How to Scale Your Operations Without Scaling Your Headcount

One of the largest limitations for most smaller companies (and bigger, too, in many cases) is that they have to significantly expand their workforces during the expansion of operations. For example, a company selling clothing needs to recruit multiple people while opening new stores. The biggest problem with the expansion of the workforce is that it significantly expands the complexity of controlling a company. A business with 2 employees usually does not require a lot of management. A business with 1000 employees will need multiple managers and even a full-scale management hierarchy to function successfully. Today, we want to discuss a technology that can help you scale your operations without the need to massively increase workforces by assembling large management teams and establishing complex data collection processes. This technology is no-code development: it makes application creation accessible and easy to use, both for smaller and larger companies.

Setting up Process Automation at a Low Cost

As we've mentioned before, the biggest expenditures during expansion are connected to management. It is not enough to find efficient employees for on-site tasks. You also have to ensure that they receive sufficient work on time and, more importantly, do tasks that are rational from the organizational standpoint. However talented your workforce is, incorrect allocation of tasks can completely negate any of their strengths. The correct allocation of tasks is the main goal of managers, who are supposed to build communication, collect information, and oversee work quality. All these tasks require large numbers of workers and complex supporting infrastructure. It is not surprising that most organizational problems in both large and smaller businesses stem from the misallocation of managerial efforts. Legacy organizational structures often require too many specialists and focus on an excessively large number of manual approvals.

Modern no-code tools enable us to finally overcome this problem and automate many managerial tasks, freeing up managers' time and allowing them to focus on tasks that were considered secondary in the past. Many platforms allow managers to automate tasks that took hours of daily work time in the past. Custom Make.com app development, for instance, allows managers to automate complex workflows personally or, in the largest-scale cases, with the help of professional developers. 

Let's imagine that your managers have to send multiple questionnaires about product quality daily to various factory workers. In the past, one could automate email sending, but constant changes in processes would likely require manual checking. More importantly, questionnaires themselves would also have to be checked manually. Modern apps can be configured to check most of the information automatically by looking at the most important variables and alerting the managers if something requires their personal attention. Services like Make.com and Bubble appeared before the AI boom, making this sort of automation possible even without generative artificial technologies. Modern AI can further automate those processes: services like Make.com enable you to integrate it seamlessly into the existing processes to check whether various tasks are done correctly, not only based on pre-made scripts but also on the basis of more flexible tools.

Decreasing Paperwork

One of the main tasks of management in modern companies is to analyze information on-site and, more importantly, communicate company leadership decisions to the workers. Data collection usually requires a lot of paperwork: managers have to record many variables and then form them into high-quality and easy-to-read documents for higher-ups. No-code platforms like Make.com allow them to automate this data collection, minimizing the number of steps necessary to send information. While some manual reporting will certainly be necessary even in a highly automated environment, most numbers and even qualitative information can be collected with minimal human intervention. This decreased paperwork is essential for improving communication between various departments. 

Firstly, expansion will no longer require a corresponding significant increase in the number of managers. In many cases, either no further expansion or minimal expansion will be necessary. This means that there will be no need to adjust newcomers to the internal company processes. The already present managers will be able to preserve the existing communication channels, preventing large-scale disruptions in the spread of information. Secondly, automation tools like Make.com can quickly spread information through the whole managerial hierarchy, requiring no manual reporting for some business variables, which can take months to reach upper management in some organizations.

Speeding up Communication

Lastly, tools like Make.com are also essential for speeding up communication among various employees. A common problem for many companies during scaling is that they underestimate the number of managers necessary for expansion. There is a widespread misconception that a linear growth in the number of, for example, store departments will require a similarly linear expansion in the number of managers. In reality, the number of necessary managers grows faster than the number of company subdivisions due to the growing complexity of the internal information flows. As a result, many expansions lead to situations where on-site employees end up with disrupted communication, having limited contact with their managers. This can lead to both inefficiencies in production (for example, if necessary instructions do not reach employees on time) and even some conflicts, which may arise out of various communication delays. 

Automated systems based on, for instance, Make.com or Bubble can resolve this problem. It is possible to create employee-centric dashboards, where they can access the necessary information without having to constantly address their managers. This will enable them to make more autonomous choices and allow managers to focus on tasks that cannot be automated and require personal intervention. While digital automation does not always make the expansion of the workforce unnecessary during scaling, it usually is more than enough to prevent uncontrolled expansion that can eventually lead to the rise of a dysfunctional organizational system.

Conclusion

To summarize, modern automation tools like Make.com enable managers to significantly increase the number of tasks they perform without requiring a similar increase in work time. They can automate data collection or information visualization via comfortable graphical user interfaces. In case very complex automation is necessary, it is also possible to address software development companies like Keenethics to ensure every process runs smoothly. With the rise of technologies like AI, this type of automation is becoming increasingly more accessible and efficient, allowing many companies to expand operations in a healthy manner and without an uncontrollable growth of their management departments.