I’ve worked with early-stage companies for many years. An observation is that anyone can build something. Few people can build something that lasts.

Building something with longevity – a house, a relationship, a business – requires significant work and a solid foundation.

Having a solid foundation allows you to build higher. It helps you weather the inevitable storms.

When growing a business, especially a high-growth company, it’s essential to consider your people practices as part of your company’s foundation. Your people are your most important building blocks.

In reality, however, this is often overlooked until there’s a fire – performance issues, chaotic processes, or key talent leaving the team.  Don’t wait for the fire!

As a founder of a People first organisation, I know the value of investing in this work early. It helps to attract and retain top talent, set talent up to succeed, and ensure your People function operates efficiently.

Below I’ve compiled some foundational people practices I believe every leader should prioritize to help establish your foundation, which is integral to the success of your business. This is all about what we do at TripleDart internally!

Think like an operations function

Build processes, workflows, and self-serve resources – from new hire onboarding to internal documentation

It’s called People Operations for a reason. Building your People foundation requires you to think like an operator.

Companies that don’t focus on operations feel messy and reactive. They don’t invest in this work because they don’t see immediate value. But being reactive makes it hard to scale.

Instead, proactively focus on organization, automation, and repetition to serve your business and team.

This isn’t just about finding the latest AI tool (although that helps!) It’s about figuring out how something (a person, a project, etc.) gets from point A to point B with the least friction.

For your People foundation, this could look like:

• Templatize interview practices for each department.
• Detailed project plans for large initiatives (e.g. benefits renewal, performance review cycle) with each task, owner, due date, and resources linked in one central tracker. And you don’t need a project management tool. A collaborative Google Sheet works just fine.
• A repeatable new-hire onboarding process – email templates/schedule and onboarding checklist templates (one for the manager, one for the new hire, one for the internal team) that are standardized and replicated for each hire.
• A tight process around filing employee documents so you don’t scramble when you’re about to raise a round of funding.
• Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to document internal processes. When a new hire joins, they can onboard quickly and autonomously by reading documentation, freeing up the manager’s time.
• An employee Intranet (a Notion site, a Googe site – find something easy and affordable to build/manage). When new content is created, upload it to this central location for the team to self-serve answers to common questions.

Hire for character

Work ethic, resourcefulness, self-motivation, solution-orientation, and integrity are more indicative of potential than an impressive resume, an elite education, or fancy hard skills*

*Some roles require specific hard skills and functional expertise but don’t overlook character traits.

The most successful team members at early-stage companies – the builders who make an indisputable impact, are easy to work with, consistently show up as high performers, and generate followership – won’t always have traditionally “impressive” backgrounds. Some might, others might not.

Instead, character traits enable them to succeed.

• Hire someone resourceful – if they have limited experience or knowledge, they know how to teach themselves and find the answers instead of complaining or delivering subpar work.
• Hire someone internally motivated to do their best work because they fiercely protect their reputation – they want the deliverables they’re responsible for to be of the highest quality.
• Hire someone ethical who treats others with respect and can navigate disagreements tactfully.
• Hire someone comfortable flexing above and below their pay grade.

These are the people you bring on throughout the duration of your business, but are especially important early on. They set the tone. They model behavior for those who come later. They lead successful teams. And they help the business grow.

However, these traits can be more difficult to uncover. A few tips:

• Create an interview rubric and include the above character traits as competencies to assess. Each panelist must document feedback on those competencies. It grounds the panelists in the competencies instead of making a gut emotional reaction, which can be influenced by bias.
• Assess for humility. Ask candidates about a recent mistake (in or out of work) and what they learned from the experience
• Ask about something they’ve built. It can be anything. Was it something quick and easy? Or was it something they worked on over a long period without giving up? Did they have to teach themselves skills along the way?

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Hire people managers who have management & leadership competencies

Even with limited experience managing teams, they should have the competencies to be successful

In early-stage companies, some managers struggle to lead due to a lack of experience or the absence of necessary skills. Perhaps they were an early hire who took on direct reports due to their tenure. Or leaders needed to hire quickly and didn’t assess for management competencies.

Your people managers have the biggest impact on the overall happiness of your employees. According to a HR survey of one million workers, 75% of those who voluntarily quit did so because of their managers and not the position, pay, or the company itself.

Don’t ignore this. Assess for people managers who:

• Are secure in themselves and self-aware. There’s no jealousy, insecurity, or ego threatening the growth of their team. They publicly recognize great work. And they hire people who are better than them at certain tasks or smarter than them in certain areas because they know (and are comfortable admitting) their gaps.
• Set goals, direct work, and delegate effectively. And when they do so, they communicate those expectations clearly.
• Hold people accountable while making them feel exceptionally supported. They are deeply motivated to see their team succeed and create a safe space for feedback.
• Respectfully push back on others to protect their team’s time, reputation, etc.

This helps someone establish trust, the most foundational element of a successful manager-to-direct report relationship.

If hiring a people manager, at least one reference must be from a former direct report. If they don’t have people management experience, dig in during interviews about collaboration. Or ask about a time they had to show up as a leader outside the workplace.

In the future, you should invest in manager programming. But that’s not always the first foundational investment. Instead, hire people who have these competencies and hold them accountable by documenting your expectations in something like a Manager Playbook.

