Most startups start small. If it isn’t just you in your garage, it’s probably just you plus a couple other passionate workers committed to your cause. Yet, even when your team is this tiny, you need to be thinking about how to keep your team motivated and keep your company growing.
Motivation in a smaller work environment is a difficult balancing act. You don’t want to impede on your workers’ existing intrinsic motivation, which is a powerful personal driver for growth and improvement.
However, you should want to ensure they feel engaged with the company, so they don’t feel tempted to find a bigger, better position somewhere else. This guide will help you motivate your lean staff, even without the deep pockets and powerful incentives that larger corporations boast.
Intangibles
Your startup doesn’t have much to offer teammates — yet. That means in the beginning, you’ll most likely be able to motivate and reward using concepts rather than physical items. Fortunately, intangibles can make for especially compelling motivation, depending on your team and your administration. Some of the best intangible incentives include:
Broader responsibilities. Few members of a skeleton startup team are titans of industry. Most often, they are relatively new to this line of work and are looking for some quality experience before finding a more lucrative position somewhere else.
Thus, you can keep your staff around longer by continuing to enhance their authority and rewarding them with bigger and better responsibilities. This kind of experience is hard to come by in more corporate jobs, so it is almost guaranteed to make employees feel special and engage with their new duties.
Flexible schedules. Another perk that is rarely available at more rigid employers, flex time is when employees can come and go as they please — as long as their work gets done. Because you aren’t dealing with a huge bureaucracy, you probably don’t need all your team members on the clock at the same time.
You should be able to accommodate your workers’ personal lives with creative scheduling, which will make your employees feel more comfortable and respected within their roles.
Tangibles
While you might think you lack the financial stability to offer something a bit more real, there are a few tangible motivators that are well within any startup’s grasp. These range from small gestures to significant offerings, and all of them are all but guaranteed to keep your staff excited and engaged:
Lunch. Breakfast, lunch, snacks — any type of food offering is exciting for employees, especially if you take into considerations their dietary needs and wants. You don’t have to feed your whole staff every day, but offering an in-office meal once per week or once per month creates an event-like atmosphere that raises spirits and provides energy for the work ahead.
Tokens of appreciation. When you have a small team, you pretty much know what everyone is doing — which means you know when someone is accomplishing something great or putting in extra effort. You shouldn’t let your best workers toil without recognition; you should let them know how much you care.
You can do this with custom trophies, paper certificates, gift cards or even emails or company-wide memos. However, you should talk with individual employees to get a feel for how they like to be appreciated before making any big and potentially embarrassing gestures.
Employee ownership. Stock options or equity in your startup are good tools to help employees feel like more than pawns in your game. These allow your team to literally invest and take ownership of their work; with stock or equity, workers can draw a direct line from their day-to-day efforts to their profits and success. It heightens an employee’s sense of responsibility and encourages them to work harder and with more passion than they might as a corporate drone.
When your crew is small and tight, you shouldn’t ever need to guess about what would make your workforce feel more motivated to excel — you should simply ask. In a brief meeting, you can gain a number of ideas about what incentivizes each person to continue coming to work and producing something great.
While the ideas listed above are near-universal, you should still talk directly with your staff about the concept of motivation in your workplace, so your startup can function as uniquely as it deserves.