Awesome Startup Workplace Series: Understanding Mindsets of Startup Employees

Part 2: What do startup employees find important?

In our first article in the ASW series, we focused on what motivates employees to join startups. In this article, we present our findings on what employees find most important while working at a startup. These insights are derived from YourStory’s recently concluded Awesome Startup Workplaces (ASW) Awards - the first exclusive employer of choice awards for startups globally.

To understand what drives startup employees, we identified 11 key parameters and asked respondents to rate each parameter on how important it is to them. The parameters used were:

• Vision-Mission Alignment: Understanding why the company exists, what are the business goals and how their work contributes to the achievement of these goals
• Information Sharing: Being kept informed about how the company is performing and knowing what various departments and teams are doing
• Innovation: Being encouraged to think innovatively, propose ideas and having differing opinions discussed openly
• Pay & Recognition: Getting a satisfactory salary package and being recognized for their contributions
• Fairness and Empathy: Being confident that the company will be fair to them and will look after them in times of need
• Co-workers: Having competent colleagues whose company they enjoy
• Autonomy & Flexibility: Feeling empowered to take decisions and having flexibility to manage their work tasks
• Collaboration: Succeeding at work thanks to contributions of colleagues and teamwork across teams/ departments
• Nature of Work: Finding their work meaningful and developing/ growing knowledge and skills
• Leadership: Having capable & competent leaders with whom they feel a personal connect
• Culture: Having a work culture that encourages fun, while driving for performance and results

Key highlights and insights:

• Vision-Mission Alignment is the most important factor, followed by Nature of Work. While employees understand that roles can tend to be relatively unstructured at startups, they need to see the larger picture of the organization and how their work fits in. They are willing to multi-task but they must feel that they are effectively utilizing their skill sets and are developing as professionals.
• It is also very important for startup employees to work with capable people, be it their Leaders or Co-workers. With relatively smaller teams at startups, there is a need to bond and a major component of this is to be able to look up to others at the workplace. That said, Collaboration ranks amongst the lowest in terms of importance, which seems a bit counter-intuitive. A possible explanation is that with higher empowerment (and possible higher levels of self-confidence), startup employees don’t feel so dependent on their colleagues. It could also suggest that the smaller size of teams and a greater alignment to the organization’s vision and mission automatically drive collaboration; employees do not expressly feel the need for formal structures that promote the same.
• Pay and Recognition also features low on the importance scale for startup employees. There are clearly loftier goals which drive startup employees more than material gain. Internal recognition is something that anyway comes with working in smaller, highly driven organizations.
• A slightly concerning trend was that employees in Operations and Other functions consistently gave lower importance scores to all parameters than their counterparts in Technology and Sales & Marketing. This could suggest a couple of things. First, that employees non-core functions may be a little disconnected from the rest of the organization. Second, that these employees are a bit more conservative. Of course, it could also suggest that there are factors other than the 11 factors analyzed that are important to these employees!
• The importance of Vision-Mission Alignment goes up with seniority, with employees having >5 years of experiencing rating this parameter significantly higher than other parameters.
• Overseas employees have given higher scores across all parameters compared to their counterparts in India. The difference in scores for Overseas employees versus employees in India is starkest on Information Sharing, Pay & Recognition and Co-workers.