Startup companies all around the world struggle to attract, retain and motivate talent. If you ask any founder, this has to be the top 3 priorities of her personal time. To figure out what startup companies can do to build the right team, we need to first understand what makes employees tick?
Traditionally startups are considered to be exciting places, with lot of freedom to experiment, passionate environment, the romance of small team, growth potential, or in the days of dot com boom, irrational benefits.
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Madhukar
In startups you win/attract employees by showing them the quality of work, work culture and potential upside in the event of success. The task of retaining the employees and keeping them motivated is the difficult part. As per me the employee retention depends on following
1. Sensitivity of the employer towards the employee specially in start up is very important. Since the employee has joined the company on the face value of long term promises, even a small insensitive act from the employer side breaks the trust of the employee.Therefore transparency and effective communication is very important for this not to happen.
2. Employees need to see a clear growth path and the organization's willingness to help the employee move in that direction in a startup company. often during a expansion phase the employers forget this and some of the employees start feeling that they are unwanted or no longer that valuable which they were when they had joined.
3. Third and equally important is the status of the company. So if the employees start feeling that the startup is not going anywhere they start worrying. Therefore participation of the employees in visoning etc helps a lot in clarifying the company s strategy going ahead.
Mandar Patwardhan
I think, we need to look at pre-employment stage. Especially for start ups its very essential to find employees who are completly sold by the vision of the founder. Then comes his/her ability to align to the vision and to take it to the logical end.
I think this problem with start ups is there to remain as the % of succesful start ups is miniscule. So to get good executives who are willing to leave their "so called" stable jobs and then to put them into a grind of making a succesful venture from zero level will always be a challenge.
A couple of other things to look at would be:
An employees previous track record.Importantly is he/she a "stable" guy….. If in established companies they have not spent enough time (with growth) then chances are they will treat a start up in same fashion……
Start Ups could also try different ways of attracting talent. Especially female talent. The biggest USP of a start up is its flexibilty of working hours (in most of the start Ups)…… I am sure there are a lot of qualified female candidates especially in India who have given up their careers mid way.