Organizational drift – the slow slipping of standards over time – affects staffing firms in a number of ways. Some of those effects are more immediate: payroll errors that cost workers time and the company money, or sales teams taking on disadvantageous contracts that threaten profitability.
Other effects are more long-term: misaligned processes that slow onboarding and increase employee churn, or wasted investments in new technologies that can’t be fully taken advantage of because data is inaccurate or non-actionable.
In part one of this series we discussed how the current push towards AI presents a newfound opportunity for staffing firms to perfect their digital transformation. Given that 70% of digital transformations don’t hit the mark, it’s more important now than ever to get it right. In part two we dug into the true cost of organizational drift and how that holds firms back from reaching their full potential for efficiency and profitability.
Now that we’ve identified what organizational drift looks like, let’s dive into how it can be addressed, and what staffing firms have to gain when they get their processes in order.
Creating a “No-Blame” Culture
When organizational drift rears its head, the damage felt can be frustrating. Your business is missing placement opportunities, error rates are on the rise, maybe you’re fielding angry phone calls from workers who are waiting to be paid. It can create an air of tension and harm workplace culture.
During those tense moments it’s a natural reaction to want to assign blame. If there was an error, somebody must have done something wrong, and they need to be reprimanded or held accountable for that error.
While it’s understandable, it’s important to reject that impulse. More often than not, individual team members aren’t the cause of these issues, but rather a symptom of faulty or nonexistent processes.
As Teresa Mullen writes for Crisis Response Journal:
“To put it simply, systems are rarely flawless; people are rarely a root cause of an unwanted outcome and so the solution does not lie in ‘fixing the worker’ by trying to make his or her behaviour more compliant – people are not the problem to be solved, they are the solution to be harnessed.”
In order to correct organizational drift, it requires the input, buy-in, and execution by every team member individually. Creating a no-blame culture can not only help you better understand where processes are failing, but can create the feedback and process correction needed to remedy drift going forward.
This cultural framework begins at the top. C-suite members and team leaders need to look at organizational drift from a holistic perspective, not merely the product of one error or one employee that may have caused it. Accountability trickles down, and creating an open dialogue where identifying process miscues that cause errors is crucial to remedying them.
Only with that mindset can we truly address organizational drift and have fixes take root for long-term success.
Fixing Organizational Drift on an Operational Level: A Three-Step Playbook
Before you address drift in process, it’s important to reiterate how much your team is your most valuable asset to achieve your goals. The team members that use your systems every day have first-hand, front-line knowledge of the way work is actually done versus how you think it should be done.
Fostering open dialogue where there are no wrong answers is the fastest way to get the intended results that can have the biggest impact on your organization.
With that said, let’s take a look at three steps to remedying organizational drift.
Step One: Creating a Process Audit Strategy
Building a process audit strategy begins by identifying key stakeholders across the front, middle, and back office of your operations. This identification process should be done by analyzing workflows rather than org charts. Instead of merely focusing on a cohort of team leaders, or a large group of one role type, you’ll want to identify a sample of workers who touch different aspects of workflows.
When identifying stakeholders, focus on team members who bridge workflows: recruiters who manually move candidates through the ATS and onboarding or back-office team members who move hired employees through payroll processing, for example.
Additionally, you can set your sights on workers in high-variance or time-sensitive roles. Desk-level recruiters, credentialing specialists, coordinators on high-volume accounts; these roles tend to be vectors for “hacks” and short-cut processes because the nature of their roles can require a lot of precise work needed in a short amount of time based on volume spikes.
While there is no perfect number of stakeholders to identify, it should be enough to build a relevant sample of processes throughout each department in the organization. For a smaller staffing firm, that could mean 10-12 stakeholders, and for a large firm with more than 250 employees that could mean as many as 50.
In addition to pinpointing stakeholders for more in-depth analysis, you can also present a more generalized survey that’s distributed to a larger cohort of team members to fill in any gaps and build a larger data set to more thoroughly audit process.
The next phase after stakeholder identification is understanding; conducting relevant interviews that get to the bottom of how work is actually done versus how it’s perceived to be done.
Within these interviews you can ask questions such as:
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- When you’re in a hurry, do you take shortcuts? If so, which ones?
- Do you use any programs outside of the main ATS/CRM?
- What bottlenecks do you experience? Do you have workarounds for them?
