We’re an early-stage startup. It’s too early for People Ops, right?

Okay, I’m biased. I work in the field. But I wouldn’t be in the field if I didn’t know we could do better. Here’s a quick primer on how.

Avoid “people debt:” Project maturity & confidence

Believe your company will survive beyond your runway. Plan for it.

It’s easy to put blinders up and lean all your energy into the existential reality of your bank balance— pushing out raise or growth conversations, ignoring signs of low morale or tension between teams (hoping “it’ll get better when we get funding”), and beating the drum of growth-at-all-costs.

But think this mindset through: best-case scenario, you get your funding and live to see another day. What happens when you burned out your staff to get there? (Burnout is bad, and a company problem — not a personal one.) You likely already anticipated hypergrowth once you got funding. Now, you may also have to replace key players, or withstand disengagement and reduced productivity from them while (if) they recover.

That’s people debt (or org debt, as Jennifer Kim calls it), and it’s a lot to take on that your pitch deck probably didn’t account for — in other words, it’s more expensive than technical debt.

Let’s look at the worst-case scenario: funding fails. Your runway ends and you have to dramatically cut staff or close entirely. Your now-former staff will find greener pastures, relying on recommendations from each other and/or you. But what happens in those job interviews? How prepared will they be for their next roles? How will your reputation, either as an employer or personally as a founder be reflected in the stories they tell about that chaotic time?

That may not matter in every case, but as Maya Angelou (or Carl Buehner depending who you ask), “People will forget what you’ve said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Eventually that will come around to impact future opportunities of all kinds.

Talk to your people about the impact of their work

I won’t ask you to give people raises when runway is dwindling. But avoiding the conversation entirely doesn’t diminish an employee’s human needs for reward and acknowledgement of their value to the company. Compensation is important, of course, but only one way to fulfill those needs.

The exact prescription will be unique to your environment, but no matter how, each employee should regularly know where they stand in leadership’s eyes (how they’re doing against company values and goals, what they need to do to excel even further, and a conversation about their future goals/how to help them get there).

How do you know how the team’s doing or if they know where they stand with you?

Ask! Make a point to collect feedback. Report back so employees see the impact and value of giving it. When you’re just a handful of employees, all of this might be pretty casual. But at the teens or above, start building for your growth with a lightweight, regular, (quasi) anonymous feedback flywheel. Sometimes that looks like weekly 1:1s, or quarterly reviews, surveys, a combination or something else entirely.

Worth noting: most people do expect raises, equity grants or bonuses after a year of good work (sooner for extraordinary work). But if the timing of your fundraise/runway will make it tougher to increase compensation than to recruit prospective replacements, be honest. Show them why you have to wait, and promise to do a full comp review across the board once you get that next round (within 3–5 months, ideally).

Your funding stage is no excuse

There’s a prevailing notion that organizational maturity aligns with funding stage. Many founders dismiss opportunities for growth “before they need it,” believing they can’t justify it until they get to the next stage. I disagree.

There are plenty of examples where these are mismatched: from public companies taking shots of liquor at their desks to celebrate milestone team achievements, to seed stage startups building robust feedback and review frameworks to ensure above-average retention and prepare for growth, to a series B company without a stable product-market fit who hadn’t yet hired a single people-related person.

Rather, an organization’s maturity — what it gets wrong, what it gets right, and everything in between — reflects the decisions and priorities leaders make along the way. Sure, funding often supports those decisions and that’s why we see a correlation between the two. But don’t mistake that for causation.

Treating your People org like the Product org

Leaders place expensive bets on product pivots, feature experiments, redefining quarterly goals, etc without blinking an eye. Yet decisions that impact the people executing that work often wait for the right organizational size, maturity or an urgent problem demanding an immediate reaction.

It seems common to “set and forget” some of the legally-compliant or talent-competitive HR bits so leaders can back to the product, but how much more effective could your organization be in the rest of the business if leaders treated the people function like a product function, starting with 5–10 people? Experiment. Engage. Communicate. Analyze the data. I promise this will be cheaper in the long run.

Here are the most common objections to suggestions I’ve made to clients or employers:

• “We’re not big enough to justify designing a standardized interview process; we just need to make the hires.”
• “We’re too early-stage to have regular 1:1s; we just have a meeting whenever we need to.”
• [US-specific] “We’re too small to get a good healthcare plan/pay for people’s healthcare premiums.”

I get the primary business-minded motivations for these objections — a fear of getting stuck in red tape, and a fear of spending too lavishly before you get a positive revenue stream to pay for it.

But each of these decisions have potentially worse (though common) consequences:

• Not having a thoughtful (or any) interview process tends to lead to more bad hires than good ones, which can be especially disastrous in a small company.
• Skipping regular 1:1s means you only have them when you “need” to: usually when someone’s leaving or performing poorly (either of which could be a bad surprise at a bad time that could’ve been corrected before it was too late, or known and anticipated).
• Choosing the legal minimum healthcare coverage attracts talent that doesn’t care about healthcare (who are typically either young and healthy, or experienced but privileged talent who can make up for your shortcomings elsewhere). That’s an unnecessarily limited candidate pool, and makes hiring for senior talent or underrepresented minorities even harder. And if you’re offering a good plan but can’t afford to pay even part of the premiums, I’m betting you’re not paying enough in salary, either.

Change is easier with a smaller team, anyway

In addition to making your teams more effective, a people org can ultimately help build and shape your culture — which is, as Lars Schmidt defines in Redefining HR, “the manifestation of values and habits and a million small things done millions of times,” — by guiding manageable changes toward a roadmap that avoids common startup pitfalls or addresses them before they become full-scale disasters.

Things like culture, or processes “the way we’ve always done it” only get harder to course-correct the larger the company gets. Proactively building and maintaining the people function as you evolve and grow saves a lot of painful change management down the road.

Wrapping up

I want to be clear, I’m not suggesting focusing on your people at the expense of your business.

But I am suggesting a mindset giving the people org equal consideration as the rest of the business pays dividends. Now, these might not be obvious. Unlike reaching a growth milestone or revenue goal, you might never notice or be able to properly appreciate the absence of certain problems as an achievement.

Like a good stage manager, one of your only proofs of a people leader’s skills is making disasters look like setbacks (…there’s a case to be made here for that not always being a good thing, especially when it comes to risk management and bad behavior, but I’ll save that for another time).

But in general, people teams spend most of their time proactively ensuring disasters don’t happen in the first place — anticipating needs, spotting and addressing small flags before they become a bigger problem, building for scale, and all the invisible little human things that make teams tick and individuals feel safe and welcome to do their best work.

So, sure — you may not think you need our help yet. But we’ll have a rocky start keeping the ship moving smoothly if you wait until you do.

About me: I used to be a technical recruiter and the first intern program manager at Yelp. Then I was a career coach, then a talent manager at Triplebyte helping software engineers get jobs.

Over my 12+ years in the tech industry, it’s become clear to me that many of our industry’s problems are human in nature. Automation won’t solve that, but earlier intervention can.

Today, I consult with companies to strategically optimize their internal processes (hiring, onboarding, offboarding, etc) and build or improve performance management and other employee engagement programs.

I’m based in San Francisco, slowly improving my home office, and a sucker for public transit, tasty cheese, fun facts and cat pictures. I’m on Twitter @keeterooni and LinkedIn. My website is here.