Are you experiencing an increased workload but don’t have the budget to hire additional employees? Or are you worried about hiring additional employees because you’re not sure whether you’ll have enough work to justify their presence later down the track? Or perhaps you’re sick of onboarding new staff or worried that expanding your team will bring too much disruption to your current team?
If this is you, here are three things you could do to kick goals without adding to your staff count.
Step 1: Review what you are doing.
The best place to start is by looking at how you and your team are currently spending your time.
This is fairly easy in a professional services environment where employees are required to track their time and each hour is assigned a dollar value. However, if you work outside of the world of billable hours, such as the public sector or a non-consulting corporate environment, you could try other things. You could quickly do a brain dump of your projects and key business-as-usual activities, look at your diary, minutes from the last staff meeting or your business plan.
Once you’ve got your list, ask yourself whether there is anything that is not really bringing you value or results. Are there any projects or activities you engaged in either as a form of procrastinating on your most important work or due to ‘shiny object syndrome’? Are there any projects that are no longer relevant due to a recent change in your strategic direction?
If yes, either eliminate these things or, if you’re not ready to give up on them just yet, at least defer them for 6 months or until things have quieted down.
The benefits of this are twofold. It not only helps you make sure that the activities you are engaging in bring value and results but it also removes distractions. This level of clarity and focus will energise and help the team achieve more.
Step 2: Find a better way of doing things.
Once you’ve completed step 1 and you are confident that what remains on your plate seems right, it’s time to look into how things are done.
This could be the way your team is set up. Is everyone doing everything or could you benefit from increasing role clarity and introducing a bit of specialisation? Could you have sub-teams that focus on particular types of tasks and then deliver their part of the process more efficiently?
Perhaps some of the work could be automated to increase efficiency. Could you draft ‘frequently asked questions’ documents for your clients or stakeholders, to reduce the amount of time your team spends answering common questions? Could the team develop checklists and flowcharts as quick references so that information searching and decision fatigue is avoided? If you have the budget, you could also consider investing in software that automates reporting or other tasks that are currently done manually.
Another important thing to consider is whether all of your team members are performing at the expected standard. If not, you could focus on improving their performance to improve their output.
Step 3: Outsource some of the work.
(Before I get into this one, let’s acknowledge that I am a consultant and that this step may come across as a shameless plug. But, hey, it’s my blog and I can do what I want, right? Jokes aside, I’ve been on both sides of the table, as a consultant and as a person hiring them, so I speak from a place of experience. OK, with the elephant in the room addressed, let’s move on.)
If you’ve gone through the first two steps and you’re happy with what you are doing and how you are doing it, or have already introduced the necessary improvements, another thing to consider is hiring an external provider to help you out.
If you have a bigger budget, the provider could help you get through a temporary backlog. They could come in, focus on this one thing and get it done.
Or you could find a specialist that could take on a project that requires a particular skill set. They would be able to get it done more efficiently and, due to their expertise, give you more confidence in the final product.
But even if you have a small budget, you could still benefit from external help. For example, they could do a high-level scan of the status quo and then build a plan of how you should best attack the project. Or they could have limited involvement and coach your team through the work. In fact, as a solopreneur, I often take on small jobs where the clients have very limited budgets and we work on a co-delivery basis, which also helps with transferring my knowledge onto their team.
Either way, regardless of whether you have a big or small budget, the benefit of outsourcing some of the work is that you can increase your resourcing without worrying about whether you’ll be able to keep them on after you’ve weathered the storm. In addition, hiring an expert means that the work is likely done more efficiently and that you can potentially benefit from the insights they bring from working with other organisations.
Any thoughts?
Have you tried any of the steps above? If yes, have they worked out for you? What other ways have you tried to get more done without hiring additional employees? Contact me and share your thoughts.
Thanks for taking the time to read the post.