Investing in employees can become quite costly for expanding companies and with economic resources not as freely available to all, the option of saving a little extra buck by not recruiting further can provide a great quick fix.
Though this may appear appealing in the short term, it is important to recognise when it is time to take the chance and invest in your team and take that extra leap to success.
The 4 signs that are telling you it’s time to grow your team are…
1. Burning out staff is burning your cash
Tightening the purse strings when it comes to hiring is only ever going to be a short-term solution to staffing problems. It may appear cost-effective to save on a salary or two but after taking into consideration overtime fees, missed contracts and scheduling gaps, this can actually result in an even bigger loss for the company.
Along with this loss of profit, the loss of the overworked employees can leave you with wasted training investment fees and even more money down the drain as you spend your time and money attempting to replace the burnout staff.
2. Employee fatigue is setting in
Overworking is the most commonly-noted stress in the workplace and, whilst every job has its own stresses and challenges, 21st Century businesses are putting more value on the principle of looking after their staff.
The old adage of “Too much work, too little time” will probably always ring true to a certain extent, however there’s a lot to be said for good management that can identify when the line between working hard and overworking is being crossed.
An even workload shared across a talented team should allow staff to stay happy and healthy and steer clear of any burnout situations that could result in them being spread too thin and lead them to look for new opportunities elsewhere.
3. You have an upside-down organisational structure
One of the clearest signs that you need an extra pair of hands is a situation where you have high-level (and highly paid) members of your team who are spending too much of their day (or evenings) covering work that they should be delegating.
Whilst it’s noble to spend most evenings getting hands dirty with entry-level work, it’s not scalable, it’s stunting your company’s growth and it’s not productive to have a £50,000 member of staff in place of a £15,000 member of staff.
Two hours doing data entry could be two hours spent training a junior on how to do data entry, and before you know it you’ll have a team doing the same task for more clients, meaning more profit.
4. Customer service surveys show a downward trend
The final and probably clearest sign that you need to expand a workforce is when the service to clients and customer slips – and you always find out about this one the hard way.
There is nothing worse than receiving poor customer service and with word of mouth referrals being a lucrative source of future work for many companies, it is vital that this is in tip-top condition twenty-four seven.
Systems such as client surveys or reporting procedures to gauge how customers feel about a service are common-place and often flag these issues up, so if the satisfaction numbers appear to be dipping it’s usually a sign that additional help is required.
