6 Tips to Help You Manage a Growing Team

With a growing company comes a growing team. As you scale your operations to meet demand, you invest more in tools, automation, and a bigger team. The bigger your team is, the bigger your company’s capacity. More tasks are done, more projects are overseen, and more goals are accomplished quicker.

However, with a growing team also comes the growing potential for chaos. Think of it as a house of cards⁠—the more cards you add, the taller and grander it gets. But the chances of it crumbling also increases as more cards are stacked. With that said, policies need to be implemented for you to reap the benefits of a bigger team.

Here are six tips to help you manage a growing team.

1. Establish a strong company culture

Nothing keeps you motivated like a strong workplace culture. Do you know that sudden desire you feel to be productive when you see others working hard?

A productive company culture fosters healthy productivity among your workforce. It also ensures that your employees treat each other with the utmost respect. This culture of productivity and mutual respect should be fostered at every stage of the worker’s life cycle, from their hiring process to the day they leave the organization.

Here are some measures you can take to promote a robust and productive company culture.

• Set reasonable goals and expectations for your team.
• Keep your staff aligned with your company’s mission.
• Enforce anti-discrimination policies in the workplace.
• Pay employees fairly and equally regardless of race or gender.
• Challenge your employees to bring out the best in them.
• Use shift planning software to plot working schedules and off-days equitably.

Regardless of your position in the company, promoting your company culture is your responsibility. If your team members feel their potential is being tapped and management respects their needs, a collaborative work culture will flourish in your workforce.

2. Maintain clear lines of communication

Whether you’re a physical on-site office or working with a remote team, open communication between the company’s workforce is essential in growing a collaborative team. You wouldn’t want your team members to work in silos. Instead, you want them to let each other know when they need help and be ready to offer help when needed.

Source: The Verge

Here’s what you can do to create clear lines of communication.

• Use a dedicated messaging platform and video conferencing software for your remote teams.
• Conduct weekly on-site or remote meetings to discuss progress and achievements.
• Encourage comments and discussions from other members of the team. Give the others a chance to voice their opinions and concerns.

Through communication, you can set expectations and create a healthy company culture within your growing team. It also helps your team members learn from each other and grow as a team and individually.

3. Establish clear processes

Imagine you’re driving a car to a destination. You wouldn’t want your team constantly whining, “are we there yet?” unaware of where they are. Instead, you need to give your team a clear roadmap to follow and detailed plans for reaching their destination.

Source: Roadmunk

Clear process documentation acts as your team’s roadmap in a remote working environment. It contains instructions for specific tasks and scenarios and detailed explanations for each stage. Here are the steps you should follow to create team processes:

• First, identify your company’s short-term and long-term goals.
• Set some KPIs that you can use to assess whether a goal has been met.
• Formulate a plan, a budget, and a timeframe to reach the desired KPIs.
• Break down your plan into tasks.
• Break down huge tasks into smaller, more manageable tasks.
• Maintain a Gantt chart that will let everyone keep track of their progress. A task timeline will also help your team members determine task dependencies. You may use a Kanban board software like Trello or Asana.

Establishing a transparent and visible process for your team orients them towards a single goal. That is essential to manage a growing team.

4. Reward your best talent

Part of fostering a productive and competitive work culture is making sure hard work is appreciated. One of the ways you can do this is by recognizing stand-out employees.

In awarding your best talent, you build a community that realizes their hard work and worth. You show that you value hard work, encouraging everyone else to work just as hard, if not more. This healthy competition among your staff will not reduce your workforce’s productivity. Instead, it will bring out the best among your staff.

Here are some ways you can reward your best talent:

• Award “Employee of the Month” certificates to your best-performing staff.
• Recognize your best talent’s skill set and work attitude, and give them a promotion when ready.
• Offer a higher pay grade to employees who consistently exceed expectations.
• Treat your team to lunch or a night out after every significant achievement (i.e., closing a huge deal, reaching 1M in sales, etc.).

Those mentioned above are only some ways you can reward your best talent.

Recognize your staff’s dedication and hard work for the company, and your team will grow along with the business. Recognizing your top performers will cause a ripple effect on the team that will encourage your employees to perform better.

5. Manage your resources well

Your concern shouldn’t only be about growing a team. Just as important is seeing if your office can even accommodate a bigger team.

That is where resource management comes in. If your growing team gets infuriated over faulty and laggy systems, insufficient hardware, and slow WiFi, that won’t be a positive employee experience.

Here’s what you can do to manage your resources for a growing team:

• Before anything else, assess first if you need a new team member. The benefits of the new hire have to outweigh the cost of retaining them. If you’re just starting a business, you need to be particularly careful with your hiring decisions.
• Besides salary, you have to budget for insurance, paid leaves, company-provided hardware, and other benefits.
• If the free version of the business solution you use can no longer accommodate the size of your team, look for other solutions, or suggest a monthly subscription. The same applies to other utilities such as WiFi or office space.
• Get in touch with a business or SaaS consultant. There’s nothing wrong with asking for a bit of help. Consultants analyze your business and develop a plan tailored for you. You may more effectively allocate your resources to certain aspects of your company from here.

Managing your resources well will prevent loss of revenue and increase the morale and productivity of your current employees.

6. Manage any conflict

The more people you bring into your workforce, the more varied your team’s collective culture, human characteristics, and values are. As your team grows, internal conflict and workplace drama become inevitable.

Source: YouthJobCenter

How do you manage conflict so that your team grows in the direction desired by your company? Here are some things you can do:

• Get everyone get to know each other. That will acquaint your employees with their co-workers, making them more comfortable in the workplace.
• Promote workplace diversity. One of the ways you can do this is by hiring from a diverse pool of ethnicities and backgrounds.
• Impose sanctions on team members who discriminate in the workplace.
• Hold seminars on workplace diversity and conflict resolution.
• See that your HR department practices the proper conflict resolution process, as shown above.
• Keep yourself in check as well for any discriminatory practices and tendencies. That is critical, especially if you hold a high position in the company.

If you want to manage a growing team, keep internal conflict in check. That strengthens the relationship and integrity among your workforce and develops your staff as individuals in the process.

Internal conflict is never a good thing. A general rule is always to seek out and resolve internal conflict before it becomes unmanageable.

Wrapping Up

A growing team can either be your company’s greatest strength or its most expensive liability. To ensure that they develop into the former, you must learn to manage a growing team.

First, establish a strong company culture. Within communities such as workplaces, cultures naturally form. You’d want to be a catalyst for a productive community so that your workforce doesn’t drive your business into bankruptcy.

To achieve a strong company culture, your company should have clear lines of communication. Encourage everyone to engage and give their input. Establish clear processes so that everyone knows what’s needed to be done and where the company currently is. Reward your best talent to let your workforce know that they’re appreciated. Doing this will bring out the best in every individual of your team.

Manage your resources well. You’d need to determine if your company can accommodate a more expansive team. Finally, manage conflicts. Doing these will allow you to manage a growing team, propelling the company to success.

Author Bio

Owen Jones is the Senior Content Marketer at ZoomShift, an online schedule maker app. He is an experienced SaaS marketer, specializing in content marketing, CRO, and FB advertising. He likes to share his knowledge with others to help them increase results.