Here Are 3 Ways to Improve Your Startup Culture To Attract the Best Talent
It’s no secret that a startup’s culture directly affects the performance and productivity of its employees as well as its hiring prospects. Ask any employee at a company how they got to be there, and chances are their answer would be because they were drawn in and inspired by the company’s culture. Furthermore, those same employees would recommend their company to their own friends and associates, thus creating a positive cycle of recruitment. As a startup founder, one of the best things you could ever do for your startup is to establish a company culture that attracts the right kind of talent and breathes life to your startup’s values, purpose and vision.
Your startup’s culture is a continually evolving process, one that adapts and grows to suit the needs and demands of its employees and workers as well as the environment and space it is in. Some companies make the mistake of treating their culture as an afterthought, something to be proclaimed about loudly on the first day and then relegated to the background afterwards. Culture isn’t something that you set up on day one and then leave it at that, it’s a process that you must work on everyday to keep alive and relevant to your startup. There will be days when everything feels just right, and there will be days when you will have to take action to move things along. Make it a habit to frequently ask employees for their feedback and input and act on them, and periodically check your startup’s progress against its stated goals and values to make sure that things are on the right track. By constantly ensuring that your startup culture is keeping in step with the times, the better off your employees and workers are going to be.
If your startup hasn’t already, it can start considering offering internship programs to attract great talent. Instead of having them come to you, you can actually go to them. This helps you to discover quality talent that you might have otherwise missed. Universities and institutions of higher learning will usually hold job fairs where students and companies can get together to assess each other. By offering internship programs at these fairs, you effectively simplify the application process and can hire students as interns right on the spot. Aside from students and fresh graduates, there will also be workers who are re-entering the workforce after a prolonged absence and are looking to sharpen their skills or acquire new ones. These workers are also a valuable source of quality talent, and it would do well for you to scout them out at local job fairs and online forums and listings. Once you have the intern working at your startup, you should delegate them relevant and important tasks so that they get a front row seat of how your startup operates as well as understand the core values and principles that drive and sustain it.
A healthy, vibrant workplace does wonders for your employees’ productivity and well-being. By simply placing green plants around your startup workplace, you are significantly livening up the atmosphere. Other than maintaining a high standard of cleanliness and hygiene, your startup environment should be well-ventilated to ensure good air circulation and workers should preferably be given access to natural lighting. The worst thing you could for your employees is to have them work in dark, dreary confined spaces. This only saps morale and may drive them away, besides the obvious dip in productivity.
How your startup manages its culture will have a direct impact on your company’s profitability and productivity. As long as your startup continually evolves its culture and adopts new measures and practices to keep employees happy and help them be the best they can be, your startup will keep attracting the right talent that it needs.
