6 Signs Indicating That It's Time to Hire and Expand Your Team

Chasing growth presents a unique set of challenges. You've landed new clients or have a surge in product demand and now need to ensure you can deliver on your business commitments.

Recognising the signs that it's time to hire and expand your workforce is essential for maintaining the momentum you've built across your markets. So, how do you know when to take the leap and build a truly resilient team?

Here are 6 key indicators:

1. Your customers aren’t happy

A surefire sign of trouble is a rise in customer dissatisfaction. Are response times lagging? Are mistakes becoming more frequent? According to a Gartner report, 80% of customers are likely to do business with a company again if they had a value enhancement during the service period. If your team is stretched thin, customer service suffers. Long wait times for phone support, slow response times to emails, and missed deadlines all contribute to customer frustration.

The dissatisfaction may show through:

More negative reviews and complaints: As your team gets stretched thin trying to handle the current workload, service and quality can start to decline. This leads customers to leave bad reviews and lodge complaints about everything, from long wait times to shoddy work.

More requests for refunds or corrections: When a short-staffed team has to rush through projects, the results will contain more errors and defects. Customers will ask for refunds or for your team to redo or fix the work.

A negative reputation can quickly derail your progress. Hiring additional staff allows you to dedicate resources to providing exceptional customer service, providing quality service, and fostering loyalty and repeat business.

2. Quality Takes a Dive: When Errors Become the Norm

When your team is overworked, quality inevitably suffers. Missed deadlines, errors in work, and a general decline in productivity have become commonplace. Disengaged employees who feel overwhelmed are more likely to make mistakes and cut corners. This can lead to costly rework, missed opportunities, and damage to your brand reputation.

As your team struggles to keep up with the growing workload, you may find yourself relying more heavily on outsourcing certain tasks or projects. While outsourcing can provide short-term relief, over-reliance on outside vendors can be detrimental in the long run.

By hiring and expanding your team, you can distribute the workload more evenly. This can reduce errors, improve the quality of your products or services, enhance your business reputation, and increase customer satisfaction.

3. Revolving Door: The High Cost of Employee Turnover

High employee turnover isn't just frustrating, it's financially draining, especially for organisations with complex hiring processes. High turnover results in constant recruiting, hiring, and training costs. It also negatively impacts morale, as remaining employees take on extra workloads.

Ultimately, it hinders an organisation's ability to operate smoothly and serve customers well. If your turnover rate is higher than your industry average, it indicates a need to improve talent retention through better HR practices.

When your team members, both salaried and contracted, are consistently working overtime or exceeding their typical schedules, it's a clear sign your workforce is stretched thin. This can manifest in several ways: salaried employees exceeding 40 hours per week, contract workers going beyond the originally agreed-upon scope of their project, or even a rise in employee sick leave due to stress. These workload pressures can also lead to a decline in employee engagement, impacting motivation and overall productivity. Ultimately, a consistently overworked team, regardless of contract type, is susceptible to burnout, which can result in increased errors and a higher risk of turnover.

Hiring additional staff allows you to distribute the workload globally, reduce burnout, and create a positive work environment that fosters retention across your international teams.

4. Turning Down Business: Leaving Opportunities on the Table

Imagine a lucrative new market presenting itself, but your existing teams cannot handle it. This is a missed opportunity for growth and lost revenue. This can negatively impact your business in several ways:

Forced to turn away new clients: When you lack the bandwidth and resources to take on additional work, you have to say no to new clients even if you want their business. This results in lost opportunities and revenue.

Lose out on potential revenue: By not having the capacity to serve new clients, you miss out on income those accounts could have generated. Your business growth stalls without the influx of new revenue streams.

Reputation suffers: Turning away new clients frequently can hurt your reputation. You may gain a perception of being unreliable or too busy. Excellent client service and responsiveness are important for continued referrals and word-of-mouth marketing.

Companies that invest in hiring during economic expansions see a significant boost in future sales. Hiring additional staff with regional expertise allows you to take advantage of new market opportunities, expand your footprint, and fuel sustainable growth.

5. When you plan an expansion: You need a stronger team

Your sights are set on ambitious expansion plans. But how do you enter new markets, develop innovative products, and scale your operations without becoming overwhelmed?

If you attempt to expand while relying on the same number of employees, you'll spread everyone too thin. Existing employees will be overworked trying to handle their regular duties plus the new expansion projects. This will lead to burnout, mistakes, and delays.

To successfully implement your growth plans, you may need to add more people, both full-time hires and strategically placed contract workers. This allows you to scale up your capabilities at the same rate as your business grows. The right hires, whether permanent or contracted, can bring the specialised skills and capacity your expansion demands.

Contract workers can be particularly effective in filling critical roles during growth phases, providing a flexible solution to immediate needs. They can own new projects, lift the burden from your current staff, and free them up to focus on core functions.

Team expansion is about building a well-coordinated unit with the skills and resources necessary to propel your expansion plans.

6. Little time for innovation, strategic research and implementation

When everyone is focused on keeping up with day-to-day operations across different regions, there's no time to brainstorm new ideas or explore strategic growth opportunities tailored to specific markets. But innovation is the lifeblood of any successful organisation.

When employees are so busy trying to keep up with current workloads, they have no time to step back and find ways to work smarter or identify new opportunities.

This lack of innovation is a huge missed opportunity. New ideas, processes, and offerings are how companies stay competitive and continue growing. Being so heads-down on immediate work prevents organisations from evolving. Bringing on additional staff can free up leadership's availability. With more people to share the workload, leaders can carve out time for strategic thinking. They can look at the bigger picture, explore new ideas, and pilot innovations.

Strategic team expansion for continued growth

Even hiring one employee requires a strategic approach. To make sure the additional investment is made for the right reasons at the right time, a compelling business case must be presented to senior leadership.

Partner with a skilled recruiter to conduct a comprehensive skills assessment and determine the perfect mix of permanent, contract, or consulting talent—individuals who can bring new skills to your team.

By strategically adding individuals with diverse expertise, regional knowledge, and a passion for innovation, you'll create an organisation equipped to expand, develop new ways of working efficiently and effectively, and propel your business towards long-term success.