Your Gambit

Following the recent trends in various industries, businesses and startups, having a really strong People strategy and culture is the basic foundation for any business to grow.

Most startups and founders focus on the product, the business plan, drawing up the business canvas model and basically start hiring people to perform key activities or just jump right into it. After having witnessed some startups first hand along my own professional journey and after being particularly attracted to the startup world. I couldn’t help but notice that people strategies are rarely thought out or planned as essential part of the business model.

I don’t mean to refer to culture of a startup, as the culture is built over time and it is normally formed by the founder and a few core members through processes and acceptable behaviors as well as the nature of the business too has an influence in defining the culture of the organization and this is regardless of the onboarding presentation that an HR would take you through on Day 1.

Before we jump into people strategies, there’s absolutely no argument here that constant recruitment and replacing people equals constant and heavy cash burn and there is also no doubt about no matter what the reference check says/resume has and/or the various rounds of interviews say every hire is a chance taken on someone. It is a known fact that if taught well any skill and any job could be performed by anyone.

So, in the wide list of things, people strategies would normally fall in the plan after the key activities and the key resources are identified in the business model canvas. Once you’ve understood the key roles, the founders need to focus on these aspects

Hiring and staffing

As a founder before you hire and on an obvious note, answering these questions would be your top priority

1. Do I need these activities to be done by experts? In this case, does it mean experienced individuals?
2. Followed by do I have the funds to hire these people?

Most founders don’t have easy or rather immediate access to funds, in this case the choice to hire would be part-timers/ freelancers or interns depending on the complexity of the job.

Hiring interns, associates, freshers are usually the best bet as the young workforce isn’t too concerned with the monetary aspect but rather the learning objectives and portfolio building while they are more focused on building a career for themselves. These are your task list executioners and mentees; they would also look at the founder as mentors.

In case the founder does have access to funds and chooses an experienced individual it should also come with an understanding that senior folks may not want to actively focus on executional tasks but rather more to do with strategies and direction, thus actively taking the function from the hands of the founder, for this thought essentially the budgets for the role should comfortably hold two hires, one who would execute while the focuses on the larger picture.

To sum it up, depending on the cost structures and budget under the hiring function there are 2 options:

1. Hiring Executioners: – will reduce the execution time of the key activities, however the founder will still have to mentor and actively think strategies for these functions.
2. Hiring Experienced folks plus the executioner: – Entirely taking away active focus on a non-core function but an equally important function of the business. Essentially this hiring will also focus on the culture fitment of the roles whereas option 1 gives you people who are flexible and more open to change and moulding behaviors.

Retention and Employee Lifecycle + Values = Culture

Before you’ve hired, another aspect of people strategies is to preplan and focus is on retention, as a startup no matter what your what your funds and cost structure or your business vision says. There are monetary and non-monetary means to retain:

1. What are the values you want flowing in your organization top down, bottom up, vertically, laterally and even externally? These values are the answers to what will help achieve the business vision with steadfast precision and will fuel your mission statement. The idea here is while hiring experienced people there needs to be culture fitment and like-mindedness to the values and alignment of key goals, this enables retention by hiring people who believe.
2. Growth opportunities and Goals, pre-aligned goals and communicated KRAs will enable employees to work towards achieving growth via achieving their predefined set of KRAs. These achievements should also be rewarded with clear growth plans. It could be as simple as growing year on year with increments and promotions, or offering performance bonuses, loyalty brownie points and more.
3. Appreciation more than rewards, appreciating the minutest achievement to reward on a bigger or over and above goal achievement, both are important.
4. Private and confidential communication on feedback by having a constructive conversation.
5. Awarding ESOPs and Shares, even the smallest fraction with make huge difference as the employee would be more vested in the company’s growth.

Retention is an important precursor to hiring, because this will enable the founder treat the employee like an asset from Day 0, and not thinking about retention after all is said and done and the employee is on their exit route.

Strategies around productivity and efficiency

As most startup come into existence without proper pre-planning and they lack major processes, and before they know it, they are getting out of hand resulting in uneven workflow distribution, burnouts and some really flat curves instead of grown.

Measuring productivity should be as simple as are the monthly goals achieved on deadline, are all individual KRAs and targets achieved on a quarterly basis and basically looking at things on a macro level.

Very few roles actually require a clock-in and clock-out system with billable hours and lengthy HR policies outlining strict protocols. However, if the focus is on productivity and target achievement, this could potentially even mean flexibility and could potentially come under a retention strategy.

In my opinion having a preset strategy for productivity and efficiency may not guarantee a good people strategy because as the business evolves these measures and methods would necessarily have to change with time.

The success of the startup not only depends on the innovative idea, the product or the business plan but it also based on good and strong people strategies that cultivate cultures that breed innovation and resilience.