Mentor Mantras: How Should Startups Manage Employee Attrition Rates?

The co-founder of coworking space 91springboard, Varun Chawla has important insights on how to get the best employees – and to get them to stay. He also shares takeaways on the kind of work culture a founder can create in the organisation in order to mitigate employee attrition.

• Don’t oversell yourself when you’re pitching to potential employees.
• Getting them in the door is not a victory, getting them to stay for a few years and be productive members of your team is a victory.
• Attract talent by being realistic about what you’re going to offer them in terms of work experience, compensation, growth and the environment that they’re going to be in.
• Be very clear and candid about each of the above-mentioned things; otherwise you’re going to get yourself into trouble later. Basically, you must know how to manage expectations.
• It’s very important to have one-on-one’s with everybody in your organisation, so that they are able to express themselves.
• If an employee expected something when he joined and that expectation isn’t being met, he/she should have the liberty to speak up about that discrepancy to his/her manager so that the manager, the candidate and the organisation can closely work together to achieve it.
• As a founder, all you can do is create an environment where you can entertain these conversations and based on those conversations, devise a plan of action within the confines of your startup.

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