Good news: you made strategic investments in your sales and marketing capabilities. They are working, and business is great!
Bad news: this increased growth is putting tremendous pressure on your operational and administrative teams.
Solution: you need an HR business partner, not a compliance guru. Not someone with an HR title with a skillset that is administrative but not strategic. This is when you need someone affiliated with your organization who understands the dynamics of organizational change.
There are some key things to consider.
1. When you are growing quickly you have the option of hiring experienced people away from competitors.
They may bring those competitors’ cultures with them, and aspects of those cultures may clash with the culture you are trying to build. When you add several of these folks at one time, it can impact your culture and frustrate your long-time employees. Perhaps you have an unwritten policy about not hiring people from certain competitors for that very reason. This can be unwise, too, as there may be some potentially good people working at those companies who dislike those competitors’ cultures and work practices as much as you do.
An HR business partner, like the Davidson Group, can help you assess each candidate on his or her own merits and not on a stereotype that might be attached to them due to where they worked previously. And they can help you design on-boarding processes that increase the likelihood that they will become accepted into the organization and engaged in their new role.
2. You are tempted to promote people into supervisory roles who may not be well-suited for those roles.
The best individual contributor is NOT always the best supervisor. This decision made quickly can cause all kinds of problems down the road. How can you know if that individual contributor has what it takes to become a supervisor or manager? How do you determine what skills matter at that next level?
Your HR business partner can help you assess what you have in the organization and what you need.
3. Your basic workflows may become strained during this rapid ramp-up phase.
This includes how workers report their hours, their completed work and request time-off. Those processes may have worked just fine when you were 30% smaller but now bottlenecks are occurring, and details are getting missed.
A HR business partner with strong business acumen can help design and roll-out systems that make the entire organization more efficient.
If your organization is not large enough to support a full-time HR professional, then a fractional HR partner is the answer. You can get all the expertise your bigger competitors have, just when you need it and at a level you can afford.
Contact the Davidson Group to learn about the benefits of our fractional HR program.
