Culture
7
min read
“So often the problem is in the system, not in the people. If you put good people in bad systems, you get bad results.” — Stephen Covey, Author and keynote speaker
Working in a fast growing organization, you must have seen your top priorities skewed towards world-class product development followed by out-of-the box marketing; which pushes human resource issues at the back seat. However, as you embark on your growth journey, having a high-performing workforce driven by purpose becomes non-negotiable.
While it may sound like a piece of cake, it is not. Building the right culture and people practices in fast growing organizations is fraught with challenges. Today HR challenges in fast growing companies are often driven by millennial workforce expectations, low bandwidth, long working hours, poor work-life balance, and engagement issues coupled with tight budgets. These people-issues if not handled on time could negatively impact your organization’s culture, employee well-being, and eventually hamper business growth.
In this article we will explore the top 10 HR challenges that you might be facing or are likely to face and ways to overcome them.
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1. Recruitment Challenges
Problem
If you have been managing the people practices for a fast growing organization for a long time, you would understand the need to recruit high-performing talent during the hyper growth stage to drive high performance and rapid output. Consequently, the first major challenge you are likely to face is identifying roles and determining the candidate’s fitness in the company. Failure to ensure an employee-organization fit often leads to resource wastage due to repeated onboarding, replacing, and recruiting.
Solution
To circumvent this challenge, you can start by identifying specific human resource requirements for successful hiring. You can seamlessly attract the right job seekers (under a tight budget) by exhibiting the company culture, quality, and growth potential to the candidates and inspire them to join. Stress on USPs like autonomy and flexibility to make your organization an obvious choice for candidates.
2. Building & maintaining a company culture
Problem
If you have established a market presence and visibility, building a company culture to improve and stabilize your rapid growth is critical. In a dynamic environment with constantly changing priorities, you may find it challenging to build a culture that keeps employees engaged and focused towards the greater company vision.
Solution
Start by defining core company values to mitigate this challenge. Then break those values into 3-4 behaviors that people can observe. Reinforce these behaviors again and again until they become the norm. To know more about building a great culture, read this.
3. Lack of systems for administrative processes
“Most bosses know instinctively that their power depends more on employee’s compliance than on threats or sanctions”, Fernanda Bartolome (Management professor and author)
Problem
It may be easy to manage 50 employee data — from contact details to quarterly performance review — on an Excel sheet, but the same is not true when you have 200 employees or more. During high growth, the lack of streamlined administrative processes can be a major challenge, especially as it increases the time required for completion of simple HR processes.
Solution
There’s no better solution for repetitive tasks than automating tasks with technology if you want to effectively deal with administrative challenges. A great HRMS will reduce the administrative burden exponentially, smoothening the HR process and eliminating the majority of the HR challenges. You can leverage a predefined system to streamline the tasks, policies, and procedures for the whole organization. Focus on identifying and implementing an HR Technology that is fool-proof, futuristic, and reliable.
4. Creating fool-proof organizational policies
Problems
You must have come across a low level of importance given to setting up and implementing futuristic policies and strategies in the initial stages of development for your organization. However, as you encounter high growth and enter into the transitional stage of advancement, you are likely to face several operational HR challenges pushing you to find quick fixes instead of a long-term solution.
Solution
The best solution to avoid such challenges is to adopt a policy mindset when your organization is young. This involves implementing organizational policies like timing, breaks, indiscrimination, equality, diversity, non-harassment, gender equality, etc. Focusing on them once you have gained ground, will be difficult and they are likely to add to the HR challenges. Invest time and energy to create a fool-proof draft and then identify the risk possibilities, eliminate unrealistic points, and train and educate your employees for compliance.
5. Not having a dedicated HR team
Problem
Fast growing organizations do not often employ a dedicated HR team due to its financial constraints to avoid the additional indirect expenses. While there might be a few resources to support the HR operations, you may not meet the total requirement. However, while scaling up or during the stages of high-growth, you will face the recurring need for hiring new people, onboarding joinees, retention, training, and several other processes along with having a standardized performance management system. The lack of a dedicated HR team might become a big roadblock in effective functioning. .
