FAST Growth - WorkBuzz.com...FAST Growth Five Cultural Challenges and How to Overcome Them 1 Introduction Congratulations on working in a fast growth company, it is an exciting time,

FAST Growth | Five Cultural Challenges and How to Overcome Them 1

FAST GrowthFive Cultural Challenges and How to Overcome Them

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FAST Growth | Five Cultural Challenges and How to Overcome Them

Contents

Introduction

The 5 Fast Growth Challenges:

1. Avoiding Wrong Hires

2. Making Onboarding Awesome

3. Breaking Down Communication Barriers

4. Developing a Structure To Help The Business Grow

5. Keeping Employees Engaged

About WorkBuzz

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IntroductionCongratulations on working in a fast growth company, it is an exciting time, full of opportunity! As you will have realised, your HR role comes with a wealth of options to develop the business, challenges to embrace and choices to be made to drive employee and business growth.

Organisations succeed, ultimately, only through

and because of their people. When in a fast growth

environment, it is up to you to create, shape and support

the conditions, environments, opportunities and culture to

help people succeed. As your headcount increases rapidly,

it’s easy for your culture and values to become diluted.

You’ll also need standardised, formal HR processes to

provide cohesion. It’s a busy time! At the forefront of your

mind is scalability and how the business can create the

roles, structures and synergies to support fast growth

over the short, medium and long-term roll out of the

organisation’s vision.

In short, an organisation’s culture can be supportive

of – or hinder the implementation of new initiatives

and the achievement of its overall goals.

Culture is important because it shapes:

• What the organisation considers to be the “right” decisions.

• What employees consider to be appropriate behaviours and how they interact with each other within the organisation, as well as external stakeholders.

• The speed and efficiency with which things get done.

• The organisation’s capacity for and receptiveness to change.

Culture eats Strategy for breakfast

“ “

Peter Drucker


Defining Your CultureYou’ve already been working on shaping the culture, which in a larger organisation can be elusive, broad, deep and varied. Culture is often implied, not expressly defined, and develops organically over time from the cumulative traits of the people the company hires.

What past events people talk about inside and outside the organisation - success or failures.

Who and what are heroes/heroines?

Pockets of real power & influence over decisions, operations, direction. This can include social power.

Internal control system relating to e.g. finance, performance quality and rewards/salaries.

Organisational ‘semiotics’ including, logos, how grand the offices are, plus

formal or informal dress codes.

Behaviour and rules that signal importance. So what’s supposed to

happen in given situations and what’s valued by management.

This includes the formal organisational structure, and relationships that dictate whose contributions are most valued.

Your organisation’s culture is played-out in every interaction. If you want to develop it, you have to spot the signs of what’s working and what isn’t.

Strong cultures live by a set of values. The sort that people believe in, get feedback on and feel inspired by… every day.

Johnson and Scholes Cultural Web

Stories

PowerStructures

OrganisationalStructures

CultureSymbols

Rituals andRoutines

Controls

Think about your organisation’s “cultural web” as best summarised by Johnson and Scholes:


Fast growth = cultural challenges

Fast growth brings challenges for maintaining your culture, which can erode what made your organisation successful in the very first place. The good news is you can mitigate these if you’re conscious of them as you grow. The next section provides a useful roadmap for avoiding these bumps in the road.


The 5 Fast Growth Challenges

With fast growth comes pressure from the business to increase headcount, quickly, increasing the risks of making wrong hiring decisions. The costs of making a wrong hire aren’t just limited to advertising or agency fees. A recent CIPD study in the UK and Australia reported that costs of poor hiring at a manager level were between 110% and 137% of annual salary, after you factor in money wasted on induction, training, and the manager and the team’s time in helping the employee to settle. Lost productivity, interviewing and administrative time and rehiring costs also stack up.

Source: CIPD, The People Bulletin, UK, Chandler Macleod, Barrett, Australia.

Spending time on the right things at the hiring stage will mean saving money. Ben Peterson of Bamboo

HR says “Replacing talent runs as high as two times annual salary, and it’s not just about dollars. Culture

and job satisfaction is hugely impacted, as well as morale, productivity, lost insider knowledge. It’s painful

to lose people.”

Making wrong hires can also dilute your culture as new employees fail to embrace your vision and

values. They feel like a square peg in a round hole, undermining their contribution and engagement.

Recruiting to high standard of cultural fit protects your culture and ensures that employees flourish

not flounder.

Challenge 1 Avoiding Wrong Hires


Hiring For Cultural Fit

Getting The Right People On The Bus

Cultural fit is the ability of an employee to comfortably work in an environment that is congruent with

their own beliefs, values, and needs. The challenge for employers is to identify and hire employees who

fit their work culture. The second challenge for employers is to consciously shape a work culture that

will ensure the success of the organisation. The employees hired must be trusted to help with this fine

balance.

Being serious about hiring for cultural fit means preparing to dissect what is great about your company,

and also the barriers potential candidates can face. At Kellogg Management Services in the UK, for

example, these factors are known as organisational fit facets, that explore an employee’s desire and

motivation to work with different leadership styles developed by the organisation, location, autonomy,

teamwork and the K Values. Questions are both direct and likes and dislikes explored to work out the

potential fit for the organisation and for the individual.

