Hiring Extra Employees vs. Adopting a Resource Management Solution: Сhoosing the Right Investment

Meeting the increasing demand: Hiring extra people vs. utilizing the existing resources 

Basically, there are two ways to meet the increasing demand for resources – to hire more employees and to optimize the utilization of the existing resources. When choosing between these two options, you should keep in mind that the first variant has certain limitations.  

• Hiring is always time-consuming: first, you have to find the right candidate, which can sometimes last for months. Second, it will take a while for them to learn the specificity of their work and become efficient in the new working environment. 
• Hiring is costly, and it’s a rather risky investment – you cannot be 100% sure that the new employee will produce high-quality output and won’t become a bottleneck for the whole project environment. Finally, it will take about half a year before a company can pay off the investment in the new employee, says the research. It means that you’ll have to postpone new projects as well as increasing profitability plans for a rather long period of time. 
• Newbies won’t deliver the required output immediately – according to the statisics, it takes about three to eight months for a new employee to become fully productive at work.

In contrast, optimizing the potential of existing resources has its own benefits. First, they are familiar with the working environment, an organization’s activities, work specificity, etc., so they don’t have to spend time on mastering these things. Second, you don’t have to spend extra money – existing employees get their monthly salaries no matter how many projects they are working on. Third, training available employees from other resource groups and assigning them to required tasks is faster and cheaper than hiring new people.

Of course, there are cases when you have to hire extra people no matter how efficient your existing resources are. But before you make such a decision, you have to make sure that your team members’ potential is utilized in the most efficient way. 

How to understand whether your teams can meet the increasing demand? Jump into the next section to find it out.

Delivering more output: Analyzing your teams’ capabilities and workflow efficiency

Before you decide on hiring extra people, you can answer the following questions.  

• Do the team members work on the highest-priority tasks? 

If they do bad multitasking instead of focusing on the most important work, they won’t be efficient enough. 

• Do you apply an effective approach to establishing tasks’ timelines?

If you set strict task deadlines or schedule tasks, it can reduce the efficiency of work – the team members will use all the time allotted for task completion even if they can cope with this amount of work faster. 

• Do you know exactly your resources’ capacity and demand? 

To make effective decisions, this data should be easily accessible and up-to-date. 

• Do the employees’ tasks correspond to their competence levels? 

If they are too difficult for them, they may complete them with a delay and hamper other team members’ work. If the tasks are too simple, the team members may feel unimportant and/or disengaged, which also won’t do good to the workflow. 

• Does the people’s workload correspond to their capacity?

If there’s even one overloaded resource group, it can become a bottleneck and negatively affect other projects due to dependencies between them. Idleness is also a tricky thing, as it’s really difficult to detect it. In both cases, team members’ productivity will be reduced. 

• Are there any roadblocks in the workflow?   

You should check whether there are any issues that block the flow – if they are resolved, it can turn out that your teams are capable of delivering more. 

Therefore, the team members’ ability to produce more output depends on the following things:

• Clear and correct priorities;
• Eliminating bad multitasking;
• Resource allocation with regard to employees’ competences, availability, and capacity;
• Proper workload management so that nobody becomes a bottleneck hampering the flow;
• Making informed management decisions based on real-time and historical data analytics.  

It’s almost impossible to meet all the above-mentioned requirements without the assistance of a comprehensive software solution. Modern project and resource management tools not only help manage projects, resources, and tasks but also increase the efficiency of project work and improve resource utilization. As a result, a company can deliver more projects with the same number of resources. Let’s take a closer look.