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Growing Fast? Here’s What Not to Do
Earlier this week, S2Verify co-founder, chief strategy officer, and former Secret Service agent, Arnette Heintze, sat down with Belinda Waggoner, president and founder of People People, to discuss the ways in which HR can help companies supercharge their growth.
Heintze (who has personal experience scaling a company with S2Verify) and Waggoner covered a ton of best practices for ways in which HR can help companies survive through phases of fast-paced business growth.
Today, however, we’re covering what not to do. When it comes to human capital management, here’s what to avoid when you’re growing quickly to ensure the success of both the organization and the employees that help it grow.
Don’t Cut Hiring Corners
When a company is growing quickly, the workload grows too. However, going on a hiring spree—with limited structure or resistance—to support these new functions can be risky for a scaling company. Often, recruiters and HR professionals will skip certain steps of the hiring process (like the background check or an interview) to get people in the door, increasing the risk of making a bad hire—which can be an expensive mistake.
Rapid growth demands a workforce that’s not only skilled, but also adaptable, resilient, and aligned with the company’s culture and values. The only way to screen for those hard and soft skills is through a thorough, rigorous, structured hiring process—without cutting corners. Plus, during growth phases, each employee’s impact is magnified (there are fewer people doing more work), meaning it’s critical to ensure that every hire will move the company in the right direction.
Don’t Skip Onboarding
With employees taking on more responsibility, turnover is a real threat to growth, making retention a top priority. While it can be tempting to breeze past onboarding (it’s a notoriously difficult and time-consuming program to put together), 69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years if they experience a great onboarding process, meaning it should be a priority for HR–not something to cut–when the organization is scaling.
Plus, organizations with structured onboarding saw a 60% year-over-year improvement in revenue. Great onboarding is not only great for retention but also for the bottom line during a time when every dollar counts.
Don’t Do It Alone
As the company grows, so do HR’s responsibilities. Now, there are more people to recruit, more onboarding to conduct, more payroll to administer, more employee data to collect and store, more compliance considerations, more compensation planning to be done—the list goes on.
Thankfully, there are tons of tools and services out there designed to help HR professionals better manage their daily, seasonal, and annual tasks—and to help them plan for the future with advanced data and analytics. From payroll tools to background check services, HR leaders should make sure they have the right tech stack lined up to take on the growth and changes ahead.
Don’t Ignore the Data
On that note, HR stores critical company data around employees in their ATS (Applicant Tracking System), HRIS (Human Resource Information System), and whatever other tech tools they use to manage their people. HR professionals shouldn’t let that data go to waste; it can tell valuable stories about productivity, engagement, recruiting, turnover, retention, learning and development, DEI, and so much more (the key inputs to successful growth).
Employee analytics helps employers assess the organization’s overall health as it relates to the employee experience and then take action on that info to improve critical business outcomes. Today, more than 70% of companies use employee analytics to improve their performance, according to a Deloitte report, and 65% of those who work in an organization with a prominent people analytics culture said their companies perform better than their competition.
Don’t Forget Your Values
Company values are the foundation upon which businesses are built. They provide a common language for employees to speak to one another and offer a moral blueprint to guide decision-making—especially when things change rapidly.
During times of growth, HR professionals should find more ways to bring company values into the conversation to combat growing pains, putting them in onboarding materials and company decks, hanging them in the office, encouraging managers to bring them up in meetings, and more. Helping employees connect to their purpose and the values that attracted them to the organization in the first place can provide them with a kind of “north star” that guides them through difficult times—and makes them more likely to stick around.
Don’t Ignore Mental Health
Today, we know that workplace stress and burnout have very real negative implications for retention, productivity, and engagement. Last year, 70% of the C-suite considered quitting to find a job that better supported their well-being. Worldwide, 615 million suffer from work-related depression and anxiety, and according to a recent WHO study, it costs the global workforce an estimated $1 trillion in lost productivity each year.
With all the new and numerous demands employees face at a growing company, employees need to know how to take care of themselves. During periods of growth, HR should treat mental health management like a skill, providing employees with training and resources that teach them how to prioritize their own well-being, maintain energy, and tap into resilience.
For more HR do’s and don’ts during company growth, check out this week’s episode of America Back to Work with Belinda Waggoner, president and founder of People People.
Waggoner is a seasoned HR executive passionate about shaping workplace cultures that drive organizational success. With a diverse background spanning startups to established corporations, she has honed her expertise in strategic HR leadership. She fosters inclusive workplaces and leverages innovative HR strategies to empower teams for sustained success.
Waggoner is typically called in when an organization is a couple of years old, has a handful of employees, and one of the first things they have to do is “undo” their HR policies because they’re often not compliant or set up to scale.