It's a good thing when you expand your team. As you bring on more employees, you can pursue more and bigger opportunities and you increase your capacity to sell. However, growing your team also presents some challenges. It takes time for infrastructure and workflow to catch up. If you don't adapt fast enough, you can lose the benefits of growth.

Andrew Stepanov, communication specialist at GanttPRO, says there are some ways to quickly streamline your workflow so that you don't miss out on the opportunities that growing a team brings. He says it's first important to recognize that your needs will vary depending on how your team grows.

For example, you'll have different needs if you're running a family business and adding external employees than if you work on a small team and you're hiring remote workers to cover more markets or countries without incurring additional costs.

No matter how your business is expanding, you can be prepared. We discuss Stepanov's ideas for managing a quickly growing team in this issue of Promotional Consultant Today.

Hold daily scrum meetings. Stepanov says that a scrum meeting is how you always imagined a meeting should be. Instead of sitting for hours while people discuss the same idea endlessly, a scrum meeting is only 15 minutes at the max. Gather your team together, tell them today's goals and then get back to work. If your team is spread across different sites or you have remote team members, you can still hold scrum meetings using online conferencing.

Create an online knowledge base. Onboarding is one of the biggest challenges for an expanding team. Even though you have carefully selected the best candidates for the job, they still need training. However, Stepanov says you can cut training time massively if you give all your staff access to an online library of essential info. Once you establish your knowledge base, you can use it to keep everyone's training up to date.

Design a custom workflow. Stepanov says that your workflow should cover every aspect of the business, from beginning to end. It's how you make sure that every task gets completed correctly and on time. Try breaking down projects into individual tasks and setting specific deadlines for individual employees. It's best to keep your workflow open, so that everyone can see each other's tasks. That way, it's easier for employees to coordinate and keep their colleagues up to date.

Build a pro-productivity environment. Remember that software isn't everything. Don't forget to find fun ways to motivate your team members. Happy workers are the most productive workers. Stepanov suggests trying productivity challenges if you have a team of competitive people. Celebrate every achievement as a team—from completing a specific project to improving productivity in general. One great way to motivate workers is to ask what challenges they see for productivity and what rewards they would like to earn.

It's important to design your workflow wisely, track deadlines and support your team as it grows and changes. Be sure to create a positive atmosphere where the first question is always, "How can I help?"
 
Source: Andrew Stepanov is a content writer and communication specialist at GanttPRO.