OPERATIONS & GROWTH
CLIENT CASE / Decentralized Team Redesign
Using a Strategic Organizational Redesign to Meet Urgent Challenges
A rapidly growing talent acquisition organization faced an 80% increase in hiring targets—with the majority of its workforce comprised of employees with less than one year experience at the company.
When hitting aggressive team goals is not an option but a necessity, how do you guarantee success? Are the potential growing pains of a team restructuring worth the strategic payoff or is incentivizing a new team to “work harder” good enough?
As leaders, we are often facing multiple challenges at once and it is vital to take a step back, clarify your objectives and act with perspective. Maintaining foresight and strategy amid the fire allows us to solve for the most amount of challenges with a single decision.
+ Operations, Growth, Organizational Design, Talent Acquisition
At a Glance
THE PROBLEM
A growing organization of mostly new employees was faced with the highest production demands in their history. Needing to balance onboarding and tight deadlines, a new organizational design needed to be explored and implemented with urgency to meet these intense demands.
THE MISSING PIECE
A collaborative and data-driven assessment revealed that rather than plowing forward with more effort in the same systems, the creation of an entirely new team structure allowed for more decentralized leadership and scope for employees. The delivery and implementation of this would be vital.
THE SOLUTION
Strategic operational initiatives broke the larger team into smaller subgroups, allowing for employees to display leadership potential, greater business development and more efficient onboarding — all while hitting their highest production demand.
OBSERVED CHALLENGE
A mature talent acquisition organization faced an 80% increase in hiring targets compared to the previous year, with the majority of its workforce comprising employees with less than one year of experience with the company. The existing staffing model, which split roles into sourcing and recruiting, posed challenges in skill development for new employees and limited career advancement opportunities for sourcers due to their lack of specialization.
The organization recognized the need for a more specialized and efficient approach to handle the increased volume of hiring while ensuring career growth opportunities for sourcers, but leadership was unsure how to optimize team structures without overwhelming their talent in a demanding period of work. The existing model lacked specialization, delayed skill ramping, and led to sourcers being undervalued, impacting career advancement and employee satisfaction. There was also a major risk of not hitting the aggressive hiring targets due to the time it would take in ramping up the new hires.
The organization sought to optimize onboarding speed, improve collaboration, and create future advancement opportunities. The goal was to redesign the staffing function to address these challenges, while metrics for success included time to hire, business and employee satisfaction, retention rates, promotions, and progress towards goals.
OUTCOME
Breaking the team down into smaller “groupings” allowed for leadership to have more room in making decisions and for individual contributors to have increased autonomy over their direct line of business. This facilitated decisions to be made at the individual level so long as they were in line with the greater strategy — lessening the need for ICs to have to check in with their leaders for direction.
This incredible increase in efficiency allowed more demand to be placed on ICs as they could focus on their responsibilities with less oversight. Additionally, new employees became more quickly specialized in their business units which allowed for an increase in velocity as the hiring period continued on.
Despite the high percentage of newly onboarding employees, the organization delivered the entirety of the previous year's headcount in the first 6 months of the year and hit the full year's hiring target by the end of Q3.
The team’s main KPI – and one that is very important for all production teams – was productivity per resource. In the 12 months following the reorganization, productivity per resource increased by 80% – the largest increase across the entire organization.
The secondary intended impact of the reorganization outside of increasing production was the stronger recognition of value in the sourcing function. In the review cycle following the reorganization, a record number of sourcers were given promotion consideration due to their increased role in the success of the organization and value to the businesses in which they supported.
In order to have a successful future, you must plan for it. Too often, we get bogged down on only solving the immediate problem in front of us.
Instead look to how you can solve the primary, secondary and tertiary challenges together. Often, a single decision can solve for multiple problems if you take an initial step back and look at the situation with strategic perspective.
-
IDENTIFYING PRIMARY + SECONDARY OBJECTIVES | In facing a challenge, good strategy offers an opportunity to solve what is in front of you; better strategy looks to also solve what lies beyond it. In this case, the organization first needed to guarantee that hiring targets would be hit. In designing a solution, however, there was also an opportunity to create a streamlined onboarding process and create better avenues for growth for the sourcing function. Knowing that whatever design took place would have multiple downstream effects, it was important to create a solution which maximized the opportunity across multiple verticals.
REDUCING SCOPE OF TRAINING | When faced with tight deadlines, it’s imperative to cut away everything that doesn’t help in meeting immediate objectives. In this case, the onboarding process was vast and included everything that a new hire may eventually do in their job. Taking an approach that limited the area of coverage per resource, a massive amount of training was cut from the initial onboarding period and new hires were quickly able to focus on the things they were specifically responsible for.
DECENTRALIZING COMMAND | Crafting a system in which team members could have more autonomy over their day to day tasks while getting more in sync with the overall strategy was critical to the success of the new team model. Dividing the team into small “groupings” allowed for subject matter expertise to be developed faster and more reliability and credibility to be developed with the partnering business teams. Decentralizing the leadership structure allowed for faster decisions to be made and created more scope for individual contributors.
GROWING SCOPE | With the change in team model, there was a huge opportunity to raise the profile of a historically undervalued role in the organization. Due to the fact that the sourcing function of the team had been assigned their work in a “next person up” arrangement, there was no opportunity to become expert in any one area or to grow relationships with business partners. Creating dedicated support allowed for the business to feel more attended to, created more scope of development for the sourcers, and more standardization (and production) across the board.
-
-
SMARTWORK APPROACH
Visual Summary
KEY TAKEAWAYS
More Expertise = Better Business Relationships
Demonstrating expertise is a fast way to create value in a business relationship. Creating a dedicated model in which individual contributors could deepen their expertise within a narrow scope of work allowed for business partners to feel better supported and for IC’s to gain traction and recognition along their own career development paths.
The Right Data Drives the Right Decisions
To ensure you’re making the right decisions, it’s imperative to ensure you’re collecting the right data. This starts with clarifying key organizational objectives and identifying appropriate KPIs that are in direct alignment. Tracking these metrics throughout this approach gave a real-time pulse on strategy, as well as an opportunity to pivot if needed.
CASE RESULTS
Importance of Specialization and Perspective
Understanding the immediate challenge — while recognizing the opportunity to solve for broader challenges — was the key to this case’s widespread success. A good strategy offers the ability to solve what is in front of you; a better strategy offers the ability to also solve what lies beyond it.
