Retaining top talent is a fine art. India’s startups have increased manifold. In the last 5 years, we can see a YoY growth of around 12-15%. According to a survey, there were approximately fifty thousand startups in India in 2018, where 18% of the startups were tech-based, meaning in a day, India gave birth to almost three startups.
Today, startups are providing 1.5-1.7 lakhs of employment per year. This revolution has also given birth to women entrepreneurs. No matter which industry you are running in the market, your competitor would always be ready to give better compensation and benefits packages to steal your best company employee if they need it. This has been a critical problem for many startups. So, it is not only important to make plans for hiring the best employees, but the company also needs to make plans for retaining them.
Here are a few tips that can help you to retain your employees and help you to build great startups.
1. Strategy to Hire Right People
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The employer can get an idea about the candidate’s attitude and willingness to work with startups during the interview. You need to recruit a high-quality employee that fits with your company’s culture and stays long for your company. To attract good employees to your recruitment process, you can mention why your company is important, what hikes and perks are you offering, how your startup is the “Best Place to Work”, etc.
You may make your recruitment process more engaging by adding gamifying recruitment process. Gamification can have different rounds of hackathons or digital games that put a long-lasting impression on the company. This will help employees to understand that the workplace is fun and engaging.
2. Provide Opportunities for Learning and Development
People don’t only join startups for salary, but they are looking to learn and develop some real-time skills while working on projects. Every employee gets motivated when any kind of career development program or training is organized for their career development. This training helps to increase their productivity and polish them to perform better in their current role. In return, it increases the employee’s loyalty toward the company, which is directly related to retention.
3. Comprehensive Review and Recognition
Startups can set up a review system for employees that can help to track their performance, learning capacity, and attitude towards their work. Moreover, this mechanism will also be beneficial for employees as they can keep a record of their performance and try to make improvements wherever required.
Parallelly a reward system can also be set up for awarding the best employees. They have successfully achieved their target or goals on time and have done extraordinary work for their team. This system will help to show gratitude towards the employees for putting in their extra efforts and helping the company to achieve its goal.
4. Celebrating Small Milestones
As a startup, it is important to make a connection with each other. You can plan a get-together or small trip with the employees that help everyone to know about each other and share their experience and knowledge that they have gained. This would help employees to refresh their minds and make them energetic to start their work.
Celebrating milestones with your employees makes them believe that you genuinely care about them and respect their effort and hard work that they put on the table. It makes employees to be connected with companies to keep them attached and share their appreciation for their effort.
5. Stay Open to Suggestions and Communication
To build great startups, you need passionate teams to get together and make things happen. There are lots of opportunities to connect with entrepreneurs and get valuable suggestions that can add value to your business.
Your team is an integral part of your company. You need to be open to all kinds of suggestions and feedback. This may give you a solution for any problem, so always acknowledge the good ideas and respect the constructive feedback.
The office should be more like a community where people get together to discuss the business idea, share their knowledge, and participate in the overall development needed for a company. The employee expectation is to get acknowledged for the effort they put in. They want to learn new things, they want to participate in a brainstorming session to share their ideas, they want a competitive package, they want growth in their career, and last but important, they want a work culture where they get respect and constructive feedback for their role.
These 5 ways may help you to tackle the situation more efficiently. But as per the experts, the simple way is to ask your employee why they want to leave the workplace. Communicating with employees and having honest feedback help you improve and manage your work more efficiently. It also builds trust between employee and employer.
The best way for retention strategy is to build trust and respect before any difficulties arise and whatever the reason for job change is. The startup talents love to take challenges and solve good problems; this motivates them more than any monetary rewards. The leadership style and philosophy play an important role in building a successful startup, as it is integral in making their employees motivated and focused.