To align interests, you give employees a meaningful ownership stake, or at least profit-sharing. If you hire people who are already interested in your field/industry, you make it easy for them to put their best efforts toward your shared goals.
This isn't sneaky. Some (many!) people want to work hard (and expect to be rewarded for success) but prefer to avoid taking all of the risks personally/handling the janitorial work of a business by themselves too.
Offer a good balance, and remember that regardless of what you require from your staff, they always volunteer the most important parts.
Hiring is hard, and these kinds of conditions make it even harder. But getting it right is transformative.
Some (many!) people want to work hard (and expect to be rewarded for success) but prefer to avoid taking all of the risks personally/handling the janitorial work of a business by themselves too.
Exactly. If you're older than 25 and it's no longer socially acceptable to mooch, you recognize that personal financial risk is toxic sludge to be kept out of your life if at all possible.
Why do people take it on when forming businesses? They have no other choice. Bank loans require personal liability, VCs run a reputation economy that's almost certainly illegal.
However, you can give people an environment where they can be truly "intrapreneurial" (this doesn't work in most companies for political reasons, but it can in an open-allocation environment where doing work is more important than controlling it) and participate in the upside (profit-sharing, bonuses, increasing interestingness of work) partially but don't have to take on any personal risk. People won't leave such an environment lightly.
To align interests, you give employees a meaningful ownership stake, or at least profit-sharing. If you hire people who are already interested in your field/industry, you make it easy for them to put their best efforts toward your shared goals.
This isn't sneaky. Some (many!) people want to work hard (and expect to be rewarded for success) but prefer to avoid taking all of the risks personally/handling the janitorial work of a business by themselves too.
Offer a good balance, and remember that regardless of what you require from your staff, they always volunteer the most important parts.
Hiring is hard, and these kinds of conditions make it even harder. But getting it right is transformative.