in the tech industry.