Startup Saturday Pune – August 2010
Today’s Startup saturday was about hiring and retaining talent. It was an interesting group discussion rather than boring lengthy presentation. The discussion was headed by Marcus Hegi of Colayer who spoke about various strategies adopted by Colayer for hiring and retaining talent.
A brief about Marcus Hegi:
Marcus Hegi is Founder & CEO of Colayer, which has a development centre in Pune. Colayer is a Swiss-Indian software product company, developing a platform to build virtual contextualized workplaces for companies, organizations and networks of professionals. Colayer is similar to Google Wave a collaboration tool, which helps enterprises to manage their knowledge base. Colayer was established in 2000 and has been operating well since then.
The discussion started with a small presentation from Arpit on Maslow need’s theory:
The theory basically speaks about human motivational factor in the ascending order mentioned below.
- Physiological needs
- Safety
- Love
- Esteem
- Self motivation
This set the tone for the discussion, which mostly centred around five aspects which leads to healthy environment for talent hiring and retention. The discussion started with the lower order needs in the hierarchy, i.e. Physiological needs and safety. No employee would like to work in an environment that is dirty or unhygienic. This not only refers to physical hygiene, but also at psychological level, like insufficient salary, constant unrest, job security,etc. It is very necessary for the employer to provide clean environment for their employees from both the perspectives.
Hiring junior employee has been not much difficult task, hiring seniors is a real problem. Most startups in India face a peculiar problem which might be pertaining to India only, i.e. marriage. Lot of employees quit a startup without any conflict or lack of opportunities, only because perspective brides would most likely marry a person working for bigger brand like Infosys or Tata, no matter what their job profile is (which they won’t understand in either case). Also other employees get an impression that cool guys are people who get jobs in big company. If your startup is product based then it’s a disasters if people leave, for product development requires very niche skill-set pertaining to your product only. This implies branding is very important for Startups, which happens only with sustained effort and is not a one night miracle. Smart employers have always worked consciously over their entire career over brand building exercise.
Well, on a lighter note Starups should hire only married employees. Interesting discussion followed on how Startups successfully dealt with this problem with simple and inexpensive methods, yet were very effective. Colayer has a day long interactive event once in a year wherein family members of the employees visit the company. Similarly few other startups celebrate common Indian festivals where the employees get their family members along. This helps build a brand in the social circle of the employees, easing out peer pressure to work for a bigger brand.
Simple things like handing out a big box of sweets on Diwali or Christmas, outdoor parties or celebrations makes a huge difference for the employees. Mr. Sandeep Saxena (of Actonbiotech) cited a simple yet effect way of brand building. Whenever his company’s credentials or interviews are published in media, he makes sure that he sends the picture of his employees to be published. This motivates rest of the employees and infuses some pride amongst the family members.
Marcus shared small anecdote related to motivation. He had once asked his employee to change a logo. Once done with the job the logo was published on Colayar’s website and the person who did it was like ‘Wow ! I did it, now the logo is there for the whole world to see’. Although not an event of great significance, it was very significant for the the concerned employee. All the entrepreneurs present unanimously agreed that money alone cannot be a motivating factor. If the salary of an employee is beyond certain threshold which gives him a feeling of security, a raise in salary is most likely to be ineffective or has marginal improvement in productivity. Hence it becomes very essential for the employers to identify the motivating factors for the employees. Motivational factors vary from person to person and some might be common to a group. In a nutshell it is very important for the startup to establish a good bond with the employees tounderstand their motivational factor and address it effectively with whatever limited resource they have.
After all any business is all about people. Highly scalable business can be built only through sustained efforts of a self motivated team. As they say like begets like, a self motivated team would attract more self motivated people. An unhealthy work environment would attract only good for nothing people. This makes it very essential for the startups to address not only personal needs of the employees but also social needs, to keep the work environment healthy and motivational.
By Chaitannya Mahatme
