Growing pains of an ICT company

These two challenges are coupled with the fact that companies are rapidly exploding from 10 employees to more than 200 in relatively short timeframes. With all this in mind, the human capital of a company is its most vital component and it determines overall business success or failure.

Career development and performance management in a small company is easy, often senior management is operationally involved and the roles and responsibilities are generally unstructured or loose. Most people in early startups accept that they do whatever needs to be done on the path to success, even if that means fixing the printer when they are developers by trade!

As the company grows, senior management starts becoming less and less operationally involved – and this is when things start becoming tricky. It is at this point that processes and policies need to be created. These are both critical to the overall growth of the company. At Entelect, our core value has always been focussed around our employees and we have made numerous efforts to ensure we succeed in managing their performance and, most importantly, that our employees are continuously growing. As with any process, it’s about learning and these are just some of the lessons that we’ve learnt along the way:

• Ensure that key performance indicators and career paths are well defined, easily accessible and part of the company culture.
• Take the time to continually evolve your performance appraisal process. We have done this numerous times over the last ten years and it has made a massive positive impact
• Do not rely solely on the feedback captured during the performance appraisal process but rather over time, document and consolidate as much information around an employee, including the number of hours worked, client commendations received and training attended. All of this information will give you a more accurate reflection of the employee’s performance when required
• As senior management, you should not be afraid to let go of the performance appraisal function, especially if you get to the point where you cannot give each employee the adequate amount of attention he or she deserves. Make sure the person who has this responsibility is armed with the necessary tools and information
• Grow a strong base of staff leadership that have capacity to give each employee the time he or she deserves

As your company grows, you will continue to face many challenges: embrace them, continue to adapt and remain relevant to your staff’s needs.