Teju Fola-Alade says her LinkedIn is “always filled up” with job offers. Now imagine, she says, being a good software engineer. “Talent would always have a choice,” she said. “So you’re not dealing with people that are desperate for a job.”
That changes how you keep your best employees, and she has spent years working on exactly that. She leads human resources at Rova, a multi-currency banking app from FCMB Bank (UK), and works as an HR business partner for the FCMB Group’s technology division. Before that she worked in tech companies including Konga, Cars45 and MANO. Her answer to the retention question is direct: if you want to keep people, “it’s no longer just matching their salary.”
You can’t just ask people to deliver
“You can’t just ask people to deliver. They need to be motivated,” she said in her TechCity Conversations interview. And keeping people motivated has got harder, because employers now compete with companies everywhere. Developers, engineers and product managers are, in her words, “technically global talent.” While you try to keep them, “there’s one company somewhere” trying to hire them away.
So what replaces the pay rise? She lists it plainly. Being “intentional about how they work, how the workspace looks like, how they are spoken to, the feedback they get, how they are motivated.”
The cost of getting that wrong is quick. “You speak to someone rudely, they think about it, how much am I even earning?” she said. “Abeg, you know, forgive my French, they are ready to take a walk.” (Abeg is Pidgin for “please.”)
The people far from head office count too
One lesson she carries from Cars45, the car-trading company: “It’s easy for you to sit at the head office under the AC and be coming up with initiatives and ideas.”
She learned it the hard way with a monthly staff award. Her first version let only one person win, by vote. The founder pointed out the flaw: the biggest office would win every month. As he put it, “Lagos has the numbers.” Staff in smaller offices, or in other countries, would never be recognized.
Now she designs every program from the outside in. “You have to think of those that are not at the head office, those that are far away from where the decisions are being made.” Whatever the main office gets, she said, the person in a smaller office “has to also get it.”
Culture is how you treat the people you don’t see
At MANO, a grocery delivery app, the CEO spent the first two days with his new leadership team on what she called a “culture immersive session,” teaching the culture he wanted: “Culture of respect, culture of honor, culture of not working in silo.”
She saw it most clearly with the delivery riders. The CEO made them a priority, and the company launched “quite a number of ideas they came up with.” They knew complaints led somewhere. A rider could walk into head office and say, “Teju, I want to report someone to you,” and “they know an action would happen.”
“Respect was very key, professionalism was non-negotiable,” she said. She counts treating employees as customers, not only the people “buying on the app,” among the most successful legacies she left there.
The hard question: who does HR work for?
Her strongest advice is for founders. In her experience, HR teams that report straight to the CEO do better than those reporting to a chief operating or finance officer, because they work “directly with the visionary.” Her advice: “Partner with your HR. Hire someone who you can work with, who aligns.”
That raises a fair question. If HR is chosen to think like the CEO, who speaks for the employee? Her MANO story is the best answer in the interview. The riders trusted HR because complaints were acted on, not because HR agreed with the boss. Closeness to the CEO gives HR the power to act. Trust from staff is what makes the action worth anything. A good HR lead needs both.
She also warns against a habit many managers know: keeping the wrong person because you have already invested in them. “Sometimes we nurse people that are going to cost us in the long run,” she said, because “the theory of the sunk cost also manifests itself in organizations.” A sunk cost is time or money already spent that you can’t get back, and it’s a bad reason to keep spending.
A career in tech she didn’t plan
“My experience in the tech space has not been linear,” she said. “I found myself there, it was accidental, but it’s been interesting.”
At Konga, the online marketplace, she trained merchants to sell on the Konga seller app, which she describes as “HR but for merchants and not employees.” That learning and development work, teaching people new skills, became her route into HR. The move was harder than people expect. “One of the most difficult profession to pivot into is human resources. People think, oh, it’s low entry, it’s not.” She was already a manager and well paid, and people questioned why she would switch. “I faced hell, right?”
Her answer was to out-learn the doubt. “I built competence. I had so many certifications.” She still takes at least one new course every year. “To know me is to know that I’m an apostle of learning.”
The side projects: a firm, a fellowship and a funny book
Konga shaped more than her career. She credits its founder, Sim Shagaya: “Sim Shagaya birthed the entrepreneurial side of a lot of us.”
She started Betaworka, a boutique HR firm for startups and larger companies, in 2018. It began in a group of former Konga colleagues. One friend, John, told her, “Teju, you need to register your company,” and sent the money to do it. She was later accepted into the Tony Elumelu Foundation’s entrepreneurship program, where she learned unit economics (what a business earns and spends on each sale) and how to build a pitch deck. “It was a shock,” she said.
Her book, 101 Workplace Secrets, published in February 2025, came from years of notes. She believes “humor, satire drives home the message faster,” so each tip is short, funny and about one real situation: dealing with bosses, answering emails, getting ahead at work. To turn her notes into a book, she ran them through ChatGPT to “refine” them and keep each point to a page.
What to do with her advice
If you manage people, start with what she says costs nothing: how you speak to people, the feedback you give, and whether staff outside the main office get the same recognition as the people near you. Salary gets someone in the door. Those things decide whether they stay.
If you want to work in HR, or switch into it, take her one rule: “Build competence. Keep building yourself.” For another view from inside a fintech, read Bukola Willoby on what customer success really takes when trust is low.
