Top CEO Says a Scalable Culture Includes Your People Too
It remains as important as ever for a business to maintain a solid but flexible physical
and conceptual structure that allows it to adapt to and take advantage of changes in amount or kind of demand. But doing that well in the digital age requires whole new fields of skills, knowledge, and technology. A business that has a perfectly scalable, flexible, and steady infrastructure is still in deep trouble if it neglects to nourish the backbone of scalability -- people.
The indispensable starting-point of this new strategy is the building of a workforce of flexible, talented, and diverse employees. A company that has practiced solid and scalable hiring will have a reserve of people at hand who can not only do their own jobs well but will be ready to take on new challenges and deal with unexpected eventualities as shifting circumstances require it of them.
In the world of online commerce and in a business atmosphere influenced by it, a change in customer demographics or the most apparently minor shift in the kind of services customers require could mean whole new service areas need to be explored. Only those with scalable structures and personnel teams will be able to thrive in this kind of environment instead of fighting for survival.
For Audrey Spangenberg, the CEO of FPX, Dallas' leading provider of business flexibility services and configure-price-quote solutions, scalability now means "the capacity of employers to handle a variety of disparate jobs at once and offering employees the opportunity to cross-train in a number of needed disciplines." Spangenberg says it boils down to the classic value of a full commitment to quality over quantity. Fewer employees who can perform more tasks means a business can remain lean, powerful, and tightly knit, and does not have to over-hire. Employees who can perform diverse tasks allow for drastically faster reaction times to changes in circumstances or the market, and far better communication as fewer and fewer messages have to pass between one department and another before a problem is solved.
As Spangenberg describes it, "Tomorrow's workforce must be scalable as well. If we are to retain our best employees, we must insure during the hiring process that they have the agility and scalability to adapt and quickly grow in a fast-moving environment -- in other words, a scalable work culture." Practices like these -- simple in concept -- could be revolutionary for businesses in a time when more and more commerce is being conducted on and through online avenues.
Success will go not just to the company with the best initial idea, but to the one who can implement it in a way that allows it to gain an audience and respond interactively to the needs and tastes of that audience as they develop.
More and more awareness is growing that in order to be competitive companies but hire candidates who are not only capable but equally flexible and adaptive. Spangerberg explains that "Younger employees (Generation X and Millennials) have an expectation that technology will facilitate their jobs and make work life easier. Employers who do a great job of enabling employees to be scalable will hire and retain the best people."
Change management traditionally emphasizes preparing for shifts in technology and strategy, and engineering shifts in the attitudes and aptitudes of employees. All these things are undoubtedly necessary, but approaching them from an outdated perspective will do little if any good. An organization that starts from the ground up and is filled with flexible and adaptable personnel will find strategic, technological, and structural adaptability coming organically.
In the world of scalable employment and business practices that expectation that technology can make life and work easier can often be true -- but a technology is only as good as the people using it. At the vanguard of the scalability upheaval in the world of business will be those who understand not only how to make new technologies work for them to manipulate how they react to them demands of work and the market -- but also grasp how to create new technologies themselves and build systems from the ground up that are tailored specifically to the needs of the moment.
The rapid technological increases that society continues to undergo show no signs of slowing down -- and as they go on changing our world in new and different way businesses will have to adapt faster and faster to the needs this creates. Those businesses that are built upon a strong scalable architecture and made up of adaptable, scalably hired employees will find themselves at the front of the pack. The only thing that never changes is that, in business things never stop changing. You can't predict those changes, but it's essential to be prepared for them.
Top CEO Says a Scalable Culture Includes Your People Too
By: Richard Berman
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