For this, you create a minimally viable product (MVP), formulate a unique value proposition, and structure a multidisciplinary team to complement your knowledge. And together you work first to product-market-fit, then to break even, and then you start to grow.
But this trajectory is not so simple. Growing a business is a winding path and without much clarity on the next step. So for the startup to be successful, you need to gain scale. And this is where it starts to get more complicated.
These difficulties are synonymous that your initial convictions weren’t 100% correct (as they usually never are), and that’s why you need to pivot. But the idea of a startup that works with an agile model is precisely that you can make mistakes fast to learn fast.
So these challenges are not the problem. The question is: how are you going to overcome them? When you manage to overcome these obstacles and the business gains consistency, the startup gets closer to gaining scale and entering into accelerated growth.
However, to overcome these challenges and survive the first few years (which are the terror of every startup), you will need a solid team that you can count on and that you can trust.
In other words, you will need professionals engaged with the company’s purpose if you want to gain scale.
Engagement at work alone has impressive benefits for companies. But in the context of those who are taking their first steps, there are characteristics of engaged professionals that are essential for the business to succeed.
So, if you are facing any of these challenges I mentioned or if you feel that your team is not fully engaged, in this post we will see how to measure the engagement and how to use it as a growth strategy.
A highly engaged professional develops what is called an owner attitude. And like any business owner (or founder), this professional starts to work not only for bonuses and remuneration but for the purpose of the company. Once you are engaged with the company, the success of the business is also your personal success.
So we are talking about people who work hard and with determination because being successful also means having personal fulfillment.
But in addition, engaged employees work happier and more satisfied. This means that if they need to make an extra effort to reach their goals, work late on some days, or even dedicate hours to study on their weekends, they will gladly do so.
And if there’s one thing we know, it’s that at the beginning of every company, the extra effort is very welcome mainly because every startup is subject to the valley of death.
Before gaining scale, it is necessary to first reach break-even. And until break-even is reached, every step a startup takes is like walking a tightrope: there’s no way to predict whether it will work or not.
This initial moment of every startup is full of uncertainties: about the product, the success of customers, the value proposition… And this is where engagement has its true importance: when you have an engaged team (with an owner attitude), you can be sure they’ll be with you when you cross the valley of death, and they’ll stay with you when you start to scale.
This owner attitude is already very common in startup environments, as most professionals who will work in this market are precisely looking for differentiated experiences, new learning and the feeling of being part of something important.
But sustaining and nurturing that engagement are the real challenges.
Just to give you an idea, a 2013 Gallup poll found that around the world, globally, only 13% of workers are highly engaged.
And ironically, according to this survey, that 13% is responsible for unbelievable results. For example:
But most important of all this is how much engagement contributes to a more stable and healthy work environment.
Many times a startup goes through delicate and tense situations in which the levels of uncertainty and insecurity are much higher than normal. This means that stress tends to increase proportionately and generate burnout in many employees.
Teams that have engaged employees tend to feel less of the effects of this moment as they feel pleasure in going to the company.
It becomes much easier to go through moments of crisis when your team is committed to the success of the startup. And these moments tend to last less, as the team itself starts to act proactively to find innovative solutions ㅡ after all, the success of the startup is their personal success.
Have you ever heard the maxim divide and conquer? Well, it could even work in the past for giant and traditional companies, but it certainly doesn’t work anymore today.
The current maxim is to measure and improve. And it would be no different with regard to engagement at work.
This work of measuring engagement to propose improvement actions may seem similar to improving a product or a sales process, but it is vastly more complex.
This complexity exists because of one factor: each person is unique. Both mood and perceptions of the environment or even the parameters of happiness vary from person to person according to the moment in their lives.
But what actually changes?
What changes is that, unlike in other areas, in people management, you need to measure the engagement of professionals constantly. ㅡ In fact, you often need to measure the pillars that drive engagement.
Practical example: You have a programmer who is your best developer. He works very well as a team, generates sensational ideas about the product and his deliveries are very expressive. He has nothing to complain about the team, the manager, or even the work environment. But he feels like he’s not growing with this jobㅡ and feels like he’s stagnant.
This stagnation will gradually consume the engagement of this programmer to the point where he becomes disengaged, greatly reducing deliveries and the quality of work.
This can happen over months or even from one week to the next. These factors are unpredictable. This is why it is so necessary to measure engagement.
The best way to measure this is through weekly surveys.
The weekly engagement surveys have the function of collecting data on the team’s moment. But mainly, the function of generating important insights into what management and leadership can do to improve the company as a whole.
Applying this process in an organized and routine way helps to quickly identify problems and minimize impacts on the startup. And just when we think you’re about to scale, every hurdle that can be resolved in advance is one step closer to scaling.
Important: Measuring engagement is a matter of statistically evaluating how your people are doing and, from there, directing efforts and actions to improve or expand the individual and collective performance of professionals.