Using an analogy from the work of Jim Collins (www.jimcollins.com), you have to get the right people on

the bus and secondly, you have to get the right people in the right seats, not just for today, but for your

workplace of tomorrow.

You must be rigorous in your selection process for getting new people on the bus. Finding employees

who have the same core beliefs, motivation, and the same mindset as your long-standing colleagues is a

difficult task. When in doubt, don’t hire, even if talent is scarce. Diluting the current talent pool will add to

the costs of poor recruitment and cause issues in the future. .

Checklist

Be clear about why the role is important for your business.

Understand what exceptional performance means in this role, and good, and under-performance before hiring.

Sell your employer brand in your advertising. Put video testimonials on your website about what it’s like to work there. Real ones! And, the benefits/opportunities of working to a company experiencing fast-growth.

Be rigorous in your selection process. Decide what activities will simulate the role in addition to the interview.


As you’ll be aware, onboarding is a longer process than the induction, taking up to a year, with the primary aim to help new employees become a part of the organisation, build crucial relationships, understand their role and learn how they add value.

On that basis, how different organisations handle the induction and socialisation of their new hires

directly affects the success of new hires, engagement and talent retention. Onboarding is the best way

to align new employees with expectations and organisational culture. An effective onboarding program

can increase retention by 25% and new hire productivity by 54%, according to The Aberdeen Group. The

key to effective employee onboarding is to individualise this process, but many companies don’t and that

can be costly.

One study by HR Zone determined that UK and US businesses lose an estimated £23 billion each year,

primarily because of a lack of effective onboarding.

Source: www.hrzone.com

Onboarding is linked to, and in some ways, starts with the employer brand that you create to attract

people who are the right fit for your company’s vision and culture. If your efforts at induction and

beyond don’t stack up with the brand you want to create, then it isn’t surprising that employees feel

disconnected.

Challenge 2 Making Onboarding Awesome

Some figures to bear in mind from the study:

40% of executives who change jobs or get promoted fail in the first 18 months.

16% of employees who leave on their own choosing did so within 12 months.

49 percent of millennials agree that they would like a better onboarding process for new hires.

More than half of voluntary turnover happens within a year of new hires’ start dates.


Source: Abderdeen Group, 2014

Checklist

Review your induction process – what works or hinders your employees in their first few months?

How could you improve the employee experience?

Get feedback from new employees on the recruitment process and their initial experience working at your organisation.

Ensure senior leaders play a small but impactful part of the induction and onboarding process.

Build in values workshops as part of the onboarding process.

of organisations communicate their core values to new employees? But...

of companies have sought onboarding programs in order to better engage new hires and acclimate them to their company culture? In turn,

of businesses believe that employees make their decisions to stay within their first year of employment?

more likely to provide new hires with peer networking opportunities / events to help them acclimate

more likely to introduce new hires to go-to people within the company

32%58%

90%

23%2.2X

Did you know that only:

as compared to All Others.

However, Best-in-Class companiesare taking action, and they are:


During times of fast growth, new employees add vital support to the business. It’s also a time when communication can break down through a lack of planning and siloed working can begin to set in. Over-communication or inconsistent communication can also add to issues.

Structured communication is a systematic process for vital company-wide information delivered in a

way that informs, influences, and sticks with your audience. Your internal and external communication

strategy will help employees learn about the company and its customers, to empower your people as

ambassadors, provide them with the info they need to do their jobs, break down silos, and to make

them feel part of something. It’s intentional and formal - not part of the informal grapevine. Mapping

your communications will clarify the objectives of each type of communication so even though

information may overlap, the message for each audience is well-defined and ensures people know what

is going on through the right channels.

The intranet is a trusted communication channel and newsletter-style emails condense company

information in easy digestible chunks. Collaboration and organisation apps and systems such as Slack,

Trello and Yammer help to build an online community where conversations, projects and issues have

visibility. Discussions and clarifications are held in a central place and can be referenced when needed.

Alongside digital communications, face-to-face lunchtime talks by the leadership teams, Q&A sessions,

and briefings about changes are also vital. These initiatives will help employees share the same frame of

reference and build trust.

Challenge 3 Breaking Down Communication Barriers

Checklist

Be better aligned as the company grows by working in a more connected way.

Eliminate silos in the senior teams.

Work out how effective you are at balancing digital communication and face-to-face communication based on your needs.

Use the output to create a way of working as a senior team to improve communication, and help employees feel engaged.

Evaluate whether platforms like Slack, Yammer and Workplace by Facebook can help you improve communication.


When you grow, you’ll become aware of the things that hold your organisation back: the scarcities (things employees consistently find in short supply) and constraints (things that consistently slow them down). You can build in processes and systems to support fast growth when you re-design and build for the future. It helps if you can see the organisation as a whole, and to identify how each element of your system needs to be aligned to create the right ways of working. You may decide that a flatter, informal structure is more beneficial than a hierarchical, formal structure, or vice versa.

