How to treat your team

Have you built your team and hired for all the key positions?

Congratulations!

Now what?

You have your dreamteam working full speed on all the topics, Sales, Operations, Marketing, Customer Support, Product, Tech, HR. All of them individually are a crucial piece of the company’s success as a whole.

Now how can you make sure they stay with you and how can you avoid employees churn?

Treat your team!!

This is particularly important AND tricky in startups as you don’t have time to constantly onboard new people (there is already so much to do to run daily operations and grow the business as fast as it should grow!). At the same time, you don’t have all the budget you would dream of to create a Google-style office with free food all over the place, babyfoot and other treats part of employees hapiness measures.

So how can you still treat your team?

Make your team feel valued

The first and most important point is to make everyone feel valued.

Everyone from the Heads of departments to the interns: in a startup environment, they are all pushing together to make it happen, so they all deserve some recognition for their efforts.

At Stuart, we set up a “Cheers” channel on Slack where everyone is welcome to write a public thank you note for a colleague. This way the rest of the company is made aware of their work, while in a 200 people startup not everyone is visible and known by the top management for instance.

Our Sales team at Rocket Internet PT had a gong that was being used every time there was something to celebrate, whether it’s a new big client on board or a job opening filled after a lengthy interview process.

Another way to do it could be a weekly meeting with all the wins of the team (alongside the challenges, so that everyone knows what works well and what needs to be worked on).

Listen to your team

But it’s not all to make your team feel valued: you must also constantly consult them to understand what they like, dislike, and their opinion about the company.

For this, you can send regular surveys where your team can anonymously express their thoughts. They can differ slightly whether you’re sending them to managers or not for instance, but the crucial point is to send them frequently enough (once a quarter for instance) and most importantly, to action the feedback. Nothing worse than having the surveys being filled in and just forget about it. Once you have this valuable data, share the main insights with the wider team during an all-hand meeting and implement quick changes to show you are listening to your team and willing to adapt to their needs.

Of course you have to be selective in what you will implement or not: sometimes it is your duty to push back if a suggestion seems particularly unrealistic or not something the company is ready to do right now. Precisely, you can also use this exercise to clarify anything with the wider team, in case you realize such a clarification is needed because a topic has been misunderstood.

Grow your team

This is definitely a point that will make the difference between a startup keeping its employees and all the others who need to constantly look for new hires.

I was listening to Reid Hoffman’s Masters of Scale podcast the other day (my favorite thing to do when walking to work each morning!), and one episode was about millennials and how to work with them. He was interviewing one girl in her twenties stating that she was part of this generation who want constant change and won’t stay on the same job for years, as their parents did.

You need to understand that your employees are embracing this mindset and seeking for change and growth. Feedback sessions are a good forum to discuss this. First of all, they should be rather more than less frequent. I recently onboarded a new Account Manager at Stuart and made it clear from the first day that she should compile a list of feedback we would review on a weekly basis. Weekly basis might be too much for a proper feedback session, but in my view each manager and managee should leverage the weekly 1:1 catch up session to communicate any feedback they’d have, so everyone can constantly improve. I personally prefer this than having one big feedback session a year where you’re told you’re not doing this or this right — that’s fine, but why didn’t you let me know on the spot so I could improve before? Everything goes very fast in the startup world so you need to make sure that everyone is improving fast enough to adapt to the pace.

In addition to these frequent feedback, a proper review session with a framework and good prior work on it is also much needed to show the employee you care. At Stuart, we use a standardised tool with which the managee self-assess him/herself and get a review from the manager.

Something I find very helpful, and have always pushed, are 360 degrees reviews, where both managers and managees assess each other. As already stated above, in a fast-paced environment, managers might find themselves going from 1 to 10 managees in a short timespan and have to constantly adjust their methods, learn fast and iterate. Nothing better for this than hear the feedback of the people they manage to understand what they can do better. That was what I had enforced as Global Head of Operations at Somuchmore (Rocket Internet).

It’s important to understand what each employee wants and show them the path to get there. The idea is to implement a growth plan for each of your team member, so they can grow in their role and progressively take over more and more responsibilities. Startups that promote their employees instead of always looking for external hires for senior management positions are the best in my view -employees have a clear reason to stick around.

In sum, treating your team is the most important and strategic decision you could take for your business. Listen to everyone, make sure everyone is happy, having fun, progressing, and always take a step back to reconsider your management methods within a high growth environment — and your business and people will grow together.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +446,678 people.

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