We Need More People.

Sometimes the problem isn’t how much work there is, but how much work it takes to get the work done.

I’ve heard some version of this many times over the years:

“We need more people.”

Usually, there are good reasons for saying it.

The company has grown. There are more customers, more projects and more things happening at the same time. Deadlines start slipping. Managers are stretched. People who used to leave at a reasonable hour are working later.

At that point, hiring seems like the logical thing to do.

And very often, it is.

I know how reasonable that conclusion can feel because I’ve made it myself.

In 2022, Soluntech went from around 22 people to almost 60. We had ambitious growth targets, and we were trying to build the organization we thought we would need to reach them.

We didn’t just hire more developers. We became much more specialized. We added dedicated marketing design, copywriting, code review, more UX designers, more frontend and backend developers, DevOps, and even created an innovation area with its own development capacity.

At the time, there was logic behind those decisions. We wanted to grow, and we believed building more capacity would help us get there.

It didn’t work the way we expected.

Revenue didn’t grow enough to support the organization we had built. Our cost structure became heavier, which eventually made us less competitive on price. By 2023, we had to correct course and make the company significantly leaner.

I don’t think the lesson was simply that we hired too many people. That would be an easy conclusion to draw in hindsight.

What stayed with me was something more uncomfortable: we had increased our capacity to do things without necessarily increasing our capacity to grow.

Those are not always the same thing.

I Started Wondering Where All the Capacity Was Going

When someone tells me their team is overloaded, it’s tempting to picture people spending every available hour doing the work customers are paying the company to do.

But that’s rarely how a day actually works.

Someone is waiting for information before they can continue.

Another person receives something incomplete and sends it back.

A customer asks for an exception, so a manager gets involved. The manager needs Finance. Finance has different information, so somebody has to figure out which version is correct.

There are meetings to make sure everyone is aligned. Messages asking for clarification. Information copied from one place to another. People checking with someone who remembers why something was done a particular way three years ago.

None of this looks especially alarming when you see it individually.

And importantly, everyone really is working.

That’s what makes this difficult to diagnose.

The problem isn’t that people are wasting their time. Most of them are doing exactly what the organization requires them to do in order to move something forward.

I began to wonder whether, in some companies, what looks like insufficient capacity is actually capacity being consumed by the way work moves through the organization.

That is a different problem.

More People Can Help. But They Also Become Part of the System.

There’s something about hiring that I think I underestimated earlier in my career.

When you add a person, you obviously add capacity.

But you also add another person who needs information from other people, attends meetings, participates in handoffs, asks questions, makes decisions and depends on other parts of the organization to get their job done.

That’s not an argument against hiring. It’s simply part of what happens when organizations get larger.

A process that worked almost effortlessly when everyone sat close to each other can become surprisingly complicated a few years later.

Not because anybody designed it badly.

The company just grew around it.

There are now more customers, more exceptions, more systems and more people involved. Information that used to travel through a quick conversation now has to cross departments.

And every time work crosses one of those boundaries, there is a chance that something is missing, misunderstood or needs to be clarified.

At some point, you can add another person to solve the pressure and discover that part of their capacity is immediately spent navigating the same complexity that was consuming everyone else’s capacity.

I’ve come to think that this is one reason some companies can grow their headcount significantly without feeling proportionally more capable. They added people, but in the process they may also have increased the amount of work required to coordinate those people.

The Confusing Part Is That Everyone Looks Busy

This is probably what makes the problem hardest for a CEO to see.

If you walk through the company, nobody appears underutilized.

Quite the opposite.

Calendars are full. Slack is busy. Managers are answering questions all day. People are solving problems. Everyone has a perfectly reasonable explanation for why they need another person.

So when a manager asks for additional headcount, the evidence seems to support the request.

Sometimes that manager is absolutely right.

But I’ve become more cautious about using busyness itself as evidence that a team is understaffed.

Because there are at least two very different ways a company can become overloaded.

One is that there is simply more valuable work than the existing team can reasonably handle.

The other is that doing the work has gradually started requiring too much work.

From the outside, those situations can look almost identical.

Their solutions probably aren’t.

I Wouldn’t Start With an Efficiency Initiative Either

The obvious reaction could be to swing in the other direction.

Freeze hiring. Cut meetings. Automate things. Tell everyone to become more efficient.

I don’t think that’s necessarily the answer.

Companies need coordination. Some work genuinely requires several people. Exceptions are part of business. And sometimes an extra meeting saves considerably more time than it consumes.

I also wouldn’t assume that technology is the solution. If you don’t understand why work is getting stuck or bouncing between people, adding another system can simply give everyone another place to look.

I think I would start much smaller.

Take a few pieces of real work and follow them.

Not the process diagram. What actually happened.

Where did the work stop?

What was someone waiting for?

Why did it go backward?

Why did that manager need to get involved?

Why did three departments need to discuss that exception?

Why did somebody have to ask a colleague for information that theoretically already existed somewhere?

You may discover that the team really does need another person.

That’s a perfectly good answer.

But you may also discover that some of the capacity you were planning to buy already exists inside the company. It’s just being consumed somewhere you weren’t looking.

So Now I Ask a Different Question

I still take “we need more people” seriously.

Growing companies eventually need more people. There’s no management philosophy that changes that.

I’m just less willing than I used to be to assume that being overloaded automatically means being understaffed.

Before adding another person, I think it’s worth understanding what the people already there are being asked to absorb.

More customer work?

Good. You may need capacity.

But if a meaningful part of the pressure comes from waiting, clarifying, reconciling, re-entering, escalating and coordinating, adding people may relieve the symptoms without changing what created them.

So there’s a question I find useful before the next hire:

If we added 20% more people tomorrow, what would actually become 20% better?

If the answer is clear, hiring may be exactly what the company needs.

If it isn’t, I’d want to understand where the capacity we already have is going first.