For startup founders, managing growth is a huge challenge. To promote healthy, sustainable growth, it’s crucial to develop an agile hiring strategy from the earliest stages of operation. Business owners and leaders must manage staff and employees to ensure that the business remains on top.
As your business grows, so too does your team, and with it the challenges of managing a larger workforce. To efficiently scale your team, you need to know why you’re scaling in the first place. Are you looking to increase capacity, or do you want people with new expertise? Once you figure it out, finding candidates is easy.
Your initial hires can be crucial. People value diversity in perspectives, experiences, backgrounds, and thinking styles. When you hire new people, look for these differences since the right combination of viewpoints can make your company stronger.
Rapid growth can bring a unique set of challenges to any company, and there’s no single, perfect way to manage it. Hopefully, these tips can help you figure out what works best for your business.
Establish Your Company Culture
Company culture is the personality of your organization. You must reflect on who you are as a company to figure out what your culture should be. Before you grow, remember to define your company culture. This will come in handy when times get difficult, and your values need to be put into practice.
Create a culture of gratitude and recognition since it helps your company to build accountability, trust, and boost productivity. Rewarding team members for a job well done is an important part of building a successful business. Not only does it boost productivity and performance, but it also encourages your workers to take more pride in their jobs and works to build trust and loyalty.
Maintain Strong Communication
Usually, it’s no big deal to keep the lines of communication open with your small core team. But keeping up tone with a larger group can be tricky. Checking in regularly is key to keeping the whole group aligned.
The more time you spend with your employees, the easier it will be to develop a more personal relationship with them. They must know you’re approachable and willing to help.
Prepare for Conflict and Differences
As team members get to know each other, misunderstandings and conflicts are bound to emerge. Studies reveal a clash between personalities causes disharmony. You may be surprised to find out that many teams experience a “storming” phase during the initial stages of team formation. This is quite normal, and before long, most teams will settle into a more harmonious state of affairs.
The idea of how an effective team performs was first identified in 1965 by Bruce Tuckman. Tuckman identified four distinct phases of team development: forming, storming, norming, and performing.
At the beginning of a new team, individuals will be unsure how to work with their colleagues or what is expected of them, which is the forming stage.
In the storming stage, you will have conflict which will arise from differences in team members’ ideas, working styles, and personalities. It’s a good idea to create a structure for conflict that minimizes tension and doesn’t anger or frustrate team members. This will help keep the discussion focused on the problem rather than blaming people.
You’ll start to notice a change as your team moves from the storming stage into the norming phase. Since know one another better — their work strategy, personalities — your team members will feel more at ease to ask for help and offer constructive feedback. They’ll share a stronger commitment to the team’s goals, and they work towards it.
And with the final stage, your team is performing to their full potential since they have a flow. They now have a structured process that will make them achieve more goals.
Provide Clear Processes
When you start to branch out and become a bigger business, it’s hard to keep track of all the activities your company participates in. You want everyone in your firm to know what you expect from them and how they should carry out their day-to-day duties.
To make sure you can stay in touch with all employees and provide strategies for doing their jobs well, write down the processes that will be essential for your operation. These processes include information that everyday workers will find helpful, such as identifying and organizing your employees’ duties and responsibilities. Create a centralized resource for storing and sharing those processes. Give your employees the tools they need to get started.
For example, you can install an RFP response software, let’s say an RFP for website development agencies and services, which can help your admins assign tasks the moment you receive a request for proposals, and help your team members communicate and validate responses in one place.
Embrace Change
As you expand your business, you might note some changes, and it will be hard to keep up with them. But that’s fine! Don’t fear change; embrace it. If you can do that, you create growth opportunities.
You can take on new challenges. You also now have a larger team of talented people who work diligently to improve your company and are more successful than ever before. Take risks, learn from your failures, and always look for ways to improve yourself and your employees.
In the end, there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to business scaling. What works for one firm with a small workforce might be inapplicable to a larger company. Scaling a business is a challenge, and taking your company from successes will require understanding and preparedness for the obstacles you’ll face.
