Take a look around your office right now and ask yourself – is everyone happy? You may think so. People may be working hard, putting in long hours, and cranking through project after project to get your new startup company launched.

You may feel like you’ve got the entire team energized and ready to go at the office. But the real question is – are you winning the war at home?

Startup company managers need to realize that attracting and retaining key talent isn’t just about peppy sales talks and big pitches. It’s about fighting the war for talent on two fronts – in the office, and especially at home.

People don’t think of startups like regular jobs. At regular jobs you think about whether you’ll get a 10% raise and a good review. At startups you wonder whether the risk, time, and (usually) lower pay are worth the benefit of a substantially bigger payout someday.

For this reason it’s worth thinking about the world of your employees through the eyes of their friends, spouses and families. Is their job still as exciting as you thought it was?

Spousal Support

Whether you realize it or not, more than 50% of the decision to stay at your startup lies with the spouse at home. Happy spouses equal happy employees. If you think about it, you’ve really got to keep two people happy at all times.

The decision to join your startup probably wasn’t made by the big pitch you gave in your interview. It was made by the big pitch your employee gave to their spouse later that evening.

As you can imagine, their pitch probably didn’t include the long hours and endless stress you’re undoubtedly enduring. Instead, it likely focused on the potential for a big payout someday that could change their lives forever. If that pitch isn’t holding up at work any longer, you can imagine it’s probably not holding up at home either, which is a problem.

Comparison to Friends

Even if a spouse isn’t in the picture, you can bet the employee’s friends are. When an employee is buried in work at a startup, it often becomes the first topic of conversation among friends. At the very least, it’s because they are explaining why they’ve been so absent lately!

If you’ve ever listened to someone describe how things are going at work, you can usually tell within the first 15 seconds whether they are thinking about leaving the company. Excited employees will brag about their accomplishments. Disinterested employees will only complain about their struggles.

It only gets worse if the employees’ friends are enjoying more free time and making more money at the same time.

Your employees want to brag about what they are doing and create envy amongst their friends. There’s no reason your startup company shouldn’t give them that opportunity, as long as they feel confident that the big dream you’ve sold them is alive and well. Even employees that are missing time with their dearest friends will be proud to say they were at least building something great instead.

Think about the Children

If your employees have kids, you can add yet another group to the list of people you need to keep happy. Every minute that your staff stays in the office is a minute that they are not spending with their children, and those minutes cost a lot emotionally.

Those late nights when your employees don’t get to put their kids to bed and every long trip that guarantees missed baseball games and piano recitals puts them one step closer to the door. No one ever feels like they’ve spent enough time with their children, and when a job pulls them away even more, it’s a powerful breaking point.

When your employee gets off the plane from yet another business development trip and sees their kid waiting for them, the only thing running through their mind is “was this worth it?” When they walk into the office tomorrow, if there isn’t some justification for the time they’ve lost, they’ll be spending their time updating their resume, not working harder.

You can’t Win ‘em All

Lets’ face it – you can’t make everyone happy all of the time. Any job is going to put a certain amount of stress on employees lives and relationships. The difference here is that people in startups tend to think of startups as dreams waiting to be fulfilled, not just a regular job.

When the dream starts to fade, people often go along with it. That’s why as the Manager of a startup company, the only way to keep people excited is to keep the dream alive. Remind them why they risked what they did to start with you in the first place.

Attracting and retaining talent is about fighting the battle on all fronts. Your ammunition is the motivation and desire to build something big. If you don’t give your team the ammunition to stay, you’ve already lost the war.