HR Tech Deals for Black Friday 2023
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Scaling the teams can be done regardless of their organizational structure. The key is in efficiency. The less growth-oriented the structure is, the overall effects will cost more and deliver less value added. So how to start building the team with growth in mind?
It is rare to start a company without a team - usually, it is the direct opposite. The group of people decides to run a business together, bringing the team before the establishment of the company.
With three arts of management mastered (or at least started as a path to perfection), the company needs to follow some general rules that will greatly influence the effectiveness and efficiency of both teams and project delivery frameworks.
This text covers:
Building a team can be compared to building a house or a block. The building is built using bricks, mortar, and steel.
And glass, yet the investor rarely asks about every brick or every glass panel. The number of chambers, functionality, and design is the true purpose and function of the building.
In Human Resources, the framework can be compared to the project, where the skills and roles are mapped, shown with interdependencies, and proven to support the company goal. Having a team without structure and framework to work with can be seen as trying to build the house when having all elements yet lacking the project.
Advantages of a framework
So what are the team building best practices one can use regardless of the team's goal or the company specifics? How to scale an organization effectively? Despite the intuitive response that "every company is different," there are best practices to follow.
Some companies see the work as a constant struggle between the employer, who wishes to drain the employee dry, and the employee, who looks at how to slack as much as possible. This is a clear leftover of the XIX-century management culture, unfitting for the modern workplace.
The key is trust. The employer should work with people who he or she trusts - be that regarding the quality or timely delivery of the work.
According to the Edelman Trust Barometer 2022 report, the situation is not that bad - 78% of employees claim to trust their employer, and 79% declare to trust their coworkers even more than managers, HR, and CEO.
Think about the way you control the team. With scaling it up - you will have to delegate the control and just let things go. Ask yourself questions as following:
What would make me trust my team more? What should I do to trust them and what sould they do to make me trust them?
The logical step forward with the team one trusts is to NOT control every aspect of the job to be done and delegate what can be delegated. Leaving the programming to the programmer, writing to the writer, and designing to the designer saves a lot of time and energy for the business owner and management team.
Decentralized teams have witnessed a spike in popularity due to the pandemic and the spike in popularity of remote teams. Yet there are good practices and a history of successful implementation of this principle. According to Sage Journals, there have been attempts to analyze this approach since 1986 - long before Zoom and Google Meet. And Google itself.
Review your time and answer two questions:
The answers to these questions are basically the information of the level of the job centralization. If the team asks too many questions, it may be either unskilled or trained to ask about everything to please the manager. If the manager asks too many questions, it may be the unwillingness of delegating the work.
What would convince me to pass the control over the part of the business? Do I know the cost of my lack of work decentralization, for example the excess time spent on management? If not - measure it using a time-tracking device and get the monthly cost of your OWN time spent on managing details. And later - decide, if you can afford it.
Gathering data and tracking the progress is necessary to build an effective company. Yet the challenge is doing this right. The ideation, planning, and tracking are full of pitfalls and assumptions one does even unknowingly.
The tasks are multiplying as the project grows - the bigger the project and the more complicated the workflow, the estimations, and assumptions get increasingly misleading. The tasks tend to multiply along the way, with the hidden challenges overtaking the previously chosen course. That, the art of setting deadlines gets even more important, with the necessity to include the unexpected task inflation rate.
Make a review of the metrics, goals, and measurements used in the company. There should be a solid database of past metrics and performance analysis. Having all that, ask yourself the following questions:
Talk to your team about the way they would measure their work and performance, They are closest to the work done, so they know what pushes the company further and what is only noise. Having the metrics and KPIs on one plate, start measuring them and after collecting a solid dataset - explore it. There may be dragons.
The structure is basically the abstract reflection of the company, with all unnecessary information cut. Its sole purpose is to define the relationship between every abstract entity in the company to support all processes and project delivery.
The holacracy framework takes this to the extreme, assigning roles to people and roles to circles that can be compared to departments. By that, the processes and structure of the company are people-agnostic, with much clear distinction between a particular employee and the set of his or her skills. There is no need for one employee to be assigned to one role or a single circle. Thus, the employee can be replaced or promoted, or the need for a particular skill (or role) can increase, yet the structure still delivers, and the key is to find a role-filler.
Holacracy is not a panacea for every business challenge, and there are multiple challenges coming with it, yet there are several good practices to follow, which clearly shows.
Check the structure of your company. Like not the people who are working for the company, but the structure. Roles, responsibilities and dependencies. Now, take the processes that the company is built around and check:
Take only processes and tasks. Dissect them into a flow of tasks. Now you have information about things done on-the-way. What role in the company should do the tasks? Not a PERSON but a ROLE or a POSITION.
Now you have it. It takes time and can be challenging, but it is worth doing for sure.
Assuming that all the points above have been implemented, the company has hard data gathered on the performance, required skills, internal connections, and workflows. Also, these are handled in a decentralized and distributed manner, effectively reducing.
By that, the management, using the data and the experience regarding the company's day-to-day operations, can spot the points where replicating a certain pattern brings the greatest advantages.
Without diving into a more detailed view, this may sound confusing. So to name a few examples:
The idea of replicable teams capable of delivering new features and working on a product in a repeatable way was emphasized as one of the key elements of Basecamp's ShapeUp approach.
The answers are in the mapped and replicable patterns of management, seen in the data the company gathers and the way it works. The problem is in the inability to reach out of the comfort zone and see the truth hidden in plain sight.
Take historical data from the company and analyze them for the connection between growth and the changes in the structure. The key questions are about the point where the existing team is not enough
Don’t feel intimidated. Every change is tough. The key is embracing it and getting ready. And that’s what you have been doing for last few weeks (assuming you followed this guide).
Team scalability is, in fact, nothing about the team itself. It is a frame and a background that enables people to reach stars and make their work easier to manage. Also, "managing" is not about telling someone how to do something but rather building the environment that makes him or her do the job in the best way possible.
With that, scaling a startup, the team and business is natural and smooth.
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