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Startup Advice: How to Keep Your Employees Happy

Keeping employees can be difficult for any startup, but that’s especially true in China, where young people often expect to work jobs for a short time before moving on to the next one. So how can a startup — especially a Chinese startup — keep its employees happy enough that they stick around? Sun Qingxin, the founder of travel website Daoyou Tianxi, recently wrote a blog post sharing his advice on how to keep startup employees.

The full post is worth reading if you can read Chinese, but for those who can’t, here’s a summary of his eight main points: 1. Values are important. If you use money to entice and hire people, those people are likely to leave again as soon as a better offer comes along. And you’re a startup, so you probably don’t have enough money to entice people anyway. But if you can convince people that what you’re doing is meaningful and that there is value in it in the long-term, the money becomes less important and you’re less likely to lose people to better financial offers. 2. Be clear with everyone from the start: doing a startup isn’t a short-term prospect. Doing a startup means lots of hard work for little pay over a long period of time and then, probably, you still fail. Be sure that your employees understand what they’re getting into up front, because if they don’t, they’re going to bolt for the doors as soon as they figure it out, and then you’ve wasted a lot of time and effort on hiring and training someone you now need to replace.