In today’s lightning fast world, organisations re-structure in shorter and shorter timescales to keep

their competitive advantage. As job titles come and go during fast growth, focus upon individuals

contributing… making a difference and serving internal and external stakeholders better than the

competition, irrespective of their job title. They can do so, based on adding value and being good at what

they do.

Also, be particularly mindful of the processes that may be under stress and may lack scalability.

Processes do not grow organically. Reviews of decision-making protocols, and building cross-company

improvement groups to link and evolve processes will help with the surge of complexity as growth

occurs.

Challenge 4Developing a Structure To Help The Business Grow in The Right Way

Checklist

Cultural change requires system thinking. As your organisation is a living system, recognise how a change may create consequences somewhere else.

Develop projections for how growth will impact your systems and people.

Create broad job bands so individuals aren’t forced to seek promotion to move up the salary band.

Develop a view of what your organisational structure will look like in 2-3 years’ time and work backwards.


Challenge 5Keeping Employees Engaged

Engaged employees outperform their disengaged colleagues, go the extra mile for the customer and are 87% less likely to leave the organisation (Corporate Leadership Council, 2004). That said, the UK has an employee engagement deficit – only 1 in 3 employees are engaged and productivity is 15% lower than the average of its EU competitors (Office for Budget Responsibility, 2018).

As organisations grow, they mature, with new processes, systems and structures. Some employees

will yearn for the “good old days” of talking to the CEO, having visibility of plans, being involved in idea

generation at the inception of a new product or offering. Fast growth is bound to change how the old

relationships worked.

Emphasise the benefits of growth and remind people of the progress you’re making towards your vision

and the contribution they’re making. When creating new roles, find the right balance between hiring

externally and promoting internal talent. As departments grow, enable team members to specialise and

delegate growth assignments.

Help your CEO ensure they are visible and approachable. Look for opportunities for them to reinforce your

vision and to engage in face-to-face townhalls and talkbacks. Giving employees the opportunities to directly

ask any questions they have or to clarify any parts of your company strategy will help foster trust.

Measure and monitor your culture

As organisations grow, most introduce an employee engagement survey to get objective feedback

from their people. By benchmarking their feedback against similar types of companies, they can better

understand their strengths and pinpoint areas for improvement. This is a key step in their maturity,

switching from making opinion, to data-driven people decisions.

In your employee survey, ask staff if they would continue working at your organisation if they had another

job opportunity. If they would leave, prompt them for the reasons why. Use this insight to identify your

biggest talent risks and take action before your best talent walks out the door.

In the past, most organisations relied on an annual employee engagement survey, but these only provided

a snapshot of their culture, at a given point in time. Today, most companies are embracing regular pulse

surveys, often run quarterly with a smaller number of questions. These enable you to better track your

culture, the on-boarding experience and identify any emerging issues, such as a new toxic manager.

http://www.workbuzz.com


Quarterly pulse surveys enable us to get timely feedback on new initiatives. We are now able to track our culture and identify any emerging issues faster. As a result our managers are better informed and empowered to be better leaders through regular bite-size feedback from their teams.

“

“

Tracey Winson, Head of HR, Agrovista

Checklist

Make the most of growth – celebrate progress towards your vision and promote internal talent.

Introduce an employee engagement survey to objectively measure your culture.

Identify any talents risks – groups of people or certain departments where a significant proportion of people are considering leaving.


About WorkBuzzHundreds of organisations use WorkBuzz to gather regular, bite-sized feedback from their people and improve their cultures.

Built for people, by people

Less admin, more action

Ask the right questions at the right time with traditional annual or regular pulse surveys. Our employee engagement experts are on hand to help you craft questions, interpret results and drive positive change.

Designed with simplicity in mind, fully mobile and tablet optimised. Get all your feedback and analysis within minutes of your surveys closing.

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Get to the heart of what matters

Drive lasting change

Segment results by demographic, seniority, location and more to truly understand what makes people tick. Benchmark against your sector and track your progress.

Pinpoint what factors drive engagement the most in your organisation, helping managers to prioritise and become better leaders. Get access to a host of best practice resources, designed to help boost employee engagement and drive positive cultural change.


Having moved from an annual survey with a

large well known provider I’ve been really impressed with the agility, flexibility and pace of WorkBuzz.

WorkBuzz have been so supportive and flexible

in helping us get our first survey set up. Our Exec

team were delighted with how quickly we received the

feedback and how simple and user-friendly the tool is.

The team at WorkBuzz have been first-class. We are

delighted with the outcome of the survey, the format it is presented in and how we can identify areas that can make us even better as an

employer.

“ “ “

Di GwinnellHR Director, SACO, The

Serviced Apartments Company

Richard ChattenSenior Business Development

Manager, TaxAssist Accountants

Rated 9.3 /10 by HR Professionals

Helen GrayHead of HR Royal

Pharmaceutical Society

Organisations with 25 - 10,000 employees choose WorkBuzz, including:


Arrange your free demowww.workbuzz.comor call our team on+44 (0) 3333 446 530

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Documents

FAST Growth - WorkBuzz.com...FAST Growth Five Cultural Challenges and How to Overcome Them 1 Introduction Congratulations on working in a fast growth company, it is an exciting time,