7 Key HR Challenges for Growing Enterprises in Tough Times
Human resources, more often than not, takes a backseat as the business begins to grow. This negligence could stem from changed priorities, tilting towards product development or even marketing. As businesses grow, productivity becomes critical for success and a highly efficient workforce becomes a dire need. This can, however, suffer immutably due to one or more factors. Long working hours, skewed work-life balance, low bandwidth account for such challenges which can impede the growth of an enterprise.
Let’s explore some of these challenges and how they can be overcome with reasonable solutions.
– Sustaining company culture
Where a start-up is in the process of building a culture, enterprises have a legacy running. From rapid growth to a dynamic environment, it is onerous to carry forward a company’s culture focused on achieving the vision. As the business grows, its strategies, structure, and internal processes grow with it. With constantly shifting priorities, it can be a daunting task to keep employees focused, engaged, and aligned with the larger business goals.
Solution
Building and maintaining a company culture starts with defining the business values. Morphing these values into observable behaviors and reinforcing them through repeated applications can help define your enterprise’s culture. Once established, it can go on as a self-sustaining pattern of behaviors that defines how things are done in the organization.
– People data management
It is relatively easier to maintain employee data on an excel sheet when businesses are just starting out and there is a low employee count. It can however become a challenge as startups grow and more people join them. Streamlining administrative processes becomes critical during high growth phases to bring down the time taken to carry out simple HR processes. Without such processes, more employees are going to add to administrative costs and a major chunk of turnover can be directed towards their management.
Solution
Automation is the utilization of technology at its best. It can outsource repetitive tasks to machines and allow your employees to focus on creative and meaningful work. A good HRMS like ZingHR can bring down administrative burden significantly and eliminate a majority of HR challenges. It can help streamline tasks, policies, and procedures in the organization and help sustain organizational growth.
– Crystal clear organization policy
The initial phases of start-up development are least focused on policies and strategies for the future. But as growth happens, and they transcend into a phase of rapid advancement, HR challenges can pop-up. More often than not, enterprises resort to quick fixes rather than brooding over and implementing a long-term solution.
Solution
Organization policies are critical for smooth workflows and even more so for a growing enterprise. HR challenges may become impossible to tackle if such policies are not there from the start and can be an arduous task to introduce them once growth picks up. For this reason, investing time and energy to chart out policies can help detect potential risks, eliminate them with well-trained employees.
– Integrated HR team and system
PwC HR Technology’s Survey says that 58% of businesses use HR technology to find, attract and retain talent. A dedicated HR team is not on the priority list for most startups owing to financial constraints and their need to limit their expenses. But as growth picks up, organizations need to hire new talent, ensure their retention and create processes for their training and productivity management. In the absence of a dedicated HR team, administrative processes can suffer a great deal and take away the significant time of the founders and employees into managing and streamlining such processes.
Solution
A qualified team of HR professionals can work dedicatedly to streamline such processes and help sustain the company’s talent and culture. It can bring down the administrative burden from the manager’s shoulders and create a culture of welfare with promptly responding and retaining employees.
– Performance and productivity management
“What can’t be measured can’t be improved” is the mantra that can apply to enterprises dealing with HR challenges. Productivity monitoring keeps employees engaged apart from evaluating their performances. A top-down authoritarian type of evaluation can hardly boost people’s morale and might exert undue pressure on them. This can in turn, slump the growth of the enterprise, rather than driving it ahead.
Solution
A lack of transparency can breed a culture of mistrust in the organization. The most effective way to tackle this is by creating engaging and transparent performance standards. Rather than working on the overground, OKR and KPIs can be set to establish a feedback system and eliminate performance blockers as the enterprise grows. This can prevent the challenges from snowballing into an irredeemable scenario.
– Employee training and development
Start-ups are a great way to learn from practical first-hand experience. Such on-the-job learnings, however, lack a systematic employee development program. Such learning can benefit both employees and the enterprise but can block the entry of top-talent into the organization. Mostly because along with learning people want to carve a good career path too.
Solution
If you wish to attract a talented workforce, you would have to invest in employee training and development programs. Giving people some semblance about their career can keep them motivated too. Trained managers can effectively guide, mentor and assist other employees and create a culture of learning and growth. It can keep both personal and professional goals in balance and lead the organization towards growth.
– Employee engagement
89% of workers believe it’s important to always network for future opportunities. Employees are the ultimate wealth of an organization and their motivation is critical to breaking barriers for growth. Most often, when an organization grows, people can become disengaged and demotivated, which can prove to be a poison to productivity. This can lead to dissatisfied customers and poor work culture.
Solution
The way out of this productivity slump is to understand the employee pulse. Analytics can help understand workplace sentiment and kill productivity bottlenecks. The data can be utilized to establish a culture pivoted around communication and engagement. Frequent exchanges between employees and executives can strengthen organizational goals and make leadership support more accessible.
Wrap up
The success of any organization stems from the people, both employees, and customers. Challenges are bound to present themselves, any time an organization is witnessing growth but an efficient HR system can tackle these challenges in a more mature manner.
Do not wait for things to go haywire before streamlining administrative processes and HR strategies. Take a leap into building an engaging work culture by investing in people and people-centric technologies.