Little tips to expand your team

Team growth and expansion are an increasing points of focus to team success and future.

In this post, we’ll outline steps for efficiently guaranteeing the growth and expansion of your tech team or company.

1. Understanding Your Team

It’s difficult to good growth without a firm understanding of your current organization and its excelling as well as weak points. Before spending too much time on tactics aimed at bolstering inclusivity, start by looking for issues pertaining to:

• Market Demands: This helps to know what team skills and strengths to enhance, grow and improve on. Properly understanding targeted market demands and requirements ensures that your team stays abreast and up-to-date with clients requests. It might even be necessary to have team section dedicated to these kinds of stuff. You get!
• Hiring Decisions: When hiring, the understanding of core need(s) of your tech team goes a long way in enhancing the knowledge from the point above. Any recruitment decision at this point in time should be to fulfill the need of the team. While hiring, it might also be helpful to keep team diversity in mind though this should not alter team efficiency in any way.
• Focus on what works: Being good at what you do enhances productivity and maximization of outputs. When a skill acquisition is still in young stage, for example, just started learning Angular, it might only help to involve this in trial projects etc. While trying to advance a skill, do not compromise productivity, efficiency and client satisfaction for your personally preferred solution in mind. This can affect your team skillset demands from future clients.
• Keep clear records: While working and creating impacts along the way, it is quite easy to forget or overlook the need to record some information about current status, team strenths, weaknesses and others. It is important to keep record as this would help to know when and how the team is fairing (growing or otherwise). It would also help investors, some clients as well as incoming team members to understand the goals, vision and challenges of the team and where to come in.

2. Set Specific and Realistic Goals

After digging deeper and looking at your data, you may start to feel a bit overwhelmed. Remember, no organization is perfectly grown yet (all still improve on solutions and approaches), which means you’re bound to identify issues that require attention.

Since you can’t fix everything immediately, it’s probably best to focus on a handful of specific, yet realistic goals. For example, let’s imagine that your analysis indicates that only 10% of senior-level developers are female. Aspiring to increase this number to 50% by year’s end, while specific (and laudable), is probably not very realistic.

So, how can you find the right balance when setting diversity and inclusion goals? A simple solution involves studying what other tech companies are doing. For example, our friends at Cairo have done an excellent job in identifying clear and attainable goals. Case in point, as outlined in the teams’s report data, one goal is to “increase the percentage of Black and Hispanic Gusties to 10%,” which would represent a two-point increase from the former level of 8%.

In short, don’t try to do too much all at once. Set goals that challenge the status quo but are also attainable.

3. Implement Technologies that Decreases Hiring Biases

As team growth and expansion become ingrained into the company's culture, your team will begin to identify opportunities for improvement. Innovative technology, in particular, will likely be a major topic of such conversations.

For example, modern recruitment programs can eliminating biases, unlike the traditional hiring methodologies (that overemphasize educational pedigree and work history) from the hiring process by providing insight into each developer’s true abilities, allowing your company to:

• Harness Data-Driven Analytics
• Anonymize Candidate Demographics