What are some employees incentives that proved great long term results in your company? What are the ones that backfired?

It IS about hiring. And that comes from the attitude of the leadership. If you have lazy workers, have a look at the hiring leaders. You can easily adapt methodologies like SCRUM or SREDIM to your situation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_%28software_development%29 Instead of project manager, the team members can assign roles--advocacy roles--to themselves.

Backwards. I'd make sure that person didn't stay in the company. "One dirty fish muddies the whole pond" It's not personal or malicious - they're just not the right fit. A great skill set, while very important is always secondary to cultural fit if you really want your company to flourish.

There's many ways to help with this, here's what I do at Clarity 1. Build an email relationship with your supply. They should have direct access to you, and you should build an ongoing drip campaign that teaches them how to improve their experience (and make more money) on Clarity. 2. For members, you should define community guidelines (Do's & Dont's) and ensure they all review / agree to them - and enforce them proactively. 3. Create a discussion forum (we use LinkedIn group) but you could use VanillaForum.com or similar, and invite members/experts to join to ask questions about your marketplace. 4. Feature experts & members that have had success or are exhibiting the types of behaviours you want from other members. We do that here: http://clarity.fm/customers Those are the big things ... smaller items would be the copyrighting, design and data you show on profiles to help increase the right behaviour (ex: Search with filter by Last Active, tells experts to be active). Hope that helps.

Your Team will have a direct impact on whether or not you will succeed as a business. I know exactly how hard it can be, especially when peoples lives are in your hands. Even more so if you outsource, outsourcing might seem cheap by our standards but that money goes a long way overseas, so usually one employee is paying for their entire family back home in their village. But you as a boss have a responsibility to all your staff, each one of them relies on you and a poor employee that lets the team down, is letting the company down and putting every at risk. Selecting your team is one of the most important parts of any startup You have not only invested your money, but your time and your life. If someone has getting in the way of that, and you have given them every opportunity to improve. You cant feel bad, you need to remove them and rehire. When you have the right person you will know. A motivated and hardworking employee will work for the business and not for their pay check.

The answer lies in creating an aspirational culture, or a culture of opportunity. Organizations owe their employees pathways for recognition and upward mobility, with inbuilt mechanisms for mentorship and skill augmentation. In a sense, organizations promote their brand to a customer and employees alike -" this is what we stand for, this is who we are, trust us, we will take care of you!" McJobs being devoid of these qualities are then high turnover, whereas the Starbucks job is a pathway to learning customer service and management skills under middle class values. But yes, creating this ethos takes enormous concerted effort! Complicating matters are trends of talent poaching and paypacket competition between industry rivals (this affects mid level and up more). Great question - happy to help you create a strategy of belonging!