lean-startup, employees, entrepreneurshipWhat are the available scenarios and steps that could be taken towards that?
According to the dictionary, being loyal means to be:
unswerving in allegiance: as
a : faithful in allegiance to one's lawful sovereign or government
b : faithful to a private person to whom fidelity is due
c : faithful to a cause, ideal, custom, institution, or product
I assume "a" and "b" do not apply in your situation, which leaves you with "c". As long as you choose people who fully subscribe to, and believe in your "cause, ideal, custom, institution, or product" they will remain loyal.
However, I have a feeling that under loyalty here you mean working long hours with little pay and not starting their own business based on your ideas or selling them to a potential competitor. If that is the case, I don't think there really is much you can do to enforce their loyalty, if you can say that.
Legally enforcing an NDA is probably prohibitively expensive for a startup (that cannot pay much to its employees). Non-compete clauses are largely unenforceable. Ideas cannot be effectively protected, as has been mentioned on this site.
In other words, lacking a patent or similar protection, your best bet seems to be working on "c" from the definition above, understanding that loyalty (in the "c" sense) is a two-way street: you cannot expect people to be loyal to you, your product or company without them seeing that you are loyal to them.
You might also try looking at it from a reverse perspective: if you were an employee, what would you want the employer to do to deserve your loyalty?
If by loyalty you mean: having people who don't leave after 2 months to work for a competitor or people who don't steal your idea then you can do 1 of 2 things, or both:
Make sure they are bound to be "loyal".
This means that you enter into a contractual agreement with them, make them sign an NDA and a 'non compete' if it's necessarry. See this post.
Prepared for events like this.
People will leave for various reasons sooner or later, let that be retirement or a better job offer, you can't do anything about it. The best thing that you can do is to ensure that you are ready in case that happens and have processes set up to handle these scenarios.
What I'm talking about is to have a resignation policy. The best one you can have is to help employees to the best of your abilities to transition from the current job to the next even if they quit the first day on the job.
Also you can try to be a good leader and have an excellent hiring culture. This way you'd worry about this less.
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