Downscaling, upscaling, firing, hiring, growing, managing, adapting, changing… It’s safe to say that companies are going through change happening at a faster pace than ever before due to COVID. 

The good news is that a Danish study shows that a surprising number of companies have managed to use the changes caused by the pandemic to their benefit by innovating and adapting to the changes in the market. This means that a lot of companies are growing. And a lot of the companies that had to let go of employees are rehiring. 

That means that not only do organizations all over the world have to adapt to a new normal. They also have to manage growth. But growth doesn’t come without growing pains. It’s hard to stay in touch with the organization as you grow. 

But the solution to managing growth successfully might be right in the brains of your employees through collective intelligence. Let’s take a look at how collective intelligence can help your organization in managing growth. 

Build a strategy

Employees are coming back to the office, and the team has been expanded with a number of new employees. There’s a lot of change to manage. From welcoming back old team members, onboarding new employees, establishing a mutual culture and making sure that the employees fulfill their potential. In addition to this, making sure that knowledge is shared across the organization and the know-how and experience from employees are utilized well! 

It requires a deep dive into the organization, and what better way to do this than by accessing employee knowledge?. What are the organization’s strengths and weaknesses? What’s the vision and mission? What are the expectations of future performance? Where is the company going?   

Take these perspectives into consideration and build a strategy where employees are to work based on OKRs (objectives and key results). Every important work task can be set up as OKR which makes it easier to track progress, work based on objectives, and to motivate employees. The objective should be seen as “Where do I want to go?” and the key result as “How will I know that I am getting there?”. An efficient way is to build trackable measures into the key result such as increase social media following by 10 a week or increase leads by 30%. Having a hard deadline that the designated team is aligned with will help increase performance, foster team-wide cohesion and collaboration and build company structure and culture. There are plenty of digital tools to help manage an OKR setup such as Monday or Trello. 

The purpose of building a strategy when managing growth is to make it clear and understandable for employees how the work is structured and performed, and additionally, what the expectations are. 

This tactic eliminates underperformance, misunderstandings and confusion and promotes collaboration, culture and increases performance. 

Align across the organization

Besides setting up a strategy for how to align work processes, establishing and integrating a company culture is crucial to running a successful business. A huge pitfall in too many organizations is siloed communication where important information stays between the managers while frontline employees and new hires are confused about what they’re actually doing and are not able to efficiently share knowledge. Research shows that too many employees don’t have a clear understanding of the goals and mission of the organization they work for. 

There are multiple tangible ways to make sure that the organization is aligned across new and old hires, teams and levels, whether the employees work from home, the office or both.

• Build on the strategy - based on the strategy mentioned above, employees understand the work processes that are implemented in the work culture. This creates an alignment between employees and how the work is done in the organization.

• Communicate the mission and vision - Showcasing the company’s mission and vision through a statement on the website is not enough. If you truly wish to work towards these goals, the mission, vision, values and goals must be integrated into the monthly or bi-annual strategy meetings that encourage an understanding to old and new hires of why they are here.

• Weekly status meetings - To create alignment across the organization, especially when scaling, it’s important that the employees have an understanding of what the other employees and teams are doing and working on.

Ultimately, this creates a deeper sense of camaraderie and collaboration, where information flows freely. If marketing communicates successfully with development, new ideas will spark when development introduces a new product or service that marketing can promote. A way to make sure that team news and developments are communicated is by setting up a weekly status meeting where teams share their current projects, ideas and updates. This increases alignment across departments and the organization. 

Aligning across the organization can help speed up decision-making, avoid wasted resources and create a dynamic structure with an optimization of the talent where employees understand what they’re doing and feel engaged. Making sure that the company is aligned is particularly important when scaling a company. 

While status updates and important information might have easily been passed around in a small team, it’s a different story when an organization grows. 

Foster open communication

Open communication is the foundation to a strong company alignment. Open communication can also help manage growth. If an employee knows that they’re free to share their thoughts, ideas and questions, misalignments and information gaps can be caught before they end up taking up resources or lead to unhappy employees. Another great side effect of open communication? Your employees possess an abundance of relevant knowledge and input that can be crucial to business performance. The knowledge can help organizations predict future performance, stay ahead of critical issues, and come up with powerful solutions. You don’t want to miss out on this advantage. 

So how do you foster open communication and create a space where employees can share their voices? 

• You embed open communication in the work culture, values and strategy. 

• At meetings, you ask for opinions and inputs so the culture of open communication is truly performed. 

• You create a safe, confidential space where employees can share their voices without feeling uncomfortable.

• You set up 1:1 and feedback meetings where space for honest, open talk is created, and the communication goes two ways.  

Empowering employees to share their voices will increase employee engagement and lead to an increase in productivity and inclusion. This is a powerful motivator for employees and talent.

Utilize the benefits of your strategic, existing resources 

As briefly stated above, your employees, new and old ones, possess an abundance of tacit knowledge that is a superpower to any organization. This knowledge is called collective intelligence.

The reason that they hold this knowledge is quite simple. Employees, especially frontline employees, are the first to experience and grasp the latest developments and changes in the market that affect the organization. They also possess internal knowledge when it comes to the organization, such as how the internal interaction, communication and work processes are going. 

Tapping into this wealth of collective intelligence is made possible by the Mindpool platform, a tool that lets organizations harness the collective intelligence of their organization to highlight opportunities and threats, innovate, predict future performance and improve the work culture and work processes. 

Utilizing collective intelligence is particularly relevant when scaling, as a lot of information gets lost as a result of growing pains. 

Ultimately, tapping into the wealth of knowledge from your employees can provide highly relevant insights that can be used to highlight issues, spark innovation, increase productivity and employee engagement and predict the future performance of an organization. 

You've just read a blog post from Mindpool - a platform that helps you harness the collective intelligence of employees. Mindpool taps into the knowledge of employees to provide actionable predictions and curated insights. Mindpool is rooted in decades of research in collective intelligence. Read more from our resource universe or contact us here if you'd like to tap into your employees' valuable knowledge.