Scale Your Team, Scale Your Culture

Any growing organization has one need in common regardless of your industry: people. As you scale, you need more people resources. It's no secret that finding and keeping top talent is one of the more challenging aspects of running an organization. So how do you scale quickly and keep yourself resourced appropriately with high quality team members?

If you want to cross the chasm, you have to prepare

Organizational Design

Firstly, you have to be pre-planning your org structure to scale effectively. We will save this important topic for a future blog. But if you don't have good visibility into your scaled org structure, you're going to be making it up as you go which will create enormous inefficiencies that can lead to lay-offs, poor deployment of payroll and more.

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Invest in Developing Your People

Relatively speaking the cheapest, fastest, and most effective way to scale your people resources is to take the time, energy, and yes money to develop your existing people. Research suggests that replacing or hiring a new employee can cost 10%-30% of that position's salary. So if the salary is $100k, the actual cost of hiring and training for the position can be $10k-$30k! Embedded in those figures are recruiting costs, training and onboarding costs, and productivity loss.

However, if you plan to invest 2%-5% of your payroll into educating, career pathing, and developing your team members you'll be far better off. You will retain good people, be prepared to quickly scale with talented staff that have historical context, and at a fraction of the cost.

1 - Teach your managers how to do good career pathing with their staff. First off, managers should be meeting with each of their employees one-on-one at least once every two weeks, ideally once a week. Part of this should include discussing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities for growth, and learning objectives.

2 - Identify your needs and develop training for them. What functions & capabilities do you need to scale or will you need in the future? Social media management? B2B sales expertise? Facility Management? Good org design planning will identify these needs. Once you have, develop or find outside training resources to build these future needs as strengths for your organization.

3 - Do good compensation planning. The fact is, people go to work for (among other things) money. If you're not paying people competitively within your market, and not investing in their growth or showing them a reasonable path to increase their personal income, you will struggle to retain top talent.

Of note, all of this is an awful lot easier to do if your organization is invested in a high quality human resources department. Research has shown that one of the top reasons people stay with an organization is opportunities to learn and grow. If your organization is not committing the appropriate resources to professional development, there's a good chance you might end up chasing your tail with recruiting, employee churn, and an inability to scale quickly.

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In summary: Innovation is all about acceleration, you need to be able to scale quickly. In order to do this, you have to be doing pro-active org planning and investing in your people. Rise Above has tools, templates, and experience to help unpack it all with no BS.

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