Sunil Setlur shares his experiences building a listening culture at Gojek

Driving experience & business outcomes

Sunil Setlur addressed a 1000 person practitioner conference at TechHR Singapore in 2022. His talk covers the process of making a vision and bringing it to life while carrying people in alignment with the mission.

Using Gojek's evolution into a Southeast Asian decacorn as a primary case study, the discussion explores how leadership can move beyond traditional employee engagement toward a more profound model of employee experience.

Key Discussion Pillars:

From Voice to Agency: Exploring why listening is a prerequisite for employee authorship and long-term inspiration.

The "Experience" Metric: Redefining success as the removal of organizational friction to allow for a more seamless "flow of work."

Radical Transparency: The cultural journey from anonymous feedback forums to a state of psychological safety where open, non-anonymous dialogue becomes the norm.

Data-Led Empathy: The role of people analytics in providing precise, actionable responses to employee feedback.

Strategic Adaptability: Why leaders must be prepared to adjust organizational goals (OKRs) mid-cycle in direct response to critical workforce insights.

Careers & Skills that count in the Age of AI

A conversation with Aman and Roger on A2Z FINTECH about managing people and careers in the age of AI. We covered why the unlearn-relearn cycle is now the foundational professional skill, why taste and discernment (v.s. tool proficiency) are the durable human edge, and what happens when your team is five people and fifty agents. Sunil also made the case that AI is delivering efficiency, not productivity and that organizations with explicit, written-down cultures will have a structural head start in making agentic workflows actually work.

Culture, Boards and the power of the Founder

This session explores how organizational culture evolves during hyper-scaling. Sunil Setlur discusses the outsized influence of founders and the first 100 employees, the strategic trade-offs of early-stage hiring, and the critical role board members play in shaping leadership shadows and incentive structures as startups transition into mature enterprises.