Traditional factors, including customer retention, community awareness, and demand, often measure business growth. These factors lead to higher demand on employees, which means a stronger need for quality employees to tackle mounting workloads and responsibilities.
A new or growing business may not always be able to properly track its own productivity, making it difficult to identify when a fault occurs in the system. This is especially true if a business is solely focused on profits and customer growth, and not the internal operations.
Before long, too much work in a growing business can lead to small productivity drains in quality and other areas, which can be detrimental over time. Even as a business continues to steadily succeed, these productivity drains can slowly take over and lead to confusion, overload, and financial decline. Learn more about this issue and how to fix it.
Too Much Growth, Too Fast
Every business dreams of making it big, but the path to success has to be walked carefully. Too much growth too fast can leave employees overworked, and teams understaffed, inventory wiped out, and customers left disappointed. It’s better to scale a business for success over time rather than shoot for the stars.
Remember: growth introduces complexity that can erode even the most efficient work strategies without proper scaling and introduction. Some of the ways rapid growth poses a productivity drain risk follow below.
Unclear Expectations
Clear expectations for staff at all levels help prevent workplace meltdowns. Quick growth creates heavier workloads for all staff members, leading to projects being mishandled or ignored, assumptions being made about who is in charge of what, and workplace productivity being halted when projects fall behind deadlines.
Stressed Staff
Absenteeism in the workplace due to stressed or ill staff members is a major productivity drain. This is also common in businesses experiencing sudden or unexpected growth that their staff isn’t equipped to handle.
Equally detrimental are issues related to staff members who are showing up at work but lagging behind or hurriedly completing their duties because they’re stressed about work pressures and impossible deadlines.
Overlapping responsibilities may keep staff present, but it significantly increases their stress levels. Hiring virtual assistant services is an efficient way to help relieve employee stress while management searches for sustainable business growth solutions. These services handle tasks like call answering, scheduling, and administrative support, freeing employees to focus on higher-priority work.
Poor Communication
When business success and growth happen rapidly, communication, already a key factor in any business success, becomes all the more important. Signs that poor communication is leeching productivity in the workplace include:
- Meetings are scheduled to address missed deadlines and worker confusion
- Employee workloads are increasing, but output is decreasing
- Projects remaining unassigned or neglected
- Confusion over email, text, and workspace communication efforts
The longer poor communication goes unaddressed, the more harm it does to the business. Poor communication also leads to employee burnout and dissatisfaction, both of which are strong contributors to high turnover rates best avoided.
How to Fix It
While it’s not always easy to anticipate a business unexpectedly going viral or becoming a community success overnight, there are ways to fix the productivity drain.
Reduce Employee Workload
Rapid resolution, focused on easing employee workload, is key to addressing the pressures of rapid growth. Immediately relieve pressure on existing staff by bringing on virtual assistant services. These services include phone call answering, appointment setting, and other tasks that can reduce employee overload and close workplace gaps.
Increase Communication
Communication in the workplace is improved by setting regular workday meetings to clearly assign tasks or clear up confusion among employees. Assignments and duties should be clearly defined and have little to no overlap.
Consider using a business messaging app or platform to communicate with all staff so issues, topics, and upcoming events or deadlines can be discussed and viewed in real time. This way, if workloads become unevenly distributed, tasks can be re-delegated, or virtual assistant services can be considered to keep operations running smoothly.
Cross-Train All Staff
Cross-training all staff members in everyday tasks allows gaps in workplace productivity to be efficiently filled when workloads are unexpectedly high in some areas and not others. Ensuring that your staff has basic training in your areas of business can help pick up the slack in different areas.
While cross-training staff, ensure every team member knows their main job and its importance in the workplace. This helps keep overlap at bay while also ensuring every team member knows where and how they can pitch in as needed.
Plan for Future Growth
While it’s impossible to gauge how long a business will thrive, it’s wise to anticipate future success by working with an efficient and full team of employees. Understand trends in your industry so you’re properly stocked and equipped with services and inventory when there are unexpected spikes in demand. Have a plan in place for what to do when employees feel overwhelmed or you’re unexpectedly understaffed. Never work with a skeleton crew.
While rapid or sudden business growth is what every establishment can hope for, it comes with some risks. Knowing how to spot and navigate productivity drain can help you retain your customers, keep your staff from burning out, and keep your business going strong.
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