- Where do you go to find answers when something goes wrong?
Answering these questions and comparing the responses across your team can provide a fundamental understanding of where drift exists and enable you to put a plan in place to correct it.
Step Two: Building a Drift-Reduction Plan
Now that you’ve identified where drift occurs and how it presents itself, you’re able to put a plan in place to correct it.
The first phase is assigning ownership and clarifying responsibilities. One of the many causes of drift is a lack of understanding around individual roles. By delineating a clear picture of who does what and who approves what, you can clear those gray areas.
Next, build a robust set of standard operating procedures (SOPs) for each task and each role. This is the most labor-intensive part of drift reduction, but it’s also the most valuable. Research has shown that quality SOPs can reduce defect rates by 30-50% compared to unstandardized methodology. SOPs are guidelines for how processes should work, and act as a single source of truth to combat the kinds of ambiguity that lead to drift.
Writing (or rewriting) SOPs is also an opportunity to correct redundancies or unnecessary complexity within workflows. Within SOPs you’re able to take all of the knowledge you gleaned from front-line workers and put it into practice. Since you’ve created an open dialogue and a no-blame culture, the insights you learned can be used to influence your new processes. Sometimes shortcuts exist for a reason; your team is a fount of information that can guide better, more efficient processes going forward.
With SOPs crafted for all roles and processes at risk of drift, the final step is to retrain staff on the new playbook. These retrainings are a great way to level set, realign expectations, and start fresh with all team members. Around 20% of employee turnover happens within the first 45 days, typically as a result of a poor onboarding experience; so getting it right through sound process management is key.
This retraining process is exceptionally valuable when you have team members of varying tenures as well; you’re not only able to course correct for legacy employees who may have built their own workarounds over time, but you’re also able to start newer employees out on the right path.
Step Three: Making Your Efforts Sustainable in the Long-Term
Remember that drift is the slow slipping of standards over time. In your drift reduction plan, you’ve set new standards with your SOPs. The next challenge is maintaining those standards and ensuring that drift doesn’t rear its head again.
The first step for long-term sustainability is assigning ownership. For each team, or each workflow, there needs to be a stakeholder or small group of stakeholders that are responsible for maintaining adherence to SOPs. This responsibility also includes keeping SOPs updated; any changes that are agreed upon need to be put in place through SOPs with updated documentation.
Next, process audits are not a one-and-done thing. In order to curb drift, process audits need to take place at least once a year, but ideally quarterly. In addition to more formal audits, there should be ongoing dialogue and group sessions where teams are able to freely discuss processes: what’s working, what isn’t, how SOPs can be adjusted or amended based on new information.
If your project management software allows it, begin tracking process-related KPIs to have a more data-driven understanding of drift signs. Metrics like number of manual corrections, compliance rate, and process deviation rates can give tangible numbers behind drift symptoms.
Lastly, tie adherence to process to performance reviews. By incentivizing not only adherence to process but also detection of process flaws, you make each team member an advocate against drift.
What Staffing Firms Stand to Gain By Reducing Drift
Fixing organizational drift can be a major undertaking, especially for larger staffing firms. By investing the resources into fixing processes, however, you create a much healthier business in the long-term. Here are just some of the benefits of addressing organizational drift:
Faster Onboarding: It can be a lot for new employees to get in lockstep with an organization. By having concrete SOPs and an aligned staff, you minimize process variance and enable new hires to hit the ground running.
Making the Most of Tech Platforms: In many instances, when an organization feels a platform they’re paying for is no longer working for them, it’s not typically the platform’s fault. Rather, processes have slipped to where many of the functionalities of the platform are being worked around, or offloaded to disparate systems. By correcting drift, you enable your team to focus on the best use of your systems of record. The audit process can also reveal systems you’ve outgrown or don’t utilize in a way that justifies price.
Better Investment in New Technologies: The rise of AI and automation in staffing has the potential to transform operations: faster, better placements, more robust communication streams and engagement with talent and customers, deeper insights and metrics into what is and isn’t working with the business. Without clean data and best data practices, however, investments in these technologies may not yield optimal or reliable results. Studies have shown that investment in sound data governance can see a 132% return on investment, so in reality it just makes sound business sense.
Addressing organizational drift is an investment in the future of your business. By setting high standards and keeping your team up to them, the sky is the limit in a competitive staffing market.