Watching your business grow is such an exciting and rewarding process. But with the thrill of expansion comes the challenge of maintaining quality standards across departments and making sure that new hires understand and live up to your company’s core values. Without quality checks in place and enforced, businesses risk sacrificing their hard-earned reputation, not to mention customer loyalty, just for the sake of growth. Quality is not a cost—it’s an essential KPI.
While the goal should be to fill new positions quickly, you need to make sure it’s done in a way that upholds standards across the board. Legacy employees who already understand and abide by your company’s mission can help keep this process on track, but as you hire more people from outside the organization who may not understand existing standards, it becomes increasingly important for leadership to implement quality checks and a corresponding process.
For starters, managers should take time to review and discuss job descriptions prior to making an offer in order to make sure incoming employees understand exactly what is expected of them. Also consider investing in technologies such as software-based credential checkers, which can help both employers and potential hires verify qualifications for certain jobs. We like to think that we have an agreement with our employees where they agree to perform certain activities and we agree to certain payment and administrative terms. Both parties can track progress and compare goals, which helps us see which employees are going above and beyond and which (if any) are cutting corners.
These are the basics of implementing quality checks for your teams:
- For whatever the position or task is, share EXACTLY what “right” looks like. You cannot hold people to a standard that they do not know. You must show people exactly what is expected of them.
- Develop a universal audit that works for every position. You can customize these later, but if you spend too much time customizing up front, you risk analysis paralysis. Get a universal audit out quickly. A “1 to 5” scale works fine.
- Mandate that all people managers audit every employee at some frequency. Employees will think this is micromanagement, but they’re wrong. This process was designed to help them get better. If you can do it from a resource perspective, best to try and do these weekly.
- In their MAPS (one-on-one meetings), have the managers review the audits with their team members. Have them focus not on everything the team member can improve, but focus on one or two items. During your next one on one, start with reviewing the items you suggested the employee work on from the last audit.
- Don’t let this slip. This is the #1 thing team members will want to de-prioritize when things are going really well or really poorly. As a leader you must fight the urge to “back-burner” the quality check. If you do, quality will erode and standards will decline.
It is essential that business leaders start viewing quality control as a KPI rather than a cost of growth. At its core, having high standards helps protect customer loyalty — something no business owner would want to sacrifice for the sake of expansion alone. Not only do customers expect these standards when engaging with your company, but they also make sure your enterprise continues running smoothly even as it scales up operations.
From legacy employees to new hires, every individual within an organization contributes to its success or failure depending on how well they live up to those standards set by the business leader themselves. Quality should be embedded into all aspects of corporate culture; from recruitment processes to customer service policies and beyond. Ultimately, when companies strive for excellence at every level, they’re much more likely to achieve long-term success, no matter how quickly they’re growing!
Find out more and hear additional sales and business growth best practices in Season 2, Episode 5 of The Grow Show.
