The Female Founders Forum is hosting a series of webinars to bring leading business owners and parliamentarians together to discuss key policy issues pertinent to female founders in order to to support them through COVID-19 and beyond.
In our latest session on Attracting & Retaining Talent, we explored how to build an open and inclusive workplace culture for growth.
In this session, we heard from Eugenia Migliori, Principal Policy Adviser at the Confederation of British Industry, alongside incredible female founders including Aimee Bateman, founder and CEO of Careercake.com and Tugce Bulut, founder and CEO of Streetbees. We were also joined by Juliet Rogan, head of Barclays HG&E team.
We’ve picked out some of the most thought-provoking insights from the session. You can view this on our YouTube channel.
Highlights & Insights from our Speakers
Tugce Bulut opened with some insights on Streetbees hiring strategy. She mentioned that almost half of Streetbees hiring comes from employee referrals. Hence, their people strategy has been integral to supporting the company’s growth.
“I strongly believe that your hiring strategy starts with your people strategy. Your employees are the best possible advocates you can have for your company to be able to attract the best talent”
She also gave our female founders some tips on retaining top talent, including to listen to your team, highlight your company’s benefits and give your employees space to bring in their expertise:
“When you hire someone, you are bringing them in to build their dream, on your dream”
Aimee Bateman spoke about the importance of finding out what motivates the person you are looking to hire. Are they extrinsically or intrinsically motivated?
“I would be wary of the people who are motivated by the stuff. They will always be looking over your shoulder for the next pay rise or the next startup that could potentially offer them more and be focused on their goals and helping them to win when they leave you”
When it comes to employing people, Aimee stressed it is important to attract people who love your customers and the problem your business is trying to solve rather than just falling in love with the founder:
“Make sure that they love your business, not just you”
She also touched on some of the difficulties she has experienced with existing staff:
“As founders, it is our responsibility to recognise who thrives and who doesn’t and be brave enough to have those conversations with them… having the wrong people in the wrong positions, in the wrong play, is one of the largest reasons why startups fail”
Eugenia Migliori spoke about the disproportionate impact that the Covid-19 has had on women. She reflected on the importance of retaining top talent and the importance of flexible working arrangements to keep employees engaged during the pandemic:
“It will be important for businesses to think about how they retain talent and motivate talent during the pandemic”
Questions & Recommendations
During the Q&A session, we touched on a range of key issues.
One attendee asked our expert panel whether they recruited for cultural fit or cultural add?
Tugce Bulut said that it is incredibly important to Streetbees to recruit people who fit their culture but also stressed the importance of hiring staff with diverse perspectives:
“There are certain values we adhere to that are not open to negotiation. Those are the values that make Streetbees successful… whereas there are lots of cultural components that get richer by adding more people to the team”
Juliet Rogan stressed that it is important for companies to have teams that reflect their diverse customer base.
Aimee Bateman agreed with Tugce and Juliet and touched briefly on the importance of also being aware of your own unconscious biases when hiring staff:
“The only thing that you have to have the same is that core value. Everything else needs to be different. There is not enough conservations happening around unconscious bias and I hope that changes”
Another attendee asked our speakers how they deal with imposter syndrome?
Aimee said that she followed someone's advice on dealing with imposter syndrome which was to give the imposter a name in order to stop overthinking:
“When you feel that moment, say thank you for caring and looking after me but I have got this. That is how I deal with it. Get out of my head and think of it as it’s own person”
Tugce said that is important to distance yourself from people who make you feel like a failure and stressed that failure is an important part of the journey to success:
“If anyone can do it so can you and if you can’t do it, you can still give it a shot”
Another attendee asked the panel about some of the challenges that they have faced with retaining talent while they scale
Tugce stressed the importance of trusting your employees and spoke about Streetbees KPI driven culture and how they constantly look to other companies to learn how to continue motivating their staff:
“In a startup, you are so motivated by your mission and so busy that you sometimes forget about ensuring that you create a motivational environment”
Aimee spoke about Careercake.com’s journey and the importance of introducing processes for employees along the way:
“I wanted to learn from people who have taken it from the kitchen table and exited and learnt from that process to tell me about what kind of processes I should put in place”
Juliet spoke about how she has enjoyed seeing how cultures develop within the startups that her team at Barclays deal with and how she has tried to emulate this within her own team:
“I think that is one of the major advantages that startups have have over large companies is that ability to drive culture through everything they are doing”
Eugenia spoke about some of the work that CBI do, including producing resources to help entrepreneurs attract & retain talent and stressed the important role that government plays in supporting this:
“The government has an important role to play in supporting businesses to scale up their activities”
Aimee touched on the importance of editing your people strategy to your business stage to ensure that you have the right people to support your business in its journey:
“When you come out of startup to scale up mode, you have to up your game and not everyone will want to do that”
We will be continuing the conversation on removing the barriers that female founders face starting and scaling their businesses in our upcoming webinars. You can find out more about the event schedule and sign up for the events here.