As a startup, you need a team that combines professionalism with a passion to keep them engaged and motivated.
To help reduce startup stress, you need a team that can self-manage.
By taking the wrong approach to managing your employees, you could lose them soon after you’ve invested money, time, and energy in their training.
This is why you have to take care of your onboarding process and initial employee management using the following five tips:
1. Create an employee handbook
Your startup needs an employee handbook or manual (digital or printed) where that can give them a point of reference when they have inquiries and questions. The handbook should be issued during the onboarding stage.
It will help them answer key company policies and procedures such as health benefits, paid time off, stock option plans, employee compliance, and disability provisions.
A handbook is an employee’s manual and helps reduce back and forth inquiries about company procedures, values, policies, and possible penalties.
2. Build a safe and supportive work environment
Your employees need to understand the company’s compliance requirements, including ethics, employee rights, diversity, and inclusion, right from the beginning.
A compliance violation or single harassment lawsuit can be costly to the company in terms of money, time, lost productivity, employee morale, and company reputation.
You need to guard both your company and employees from the risks of non-compliance caused by illegal, unethical, or irresponsible employee conduct. The best way to achieve this is to build an employee handbook and workplace compliance training program.
If you don’t have one, you can seek online compliance training for employees to educate employees on the important company, industry, and governmental requirements.
3. Create an efficient meeting routine
Your startup needs to review meetings, but you should spend more time on actual work than meetings. On this, Paul Graham advises entrepreneurs to adopt a “maker schedule” to avoid manager schedules.
Entrepreneurs don’t need a manager’s schedule that spends more time on meetings disregarding the important work. Instead, you need a maker’s schedule that provides enough uninterrupted time for employees to focus on doing their work and not on meetings.
Meetings should have the least time slots and take the least of employees’ time.
4. Establish an employee review process
As your company grows, you may eventually hire an HR manager or professional and even install a Human Resources Management Systems to help manage the different types of employees.
This will also help your company manage all HR aspects, including recruiting, hiring, onboarding, payroll, talent management, compensation, and employee performance reviews.
This will also allow you to review your employees and find the best-performing employees that need protecting. Your review process should encompass the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you need your employees to excel in and improve the company’s growth.
5. Empower your teams and let them be flexible
There are two great things to a productive startup team: the right resources and the ability to be flexible. You need to empower your team by providing them with the right tools to do their jobs effectively and succeed.
For example, if you have a marketing team, give them the right CMS tools and help them make a great SEO strategy. Once you give them the tools, let them have the autonomy to do their job and watch them succeed.
You also need to expect your employees’ roles to change or evolve. For example, you may have hired a graphic design professional, but when you discover that they have great writing skills or a master of memes, you can shift their roles or give them additional roles.
Endnote
When you have a startup business to run, it’s just right to make sure the people you’re charged with implementing it are right for it.
A handbook can start them off, and with a safe and supportive work environment and a chance to be flexible, your employees can achieve great success, but you also need to review their performance and ensure they stay on course.
