Making the most of your company’s existing resources became a cornerstone topic during COVID-19. As organizations rapidly adapted to unpredictable market conditions, it seemed like everyone’s focus shifted from growth to efficiency overnight.
Improving productivity and maintaining production with limited resources drove many business decisions between 2020 and 2021. However, while many businesses have seen productivity gains, they often aren’t sure what the next step is to create and maintain reliable growth. The key to adaptability and long-term growth is scalability.
To scale effectively, companies need to look beyond their existing resources and utilize new tools that can help them better leverage their workforce’s capabilities. Even with highly efficient processes, companies need scalability to optimize costs, gain a competitive edge and become more agile in an evolving market.
Here are the key differences you need to know between efficiency and scalability.
Efficiency vs. Scalability: What’s the Difference?
Supply and demand are at the heart of all business operations, and both efficiency and scalability help companies improve how they manage supply in the face of demand.
Efficiency focuses on making the best use of existing resources. Improving efficiency often means decreasing the time, labor, money, or materials needed to create the same output—like revenue or product. When a company offers services to its clients, we often align optimizing efficiency with improving productivity or achieving peak performance. Essentially, becoming more efficient means increasing supply to match consistent demand without expending more resources.
However, most companies hit a point where demand changes. Even with peak efficiency, these companies need to adapt to continue growing, reduce costs, and keep up with changes in demand. That’s where scalability comes in.
The goal of scalability is to expand a business's capabilities and manage a larger workload in a cost-effective way—and, importantly, to provide a reliable method of continuously adapting to increased demand over long periods of time. Typically, companies scale by introducing new technologies, workflows, and automation that maximize labor potential and rapidly enhance growth, cut costs and quickly adjust to changing market conditions.
70% of companies intend to hire more temporary workers and freelancers this year to optimize costs, increase flexibility, and tap into new talent pools.
Becoming more scalable commonly provides efficiency benefits, but improving efficiency alone doesn't help companies meet increasing demands or prepare them with long-term growth strategies.
Why Scalability is Important
Lately, companies have seen firsthand how many circumstances have dramatically impacted the global supply chain. As resource availability, the labor market, and client demands change, modern companies are discovering how important it is to maintain agile operations practices.
By 2026, business leaders expect 50% of their revenue will come from products or services that don’t exist yet.
In today’s business environment, efficient processes alone won’t help a company move fast enough to adapt to evolving market conditions. Scalability is becoming increasingly important for companies to keep up with their competitors, let alone grow and increase revenue.
Scalability gives companies the direction and support they need to help their business shift priorities quickly, deliver consistent outcomes, and maintain efficiency as the organization grows. By improving scalability, companies can realize a higher return on investment across multiple areas of the business.
Why Your HCM Needs to be Scalable
Many areas of your business offer opportunities for scalability, including people management. Managing and engaging employees play a critical role in your organization’s success, and flexible people processes are the secret to keeping your hiring, training, and people management practices agile.
84% of companies are prioritizing digital transformation for HR functions, with 85% motivated by cost savings and 75% inspired to improve effectiveness.
Leveraging workflow automation to streamline people processes is essential to boost onboarding outcomes, improve employee experience, and empower your company with increased organizational capacity. However, a scalable HCM doesn’t only enable your team to eliminate manual processes and cumbersome siloes across departments; the right HCM can also give organizations peak visibility into spending levels, headcount projections, revenue modeling, and employee growth opportunities that may otherwise go unnoticed.
Low-value administrative tasks are a huge and largely unnecessary expense for most organizations, costing $8.15 billion and 40 billion hours for large companies across the United States (U.S.) and the United Kingdom (U.K.) in 2021. By removing these administrative tasks from your team’s plate with HCM automation, your people experts can focus more on growth strategies and take advantage of new opportunities.
Building a Better Business with SyncHR
There’s no doubt that scalability is a must to build a better business in 2022 and beyond. If your company is already seeing the gains of improved efficiency, now is the time to consider your growth strategy and become more agile. With scalable resources like a modern HCM, your company can weather any market changes that come your way.
At SyncHR, we’re here to help with efficient, accurate, and cost-effective workforce management solutions. Our cutting-edge HCM makes it easy to introduce automation and scale your business to achieve exponential growth potential. To learn more about SyncHR, click here.
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John is responsible for SyncHR’s product, engineering, and system operations teams. He is focused on streamlining the business processes related to HCM and finance by distributing SyncHR to all members of the workforce and by using patented security and workflow to control these developments. John is also responsible for delivering SyncHR as a cloud based application with “extreme ratio” financial metrics.
He has a background in engineering, workplace applications, and business administration, bringing over 25 years of experience deploying strategic HCM applications. Prior to co-founding SyncHR, John was the CEO of Harbor Technologies, since acquired by Mellon Financial Corporation. Previous to Harbor Technology Group, he spent an internship with the Swiss Bank Corporation in their derivatives pricing and trading group and also worked as a senior manager for the US Navy. John received his Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and his Master of Business Administration from the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley.