Keeping your team happy and motivated is the key to startup success. Engaged employees are more productive, loyal, and stick around longer, creating a positive vibe that helps you better hit your objectives.
Let’s work through how you can advance engagement and retention:
1. Build and Take Pride in Your Workplace Culture
You want to be setting the foundations for a happy, inclusive team.
Define Your Mission and Values: Make sure everyone knows your startup’s mission and how they play a part in it.
Foster Inclusion: Celebrate diversity and make sure everyone feels like they belong.
Top Tip: Ensure you build your culture intentionally – you should take conscious steps to ensure your culture is unifying and also that your team embodies your values.
2. Get Employees Excited and Involved
Keeping communication open and recognising contributions. You want to make sure that all employees feel valued and comfortable sharing their opinions within the right fora.
Stay Transparent: Use town halls and updates to keep everyone in the loop.
Encourage Participation: Welcome employee ideas through surveys and feedback sessions.
Celebrate Wins: Recognise achievements with meaningful rewards and shout-outs.
"Sometimes, you know that the news you have to deliver to the team will not go down well. I've done this a few times. In these cases, communication is key - people need to understand the need and the reason for the change. I think about it as 'over communicating' - you need to say it 100 times so that everyone hears at least once. There are a couple of good ways to do this - I like to create a video every week with 2-3 key points or ideas, providing a state of the nation on the week just gone and what's ahead. I find it helps the team to feel connected, happier and involved in our collective progress. i sometimes make one for the team and one for the senior leaders, given our geographic distribution."
Roxana Dobrescu, Chief People Officer
at Commercetools, Brighteye Mentor
3. Invest in Professional Growth
Helping your team grow their skills and careers. It’s important for teams to feel like their success contributes to team success and that you’re of course invested in their progress. The main thing that teams want in this context is clarity.
Clear Career Paths: Show employees how they can grow within the company.
Offer Learning Opportunities: Provide training, workshops, and resources for skill development.
4. Support Work-Life Balance
You want to do what you can to make sure that work fits into life, not the other way around. You want motivated employees arriving to their desks fresh and energised, fuelled through whichever routes best suit them. There also needs to be some proportionality, with employees feeling able to prioritise their family and health when appropriate and the business when appropriate. Why make it complicated to attend medical appointments, for example? Your teams won’t forget if you make it difficult to attend personally significant events.
Flexible Work Options: Let employees set their schedules or work remotely when needed.
Well-being Programs: Focus on mental and physical health with resources and wellness initiatives.
5. Strengthen Manager-Employee Bonds
Building trust and support between leaders and team members. Team leaders need to be the lead advocate for individual employees – they need to be supported and give some wins when credited for success to take back to their team.
Empathetic Leadership: Train managers to lead with understanding and respect.
Consistent Feedback: Create a culture of regular, constructive feedback to guide employees.
"Monthly town halls are critical for communicating the most important points to a distributed team. People sometimes take internal communication lightly but the truth is, it can make or break your business. There will be shitty times and monthly collective sessions can help you and your team to build a better sense of ‘why’ in people. If you lose the ‘why’, it can be hard to rebuild."
Roxana Dobrescu, Chief People Officer
at Commercetools, Brighteye Mentor
6. Encourage Team Collaboration
You want to make sure that your team runs like a well-oiled machine. This means that barriers between teams should be near seamless. Your organisation should feel dynamic, nimble and fast-paced.
Top Tip: the working environment should be such that everyone in your organisation should be able to reach out to and meet everyone else in your organisation if they have ideas.
Team Activities: Plan fun events to build camaraderie.
Better Tools, Better Teams: Use platforms and spaces that make working together easy.
'Employee resource groups (ERGs) are critical in my experience. They are a good way to make people feel involved and we actively support them. We have a range of groups, including black, parents, neurodivergent, women, LGBT and others. It’s a good way of making sure those that want to can be part of a group that bolsters individual voices and makes sure their expectations and hope are heard. It breeds an inclusive culture that can be phenomenal in creating loyalty. ERGs will come to me and say ‘benefits or support around X is not serious or generous enough- we need a change’. And then we will collectively decide on the proposals - it could be something like ‘can we trade gym allowance for kindergarten allowance?’.
It often feels like politics, because everyone is ideating and promoting ideas and then lobbying us in the central team to make changes. ERGs lead to a vibrant culture. We provide a small budget too, to fund socials and training. They truly are one of the best ways of bolstering retention out there - and in my opinion, you can have ERGs at any scale, even in teams as small as 5 people."
Roxana Dobrescu, Chief People Officer
at Commercetools, Brighteye Mentor
7. Track Employee Engagement
Depending on the size and structure of your organisation, the way you discern what’s working and what is not will vary. Regardless, it’s vitally important to have your finger on the pulse with regards to sentiment, culture and work satisfaction.
Engagement Surveys: Regularly ask for feedback to identify areas for improvement.
Measure What Matters: Track satisfaction, turnover, and productivity to guide strategies.
8. Keep Your Best Talent
Attracting the right team is only part of the process. Making your startup a place people want to stay and spend the best years of their careers is a totally different proposition. There are a number of ways to deliver this:
Competitive Pay: Ensure salaries and perks are at par with industry standards.
Celebrate Loyalty: Acknowledge milestones like work anniversaries.
Learn From Exits: Use insights from exit interviews to make changes.
"When thinking about retaining your top performers, you need to have them clearly identified and be involving them in projects that put them in the driving seat - 80% of your results are likely going to come from 20% of your top performers. You NEED to keep this people. In my experience, A players want one sing thing: accelerated growth. Ringfence the 20% and produce tailored training opportunities for them to pursue. Some of these people will be junior and others might be VP level - programmes need to reflect these levels. We form customisable Ambition Plans with these prospective leaders.
Typically, you can split the way to keep talent into three categories of support:
Compensation - salary, bonus, equity
Emotional check-ins - CEO breakfasts, ‘stay’ interviews which is when a people business partner will check-in quarterly to check their goals are aligning with company goals and that they feel properly appreciated
Projects- ensuring they are part of the most important, strategic projects in the business, so they feel enabled to make a meaningful contribution "
Roxana Dobrescu, Chief People Officer
at Commercetools, Brighteye Mentor
All of this said, hungry people always want more and sometimes can get more by leaving… it can be hard to keep up with how much they want to grow so you will need to find a balance.
Happy employees are the heart of a thriving startup. Focus on building a positive culture, keeping communication open, offering growth opportunities, supporting work-life balance, fostering collaboration, and regularly improving your strategies. With the right approach, you’ll keep your team engaged and your business moving forward.
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