Do you consistently end your workday with a host of unfinished tasks? Are you working at home as often as you're working at your place of business? If you find yourself bogged down by administrative duties at the expense of much more critical revenue-generating and customer-acquisition activities , it's a clear sign that you need additional staff members to tackle tasks such as answering phones and paying bills.
After all, your time would be better spent developing long-term growth strategies. Have you noticed a spike in customer service complaints? Perhaps these complaints involve problems with delivery, refunds and so on? Unfortunately, an insufficient workforce can result in customers falling through the cracks or the loss of prospective customers whose inquiries go unacknowledged.
If you've noticed that you're struggling to provide stellar customer service, it may be time to consider increasing your staff. No business can afford to alienate existing customers or neglect potential new ones. To help you determine when to hire more employees, consider your staff's current workload. It should be easy for you to tell when your employees are struggling to keep up with the demands of their jobs.
They may experience increased stress levels, display a lack of attention to detail or request time off more frequently due to illness. Analyze these to see if you can justify additional help. For example, if your business is tied to sales, look at numbers of proposals and bids.
The key to success is matching hiring to the time when new employees can begin to generate revenue. In many cases, it takes eight to 10 weeks to hire someone. How quickly can you put new people to work?
Examine the utilization rates of your current employees — the percentage of their time that is billable versus gross profit. Recruiting is one of the biggest expenses a company has — and one of most overlooked. Besides the obvious costs of salary, benefits and office space, a lot of hidden ones are lurking.
Take a close look at existing staff to determine if you need to look outside your company to get the work done. There are two types of input for making a decision: data and Spidey sense. One school of thought says that if you find someone who is an absolute perfect fit for your core values and beliefs, especially if the person can generate income, hire him or her.
Hiring the right people is even more important than timing. Turnover is one of the highest costs in business, so if you recruit for core values, beliefs and skills, you may be saving money down the line. Want more info about hiring a dream team? Download our free e-book, Building a better team: How to attract, recruit and hire top talent , now. Learn how Insperity can help your business. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
A staff expansion is also a good idea if you plan to change the technology your company uses. When you hire a few technology experts, these employees can facilitate the change-over and provide support and technical advice to your current staff. Overtime might have become a fact of life at your company, and although your current employees are getting the job done, it might not be the best financial choice for the company.
You might discover that it would be cheaper to hire a few new employees rather than pay current employees time-and-a-half. Working at a humane society allowed Jill Leviticus to combine her business management experience with her love of animals.
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