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Are employees so important that they can become indispensable in your business? The short answer is, no employee should ought to never be so essential that it could cripple your business if they had to leave. It presumably lies with the same idea as, no human ought to have absolute power. In plain English, it means that if someone was given the chance to “be in a position of bargaining power” they would.

A worker gets indispensable when “you require them more than they need the job”. This happens often in smaller businesses in light of the fact that you have not yet developed an employee base where job responsibilities are spread around more workers. This happened to my first business when I started a logistics business. We had a dispatch manager who was accountable for arranging the deliveries and dealing with our 22 dispatch team. She was extremely good in her work and handled the daily routines very well. Since she was in a position that was vital to the daily operations of the business, we had to constantly put up with her complaints and fancies. For example, she would complain that her wage was too low for the amount of stress she had to bear. Or that her job title was not fancy enough. The fact was, she was well paid and her title was better than any job she had previously. Since we knew that the business operations would be chaotic if she should leave, we put up with her nonsense for a long time.

Your startup may sometimes come into situations like this if you had any factors stated below:

• A programming company where you are not the lead software engineer.
• A pastry shop where you only have one baker and you do not know how to bake.
• A restaurant where you are not the culinary specialist (this is very common).
• An auto shop where you have 1 mechanic.
• A business where it is operationally overwhelming (ie a messenger business, assembling), and you depend on an employee to deal with the day by day runs, while you go out to meet potential new clients.

* To sum it up, you can get into such a business situation when you are now knowledgeable in the core compentency of the business or if certain parts of operations is critical the smooth running of the business. I understand that startup jobs and employment issues can’t all be perfect, but at least you can mitigate some of the difficulties Technology jobs.

Here’s some ways you could protect yourself and organize in such a way to avoid such a situation:

• Where possible, train yourself in the key areas of business before starting up.
• If the first is not possible, get the key employee to train you instead. ie get a chef to write down the recipes and teach you. This is good contingency practice should the chef go on sick leave. You cannot afford a restaurant to close for days.
• In the event that the business is able to, hire another staff to understudy the key employee.
• Build up sales quickly to a point where you can afford the cost of 2 key employees.