How can we make it easier?
How much time did your organisation waste last week maintaining processes that could be simpler? For most companies, the answer is shocking.
The reason that most start-ups are exciting to work for is that they keep things simple and continually look for ways to make things easier. They recognise that time and money are limited commodities and that making things easier naturally increases how efficient (and happy!) everyone is, leading to faster product or service delivery.
Yet when start-ups scale, the challenge is to evolve the culture to ensure that things continue to be easy to do and that they don’t fall into the trap that many organisations find themselves in right now. That is, wasting valuable time, resources and money on maintaining difficult ways of working.
Scaling a culture is often overlooked in the pursuit of growth. Acquisitions are made, employees are hired, targets are reset. Newer staff move further away from the founders, whilst early employees wish to retain the ease of working that they’ve had before.
For start-ups, the answer is easy (of course it is)! When you reach 50, then 150 employees, then every year after that, spend time redefining your culture to ensure that keeping things simple remains a priority in line with the ethos that created the company in the first place.
Of course, as any organisation and its workforce grows, more structure is required. But that doesn’t mean that things need to become significantly harder to do.
For those already mired in making things hard, you have two options to manage the never-ending time, cost and morale frustrations:
Accept that that’s the way you do things and ensure time and cost contingency is built in to everything you do
Every year, bring your teams together and ask them the question “How do we make it easier?”
The solutions to the frustrations that you face lie in the heads and hands of your workforce, what’s missing is either the time to answer the question or the leadership to ask it in the first place.
Schedule an hour this week with your team. Ask them one question: “What's the most frustrating process you deal with, and how would you make it easier?” Then give them the authority to implement the change. Then repeat. Your people will thank you for it.
