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We’ve all heard the proverb, “Slow and steady wins the race.” Speed doesn’t always equal success. Still, fast growth is a dream for many business owners, often keeping them up at night and driving their decision-making. Growth can create exciting new opportunities and give your business a competitive advantage.  

Many organizations, especially startups and smaller businesses, fall into the trap of growing too fast, too soon. Doing so without the right systems and the ability to support that growth can be a double-edged sword and do more harm than good.  

So, what do you do as a human resources leader when the senior leadership team tells you they have an aggressive goal to hire 1,000 employees over the next three years? Rapid business growth doesn’t just impact the organization’s finances, products, or services; it also impacts the workforce. While your CEO may have big goals for the business, as HR leaders, it’s important to have a realistic view of the current workforce to see if they are ready for the changes that may now be required of them. Are those changes beneficial for them in the long run? 

Growth does not have to happen overnight to equal success. Here are a few things you can do to overcome the HR challenges of fast growth and pursue healthy growth that’s the right fit.  

Pay Attention to How Your Culture Evolves 

When your company has experienced growth in a short period, it’s common to hear comments from employees such as, “I miss when we were smaller; things were so much simpler!” High growth often means cultural changes within the organization that are not always positive. These could include changes in leadership, processes, location, and more.  

It’s important as HR leaders to ask ourselves, “What kind of culture do we want to create, and does rapid growth help us or hurt us?” Paying attention to how your culture evolves during times of growth will help clarify how rapid growth changes your workforce and what you can do to ensure that those changes are for the greater good.  

Foster Operational Efficiency  

One challenge of rapid growth where many businesses miss the mark is maintaining quality and excellence in their operational processes. Often, when the business is growing too fast, leaders make the mistake of trying to fill in the gaps of all the process changes after things have calmed down, instead of ensuring beforehand that current processes can meet current and future demands.  

Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, said, “So often the problem is in the system, not in the people. If you put good people in bad systems, you get bad results. You have to water the flowers you want to grow.” 

Your operational processes as HR leaders are not limited to Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) paperwork. How your processes sync and communicate with other operational processes within the organization is also important. During times of rapid growth, it’s critical to perform a quality-control check on all your processes and relationships with other cross-functional departments to ensure operational efficiency and excellence. Make constant improvement a priority. As Covey stated, water the flowers that you want to grow.  

Find Creative Ways to Encourage Healthy Growth 

Is your company looking to expand into a new market or develop a new service or product line? To encourage healthy growth, you could propose a new training program for the staff that has to produce the new product or deliver the service. If your company is expanding into a new market, you can help foster healthy growth by developing a strategic workforce plan. No matter what stage your business is in, as HR professionals, our job is to ensure we have the right HR strategy for the right season.  

Rapid growth may sound like success on the surface, but if you don’t have the right people with the right skills in the right places at the right time with the right processes to support the growth, you may find yourself falling behind in the race to win. If you need assistance as your company grows or have any questions, please contact Employers Council.