This is the final installment of Supporting the Team that Builds Your Dream. I dig into our own experience building an operations team last year, the ever so important soft-skills of operations team members, and the ins and outs of outsourcing.
Fact: Building an administrative team is the best thing we’ve ever done for our workplace.
Last year at We Are Mammoth, our development team doubled in size. We also started building a design team to tackle our customer experience and branding initiatives. About a quarter of the way into this spurt of growing from 9 to 20 team members, we hit a wall administratively. The processes we had for interviewing and onboarding no longer sufficed (read: I could no longer do a break-even job at it). The outsourced IT team we used to patch up our network and workstations couldn’t keep up. So it was time to figure out a plan to support our growing team from the inside.
Building our operations team
The first thing we did was create a memorable mission and vision for our operations team: Service our production team like they’re pro-ball players on the court playing a championship game. We react quickly and accurately to ensure there’s as little interruption as possible to their ability to play. We minimize downtime, inconveniences, and do an excellent job onboarding new hires. Our goal is to create a workplace where productivity and personal fulfillment are never hampered by any operational snags which are in our control.
We changed the role of one of our project managers, Lindsay, who has a masters in human resources administration. She wholeheartedly jumped into managing our people operations. Where she sometimes fell short on technical knowledge in the consulting arena, she more than made up for in sheer passion in managing hiring, onboarding, and team retention. She’s crushed it.
The second person we added to the team was a full time systems administrator. His name is Ameer, his game is managing our network performance, security, and maintaining the 75 or so workstations and servers we have here. Coming from the Chicago Public School system, Ameer was ready for reactive whack-a-mole. His other huge contribution has been to practice proactive maintenance; he’s always looking a few months out at bandwidth, storage, security, and keeping the team running at 100%.
We’ve largely succeeded because of these two crucial additions to the team. Any doubts I had about whether we needed a full time people ops manager or sys admin were quickly laid to rest. There is so much more we can accomplish now than the bare minimum we were struggling to suffice before they were on the job.
Hard skills are only half the job
If you followed along in the second post in this series, you’ll already have a working job description for your roles you need at your company. But remember this: the people you want supporting your workplace must love interacting with people and they must be aligned with your vision of servicing your team like they’re Fortune 500 executives on a transatlantic Virgin Airways flight. While the jobs are transactional in nature, a human touch is 100% required 100% of the time. Communication, polite demeanor, and selfless attitude are essential. If you’re like me, your experience with IT support and HR has been sub-optimal, if not dismal. These are not easy jobs, and you’ll have to support your admin team in the same way they support your staff. As a founder, they’re your customers!
Hire or outsource?
There are thousands of consultancies out there who service both the IT and HR aspects of small companies. They’re great. They have the infrastructure and the experience to come in for a few hours each week and take care of the work that you, as founder, shouldn’t be doing anymore. Maybe that’s exactly what you need to bridge the next year or two.
But, they’re not employees. They’re not committed to your company’s vision. They’re committed to theirs. So, while you may be servicing the transactional aspects of your workplace better, you’ll still need plenty of time to ensure your team is being taken care of, from business vision, to performance reviews, to happiness-factor.
Build a passionate workplace and watch business grow.
Building an efficient workplace is critical to building a good product and becoming a self-sustaining company. It increases morale and trust so that the team building your business focuses on design and implementation, rather than everything that’s not working at work. For you, you can pay more attention to the vision and mission of your company, spending time where only you, the founder, can truly add value. If you’re smart about your hiring, the people you have joining your administrative team will execute on your vision, completing the cycle of being a just in time start up to a stable, dependable employer.
{Craig Bryant is founder and product manager of Kin, and cofounder of We Are Mammoth, a web consulting firm in Chicago.}