Solution
You must focus on convincing your executive leadership to have a qualified team of HR professionals to work dedicatedly for the welfare, growth, and development of the company’s talent and culture. It will help you deepen your efforts towards employee engagement and experience and create a happy workforce.
6. Monitoring Productivity
Problem
Monitoring productivity is crucial not only for performance evaluation and bonuses, but also for keeping employees engaged and measuring the overall organizational progress. In a fast-growing company, the drive for high-performance often leads to undue performance pressure and lack of work-life balance without systematic guidelines and workflows. However, here you would face a challenge in achieving the dual goal of tracking and monitoring productivity continuously without affecting employee morale and losing employee trust.
Solution
You must adopt a continuous performance management approach for monitoring productivity. Start with performance tracking by creating transparent performance expectations and standards. Set OKR, use KPIs, and implement continuous feedback systems to understand the performance blockers as your company reaches new heights. This helps stop the negative snowball effect.
7. Retaining and rewarding performing employees
Problem
If you want to drive hypergrowth, you need to drive high performance. To drive high performance, you need to recognize and reward your employees for their effort. Also, to retain your high performing employees for the long-haul, as a growing organization, you need to provide them growth and development opportunities. With 25% of millennials looking to switch jobs after the pandemic, retaining key employees is going to be more challenging for fast growing companies.
Solution
Quick fixes do not boost employee morale. Neither do financial incentives once a year. To drive continuous performance through regular reward structure, you need to create a structured process to reward the employees on time and motivate them to do better. Use technology to guide your managers to conduct regular 1:1 check ins to encourage them, build a recognition policy, and continuously check employee pulse to understand the sentiment of your workforce is a great way to minimize attrition.
8. Aligning employees to a common goal
Problems
One of the biggest HR challenges that you might be facing would revolve around aligning employees towards a common goal, i.e., the company’s vision. In a high growth situation, especially when your team size is growing, it is normal for employees to lose sight of the larger goal.
Solution
One of the top ways you can experiment with to align individual employee strengths, day-to-day tasks, with business goals is to set clear Objectives and Key Resources (OKR). Create an OKR performance framework and set KPIs against their roles. Let the employees set personal goals with the organizational objectives in mind and let the organization relate the company objectives with the personal goals of the employees. Also, mentor them, guide them, and drive them towards success and satisfaction.
9. Employee training & development
Problem
In the growth stage, you might lack structured development programs. However, the importance of learning and development programs cannot be understated. They are great for on-the-job learning due to their autonomy, flexibility, and scope of role they provide. When 59% of millennials consider training and development opportunities before applying for a new job, as a scale-up, if you want to attract top talent, you need to provide them not just a job, but a career path.
Solution
To mitigate this challenge, you need to iInvest in employee development. There’s no way around that. Focus on training your managers to offer guidance, mentoring, and assistance to employees. This opportunity to develop and train under competent leadership will help employees align their career and personal goals towards your organization’s growth and success.
10. High employee engagement and maintenance costs
Problem
Lastly, as you scale up you cannot afford to lose momentum due to disengaged employees. It not only leads to an unproductive workforce and high turnover costs, but also quick attrition, poor company culture, and dissatisfied customers.
Solution
This HR challenge can be solved by leveraging employee pulse and analytics to better understand workplace sentiment and real performance blockers. You can further use the data to implement frequent communication, strength-based goal alignment, leadership support, and building a culture that drives engagement.
As your organization embarks on the growth journey, your people will be your biggest asset and the best way to facilitate success is to have a a highly efficient HR system.
This involves investing in your employees and their well-being as you scale. Use people analytics to know your people. Don’t wait for catastrophes to occur to create full-proof organizational policies and HR strategies. Leverage technology to automate as many processes as you can. Build a work culture that attracts the right talent whenever you need it. The bottom line is that you need to preempt HR risks before they surface to create a high performance culture.
Suggested reading:
HR challenges in remote companies
Challenges of working from home for employers
Book a demo today and see your managers grow in 2022, resulting in organizational and team success.
