How to grow your startup’s team without getting out of breath

What should a job look like so that you would like to clock in every morning?

That’s the question myself and Paweł, Versum’s co-founder, were tackling while we were still college students building our startup from scratch. Team building has been and will always be the most important part of this journey for us. Today, our team consists of 140 people and in the next few years, we want to at least double the number. Versum is growing rapidly, but the approach to managing people remains the same. We still want everyone to come to work content, feel that their passion is fulfilled and be proud that they are doing something good for both the beauty and SaaS industries.

The question from the very beginning of this article is part of our daily business and HR decisions. And here’s another one: How to transform a small start-up into a large, international organization, and keep the subjectivity (and not objectivity) of each person on our expanding team?

Our human capital philosophy quite makes us stand out among many other companies and we believe that it is one of the crucial building blocks of our success. Here, I will share our winning approach and what else is ahead of us — in the short and the long term — an important component of our strategy to maintain both the growth rate and the startup culture.

Today

1. Satisfaction first

If you work with us, we want you to feel truly satisfied. In other words, our goal is a happy team, and we are well aware that for every single person, satisfaction will result from different factors. It is not necessarily just a salary: more often it’s the mix of the environment, a well-chosen range of responsibilities and whether what we do makes sense to us. You need to actively manage these puzzles. The dissatisfaction of one person in the team affects other colleagues, and may also be the reason for the team’s weaker results. At Versum, we try to avoid such situations and act proactively. What undeniably helps is the fact that we have a psychologist in the company who is able to quickly detect difficult situations and remedy them in time.

2. Open communication

Already during the onboarding process for new hires, we emphasize the importance of open communication. We are open to all opinions, brainstorming and intense discussions. The ideas and insights of new people in the team are valuable. Thanks to the newcomers’ fresh approach, we can constantly develop and improve existing processes.

In addition, everyone on the team is encouraged to give each other open feedback (regardless of seniority). Thanks to this we can constantly develop and be better at what we do.

At Versum, we treat unnamed problems as non-existent and we encourage everyone to openly share any comments to solve all issues as quickly as possible before they escalate.

3. Facts vs. emotions

We also take care to speak constructively about any issues. We try not to mix facts and emotions as much as possible. We train everyone to discuss facts and aptly name emotions. Thanks to that, we can come to better conclusions.

We also expect open and constructive criticism. You don’t fancy someone’s presentation, for instance? Point out the mistakes, but never criticize the person, so that the author of the presentation knows that you evaluate the product, not them. At Versum, projects are not an extension of our ego. This approach saves us unnecessary misunderstandings. At the end of the day, we all play to one goal. Open and friendly criticism is an opportunity to constantly improve the quality of our work, and thus the business results.

4. No shortness of breath

In a fast-growing startup, change is the only constant. Versum is a place for people who are not afraid of changes, open to new experiences, hungry for knowledge and development. People who adhere to the principle: “Let it be as it was” will probably burn out quite quickly and get breathless. Stagnation? Weariness? Not with us.

5. Better than ourselves are welcome

Although hardly anyone likes to admit it, managers are often afraid to employ people better than themselves. Consciously or subconsciously, many tend to avoid it. You might have heard a manager say they are not interested in a candidate who already has such broad experience that they will probably be bored doing any job. The truth is that in such a case the manager is simply afraid of losing their position. We have a simple antidote for it. First of all, boredom doesn’t happen on our watch. Secondly, having an appetite for being a large international organization, we need to bring in specialists who are not only better than ourselves but also have experience in large multinational companies.

6. Thank you for not being nasty

When we employ someone, we gain both talent and a human being for the organization. It is important to us that the new person will bring the sought-after competencies but also find a place in the team. There are two important issues to keep in mind here. The first is the satisfaction of the newly hired person. The second — and equally important — is maintaining the well-being of the existing team. At the same time, we want to upkeep the dynamic business growth.

That’s why while making recruitment decisions we answer two questions: 1) will a given person provide results for our business?; and 2) will our organization satisfy a particular person in the long run?

Put blunt, we do not hire jerks, frustrates, and conflictive people, even if they have impressive qualifications. We know that one such person can poison the atmosphere, and therefore results, even in the best team. It also happens that we employ a cool person with a good attitude but without experience.

Tomorrow

1. Recruitment while growing

One of the challenges that await a company such as Versum, whose team has grown from several to several hundred in a few years, is to recruit high-level specialists who have experience in managing a large organization. For them, working at Versum is an opportunity to help build a company that will become a global player in the industry. In much larger businesses, all processes have long been established, so the impact of individuals on the organization is close to none. With us, you can be in the center and literally build the company from scratch.

2. Distribution of knowledge

When our team was small at the beginning, everyone knew what to do and how. Today, it is simply not feasible. Wherever possible, we create processes and we will keep doing so. And all this so that our know-how would not be locked in the brain of one or two people. We store our knowledge in documents, videos, training materials, and processes. In order to be able to use the experience and knowledge we have, we need to systematize it and make it available to new hires everywhere.

3. Thriving in a distributed model

The times of one small office are long behind us. Today, our HQ occupies three floors, and we have offices and team members in other cities and countries: Poland, Mexico, Brazil, Romania, Sweden, and Egypt. We work across borders, continents and time zones, but we are still one team. Distribution of knowledge is one thing that we have to take care of. Open communication, the delegation of tasks and processes, effective management, and addressing cultural differences are next on our list of priorities. We put a lot of effort into it and we will continue to do so because the return on investment comes in excess. We have access to talent and skills around the world. Having a good team, we can build everything.

The future

This is all just the beginning. More work and challenges are ahead of us — an even bigger team, an even larger structure, different continents, different time zones, offices with people from different cultures. The challenge, however, will be to maintain the same management philosophy wherever we are so that everyone in all countries would feel part of the Versum team and understand where we are going.