Ruthlessly prioritize your resources

It’s ok to say no to cultural “bells & whistles” while building your People foundation

Early on, you’ll have team members request benefits, tools, and programs for which you don’t have the resources (financial or time). This can look like a wellness stipend, a mentorship program, or a nice-to-have productivity tool.

These are wonderful cultural elements and resources that enhance the employee experience. But focusing on this before other foundational practices are in place is a mistake.

The analogy I always use: Imagine you’re walking into a new house. The house is framed, the electrical work is in progress, and the plumbing is partially complete. But there’s dust all over the floors. The walls aren’t insulated. The sinks are missing. At this point, you might dream of the artwork you’ll hang, the rugs you’ll roll out, and the music system you’ll install. But if you prioritize that over plumbing, you’ll have an unpleasant experience living there and/or will have to move out!

Building an internal culture is similar.

These special features might make an employee think highly of the culture momentarily, “My company has a wellness stipend! My company has fun social events!” But it’s fleeting. It won’t retain your star performers who need more than that. Building a thoughtful onboarding program, creating an equitable compensation philosophy, or establishing a consistent promotion process will.

Create a leveling framework early on

Having a simple universal framework can be one of your most valuable foundational elements

Leveling is the process of assigning roles to numerical levels (e.g. 1-8) and outlining general expectations around how work gets done by level (e.g. how someone approaches solving problems, how their work impacts the company, etc.).

Having a simple universal framework (a framework that can apply to most teams) can be one of your most valuable foundational elements. At a later stage, you can build a department-specific framework or a manager vs. individual contributor matrix. But you don’t need that for your foundation.

Having a framework ensures you’re setting expectations and evaluating employees consistently by level across teams. A Sr. Manager on one team isn’t held to a different set of standards than a Sr. Manager on another team.

It helps employees know what’s expected, it helps managers navigate development and growth conversations, it helps inform promotions/performance reviews, and it gives you a framework for associated compensation bands.

If you don’t have this, you’ll build up organizational debt that needs to be cleaned later. People could be incorrectly leveled – a Director can be hired who is less experienced than a Manager. Someone could be paid incorrectly because levels weren’t tied to comp bands. And that cleaning isn’t fun!

Having a simple, universal framework will help you hire the right people, set expectations, develop your team, and reward fairly.

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Invest in performance management

Define a philosophy, establish a process, select a tool, and carve out time for the work

For the business, this ensures your team is continuously improving to meet company objectives. For the team, it helps you retain your highest performers (e.g. maps growth paths, rewards hard work), helps your developing performers progress forward, and creates immediate action plans for your underperformers.

This work will always take an investment of time – there’s no way around it. But don’t overcomplicate things. Some tips early on:

→ Combine your look-back and look-forward. For an annual or bi-annual performance cycle, create a self-review and manager-review form with a few short questions: accomplishments over the prior period, demonstrated strengths relevant to the role (reference job descriptions or department competencies if you have those), personal development opportunities relevant to the role, and a few role-specific goals for the next 6 months. That’s it.

• If you choose to run an annual cycle instead of a bi-annual, schedule a mid-year touch point for managers and direct reports to align on/revise goals and hold feedback conversations.

→ Tie merit cycles to your performance cycles. This ensures performance informs merit increases. Some early companies provide ad-hoc salary adjustments because it seems easier. But this leads to inequities – with no solid rationale, one person might get a raise because they threaten to leave. Another because a manager pushes hard. That’s not why people should make more money.

• In the Manager review, include a question that asks the manager to assess performance over the prior review period. Use a 3, 4, or 5-point scale (e.g. not meeting expectations through always exceeding expectations), create a short description for each group (and managers should leverage job descriptions/leveling frameworks to determine ratings), and then assign each group an annual % increase in salary.
• Each % increase can be a range (e.g. 3-5%) to account for other factors, such as someone already being very high in a compensation band.
• The manager’s performance assessment should not be based solely on business goals. Sometimes goals are not met due to factors outside of someone’s control. Other times, goals are met but the individual has other performance issues to consider (e.g. lack of professionalism, misalignment with values). There’s more to performance than business goals.
• At a small size, have a few leaders review these ratings before they’re locked to ensure people are assessed fairly. At a larger size, have the specific department leader handle calibration.

→ Utilize a tool. While this might not seem foundational these tools are designed to simplify the process of performance reviews and compensation cycles via standard templates and automation. It will take more time and feel messy without a tool. 

Design an intentional All Hands meeting

Use the meeting to inform, educate, recognize, and connect

All Hands – your standing company-wide meeting – is a foundational People practice, especially in a remote environment.

This recurring meeting should provide value to your team by sharing key business updates, helping the team learn something new, recognizing wins/great work publicly, connecting in a fun way, hearing from leaders, answering questions, and keeping your company’s mission/values top-of-mind.

Your All Hands should have a consistent, repeatable format, with similar content blocks, but the content should shift. For instance, have a different team present at each meeting.

I do not recommend running this meeting every week because it’s difficult to produce a valuable virtual “event” weekly. And that’s what a well-produced All Hands is – an event.

Run it every 4 weeks. Build the agenda a month or so out and put someone in charge of producing the event, ensuring slides or notion pages are built, speakers are prepped, tech is set up, and everything runs smoothly.

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Hope you like this post. 👋 I’m Shiyam. I support companies and leaders as they build their Marketing People foundation. I can help you solve current challenges and/or plan proactively for the future.. I would love to connect.

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