BENGALURU: Most startups face the challenge of scaling up and as team members increase, so does the hierarchy. Startups should keep a constant communication flow with the team members as this helps in building trust and over time it helps nurture higher employee engagement. High engagement means that employees care deeply about their work, feel like they are part of the team, are bought into the greater vision, and bring their unique strengths to their work. None of this is possible unless the employees feel like the company they work for cares about them, values their work, has their best interests in mind, and accepts them as part of an integral team. With more than 45 team members investing in Eupheus Learning and to make it a reality in June 2017, scaling up has been easier as each team member is more than committed to creating an impact in K-12 ecosystem. We made a conscious decision to quickly grow our team in order to match our appetite for growth. Our philosophy has always been to have open door communication channels.
– Sarvesh Shrivastava, founder, and Managing Director, Eupheus Learning
The art of delegation is an important task that every entrepreneur has to learn. One of the keys to managing a team is to avoid micromanaging them. You can do this by creating systems and processes they can use to get the job done. We hold weekly team heads meetings where we decide how we can work on cross-departmental projects better. We have also put our semi-annual goals all over the office so everyone can see them. I think the biggest challenge so far has been keeping the team aligned as we grow. When we were five people, we used to interact a lot with each other and everyone had a clear understanding of the company’s mission. But as we grew to 45 people, the interaction level with the team members decreased with the introduction of a level of management between me and most employees.
- Sanna Vohra, founder, The Wedding Brigade
A startup journey is full of ups and downs, and teamwork is the key ingredients required for any organisation’s success. Managing a team is one of the most complex tasks a startup founder has to play from attracting the right talent to be part of the team, creating the team culture and sometimes we have to change the team also. We need to think of creating team goals, team outings and shared habits and attitudes required for organisation success. The other important aspect is to spend time on building a team culture. Often as founders, we are so busy building the business we often forget about building a shared value system within the team. There are employees who fail to change or do not align to ever-changing organisation priorities, so do let them go, as changing them would drain you of bandwidth. People who join you purely for monetary upside will leave you as soon as things look bleak. So, when attracting talent, do not only focus only on monetary aspects like salary hike, wealth creation opportunity, try to see the alignment of purpose and culture first then make sure other monetary aspects are taken care of.
- Viraj Malik, co-founder, VURoll