The #1 Challenge of Scaling Up – Staffing

How to Grow a Productive Team

Whether you are growing your business by 20% or 200% over the next 12 months, there are many challenges to achieving and sustaining that next level of success. What is most likely to cause you to hit a sour note? Staffing.

Finding the right people to hire is challenging. Do they have the right skills? Will they fit within your culture? Will they embrace your company’s vision? How quickly will they get up to speed?

It is that last question that is most likely to undermine success. Hiring the wrong person for the job is always costly in terms of time and money. However, 80% of the time you get it right. And still, for growing companies, growth targets will be missed when new employees:

• Make too many mistakes that impact quality/customer service.
• Require too much handholding for too long, which slows productivity and burns out seasoned employees.
• Leave the job after a few months due to frustration – undermining your ability to increase capacity.

The good news? Each of these risks can be reduced with good business process documentation and Smart Growth strategies.

Three Key Touchpoints when Staffing for Scale Up

Onboarding – The Basics
When a new employee begins work, she or he does not need to know all the twists, turns and exceptions that can happen in operations. Too often, someone explaining the job will throw in too many details or say, “I do it differently than everyone else. Follow my example. It’s better.”

To get up to speed quickly, your new employee needs a clear picture of the workflow (a.k.a. process map) and simple step-by-step instructions to execute the tasks, not conflicting instructions from different employees. Get your new people grounded in how work “should be” done using a single documented standard. Your standard of excellence. A process map ensures consistency and helps them get up to speed faster.

Sharing Wisdom
Once your new employee transitions from the “crawl” phase to the “walk” phase, she will begin to deal with exceptions, nuances and special cases. Having a coach or mentor is still valuable, but that business wisdom should also be an accessible, documented asset.

Orion’s clients have supplemented the basic how-to elements of process documentation with notes, recordings and videos that further explain key tasks or branch points that may lead you astray. Sage advice from the “old salts” can be recorded and appended to a particular process step. (This is the essence of knowledge management.) If your company does fieldwork, it can also enhance safety if you have a video of how to, for instance, attach a 10,000-volt cable when you are atop a pole, 30 miles from the office.

This point in the journey is when a good hire may become someone with one eye on the door. If frustration builds every time a special case goes awry, he can feel set up for failure. On the other hand, it can also be because the new hire wants the training wheels to come off, but no one has the time or the assets to help him make that jump in productivity.

Decision-Making Clarity
When a company is in its earlier stages, there is less work specialization and most activities occur within line of sight. It is easy to confer with a colleague or get approval for a big decision. As companies scale, decision-making gets more complex. Who approves what? When does a frontline employee escalate an issue? When do you need to consult a specialist? How and when should issues be communicated to other stakeholders?

An excellent process documentation tool to assist at this stage of organizational growth is the RACI diagram. RACI stands for:

• Responsible – Person who performs the task or activity.
• Accountable – Person who must approve the outcome and/or will be liable if performance does not meet standards. (One person can be Responsible and Accountable.)
• Consulted – Subject matter experts whose advice or counsel may be needed.
• Informed – People who must be kept up to date on progress or problems. This can include supervisors, downstream colleagues or customers.

There are several variations/alternatives to your classic RACI diagram (RASCI, RACI+F, CAIRO, DACI, RAPID and DARE). There is no magic to any particular acronym or format. Use whichever words and format will be easiest for your team members to understand.

Smart growth isn’t just about hiring more people, it’s about making sure they succeed once they’re in the door. Process documentation is the key to helping your team work smarter, not harder.

–Paul King

Related article: Six Opportunities to Look for During Process Documentation.

“Should Be”

Process analysts and IT professionals talk of the “as is” versus the “to be” process. At Orion, we looked at two possible versions of “to be.” The more exciting version is “could be.” This is the new design enabled by innovation, reengineering, AI or a new IT system. Achieving “could be” can take a lot of time and cost a lot of money. (The results had better be a dramatic improvement!) For most processes, you can get significant improvement by achieving the “should be” state.

What is “should be?” That is what you are process workflow looks like when it is executed to its business intent without unnecessary variation, inspections, and exceptions. Call it lean. Call it working smarter. Call it process efficiency. It is how work should be done. In public sector applications, Orion has found that we can eliminate 50% of process steps, thereby achieving a high-quality outcome more quickly and at lower cost.

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