Choosing staff augmentation for the first can be nerve-wracking.
The thought of all that could go wrong with opening your business up to external personnel to work with your team may fill your mind with doubt as a founder who has been able to identify the need to add more capacity to his team.
If you’re in this type of situation, our founder’s guide to staff augmentation and tips for IT staff augmentation should be of help to you.
However you may ask, what about founders who can’t quickly identify when it’s time to boost their staff’s capacity? How can we help them do so?
Well, this article aims to do just that.
For the next few minutes, I’ll help you develop your ability to determine if and when you should add external staff to your team and how to go about it.
Starting with what you need to know to kickstart staff augmenting.
How to go about staff augmentation
I listed two articles above that detail what to do when you’ve determined the need to add more capacity to your workforce as a founder. I want to encourage you again to check them out.
The staff augmentation journey traditionally starts with the search for an agency.
In fact, one could say that this is the most important step.
Going on the internet to search for, compare and choose a staff augmentation agency with features that align with your needs makes all those thoughts about what could go wrong we talked about earlier a non-issue.
Staffing agencies have different features.
Some only serve niche industries and in a lot of cases going with an agency that only serves clients in your industry could make using contingent staff less risky.
The next step after choosing an agency typically involves doing a cost-benefit analysis.
Again, I discussed how to do this in detail in one of the articles linked above.
There are some more steps after your cost-benefit analysis but they are only to make sure that you get the best out of the human capital allotted to you.
In essence, the two steps listed here are the most important steps you need to take to kickstart your staff augmentation journey so keep them in mind.
Can you answer one or more of these questions?
Now coming to the premise of this article.
Being able to identify when to start looking for more people to help your team achieve tasks is not hard.
Staff augmentation aims to enhance your in-house manpower by offering human resources with diverse areas of expertise not currently available or with similar expertise to expedite the achievement of objectives.
What this means is that the moment you begin to notice any or multiple of the following signs in your team is more than likely the moment you need to kickstart your staff augmentation journey:
- Your product or service is consistently late on updates or upgrades
- There are always piles of tasks to be done
- You constantly have to stretch your team to meet deadlines or implement features
- Your team is massively demotivated and quitting.
All these symptoms and signs indicate a team that requires a boost.
As a founder, If your team exhibits one or more of these, you might want to start looking into augmenting and adding capacity to re-energize and strengthen.
In conclusion, keenly observing your team and business to identify areas of improvement, even when the tips listed in this section may not appear evident, will give you insights on the actions you need to take.
Ultimately, staff augmentation might be the thing. If this turns out to be the case, please do not hesitate to reach out to our team for consultation. Feel free to get a sense of our staffing solutions.