As it turns out, growing pains aren’t just limited to our physical bodies as we rapidly shoot through puberty in adolescence. While growth is almost always a good thing for businesses, there is such a thing as growing too fast. Indeed, when an organization has not been fully successful in developing the internal systems necessary to facilitate a certain level or rate of growth, a company might begin to experience growing pains. Generally speaking, growing pains in a small business are symptoms that an organization needs to make a transition. What kind of transition, you may ask? Well, it depends, but that’s what we’re going to take a closer look at in today’s blog post.
Helping With The Growing Pains Of Your Company
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Continue reading on to get some more insight about navigating these common organizational growing pains for businesses.
There Just Aren’t Enough Hours In The Day
This comes off as more of an excuse and can apply to many things in our day-to-day lives. It’s sad to say, but many employees actually feel like they could work twenty-four hours per day, seven days a week, and still not have sufficient time to get everything done. Yikes! These same employees will then begin to complain about “overload” and crippling stress, feeling like they are always trying to catch up on their work but never succeeding. Think of this situation is somewhat of a “work treadmill”, in which the more work employees do, the more work there seems to be coming down the pipeline. Clearly, it’s not a sustainable system.
Too Much Time Is Spent Putting Out Fires
Another typical growing pain sign for a small business is a problem that usually results from a lack of long-term planning, and not having a strategic plan doesn’t help. If your individual employees and your company at large does not know what to expect from a day to day basis, this usually results in a loss of organizational productivity, effectiveness, and efficiency.
Take this example of a company where constantly dealing with short-term crises was a major problem. A lack of planning caused orders to be needlessly rushed, resulting in excessive pressure on employees and a dip in workplace productivity. As such, drivers had to be hired on weekends and evenings in order to deliver orders on time, but some of these were already quite overdue. In another example, a lack of planning can result in a shortage of salespeople, and because of these shortages, a company may be forced to hire new people and put them to work almost immediately without adequate training. This is not good because these new hires do not possess the skills necessary to be good salespeople.
People Don’t Know What Other People Are Doing
This is truly a crippling growing pain for companies and is often a result of a lack of communication between team members of departments. Your employees might even be unaware of the exact nature of their own jobs, and how their own job relates to other people’s positions within the company. Again, yikes. This then creates a situation in which people and departments alike do whatever they want to, writing off the remaining tasks at hand as “not our responsibility.” The constant bickering between people and departments over who does what may become a more prevalent issue and an organization may eventually devolve into an isolated enigma of a workforce.
Employees Are Unsure About The Direction Of The Company
This growing pain is characterized by employees complaining that their own company “has no identity”, blaming upper management (that’s you as a small business owner) for not providing enough information about the company’s future direction. Even worse is your employee’s belief that upper management doesn’t even know what direction the company is headed in. Ultimately, your team is coming into work for a paycheck at the end of the day, but they’re also yearning for a clear sense of purpose and value relative to their position in your company. As important as their individual contribution is, the bigger picture within the company also matters.
When insufficient communication is combined with rapid, sweeping changes (as is often the case in growing companies), employees will naturally begin to feel anxious about this. To relieve this anxiety, they’ll either create their own networks for obtaining the desired information or come to believe that they know the company’s direction even though management has never actually communicated this information. If the employee’s anxiety reaches a point where it becomes unbearable, employees may begin to leave – a costly turnover for any growing business.
Employees Feel A Need To Do Something Themselves To Do It Correctly
The whole “If I want to get something done correctly, I have to do it myself” mentality is likely a result of people becoming more and more frustrated by the difficulty of getting things done in an organization. This mentality is also the result of a lack of clearly defined roles, responsibilities, and linkages between these roles. Not to beat this point into the ground too much, but as we touched on above, when roles and responsibilities aren’t clearly outlined, this is problematic. This causes individuals or even entire departments to act on their own because they do not know whose responsibility a given task is. An employee might even just do a task themselves in order to avoid confrontation since the person or department to whom they are trying to delegate a task to may refuse it.
By operating in this environment, departments will then become more isolated from each other, and teamwork will gradually become more and more scarce. Indeed, though sad to imagine, each part of the company will continue “doing its own thing” without really considering how their contribution fits into the bigger picture. Ultimately, communication between management and lower levels of the organization may be minimal due to the fact that the organization has no formal system through which information can be channeled.
Most People View Meetings As A Waste Of Time
Sometimes meetings can very well be a waste of otherwise productive time. On the other hand, meetings are an effective way to get team members and multiple departments on the same page about what’s going on in the company. Recognizing the need for better coordination and communication, a growing organization may begin to hold meetings. However, without planned agendas, a designated leader or even an engaging presentation of content, a lot of these meetings are really nothing more than mere discussions between people. As a consequence, these meetings turn into somewhat of a free-for-all, dragging on interminably without resulting in decisions or even any real productivity.
Other complaints about meetings may involve a lack of follow-up on decisions that were made. Companies will schedule monthly or even yearly planning meetings during which goals are set for individual employees, departments, and the company as a whole. Unfortunately, these sessions are a waste of time if people ignore the goals that have been set or fail to monitor their progress toward these goals.
There’s A Lack Of Follow-Up And Accountability
If there’s little to no follow-up after plans are made, things simply will not get done. In some cases, there is no follow-up because the company has not yet developed systems to adequately monitor its goals. For instance, many firms desire to monitor financial goals but have not yet developed an accounting system that can provide the information needed to do so.
In other cases, follow-up doesn’t occur because personnel have not received the proper training in setting, monitoring and evaluating company goals. Upper management may set goals that cannot be achieved or cannot be measured, or they do not know how to evaluate and provide useful feedback on goal achievement. These problems tend to appear the most often during the performance appraisal process.
Setting Up Your Business For Success
Are you ready to break through the financial barriers that are causing your small business growing pains? Don’t let a lack of working capital or a negative cash flow hold you back growing your company into something that you’re truly proud of. Our receivable factoring company at The Commercial Finance Group is ready to provide you with our small business lending services. Learn more about a business line of credit and how our flexible approach to lending can benefit your business by getting in touch with us today.
