The human brain doesn’t come with an off switch. At times I’m sure we’ve all wished it had one but it doesn’t and that leads to a simple fact: People worry.
When you allow people the opportunity to let their mind carry and distract them, it will. This isn’t to say that you should try to make your employees or team conform to a belief or limit them in what to do and don’t have access too, rather to nurture and support them. If you ensure that the basic needs of an individual are looked after and not a worry or bothersome to your team then you allow them to be present in the workplace.
What is key to laying this foundation of support is providing service to your team. Their needs will always be far ranging and unique to each individual so it’s important to find out the services that are most needed and strive to provide those. This may mean ensuring that healthcare, psychological and family needs are supported, encouraging vacation time is taken for alignment or that wage levels are competitive.
Eric Spell, President of AGCareers.com lays out a few of his keys to employee engagement to help address some of their basic needs.
Teams are critical in startups. There’s no other way around it. However if your team is spending their time worrying about money, prescriptions, child care and not working your startup will suffer. But if you take care of the team you have assembled and provide them with what they need to allow their mind to focus, the work they produce will be amazing.
The principle from there becomes simple, take care of the team, and the team (including you) will take care of the startup.
