Before You Hire More People, Look at the Work They’re Already Doing

Imagine this: One of your employees spends three to four hours every day preparing a report nobody reads.

That’s what an operational review uncovered at a natural gas company.

The employee had been gathering information from spreadsheets, preparing the report, and delivering it as expected. The process was so firmly established that nobody questioned whether the report was still needed.

Now consider what happens when the business grows.

Does the employee spend even more time preparing reports? Does the organization eventually hire someone to help manage the workload?

The question isn’t whether the employee is productive. It’s whether the work is necessary.

For natural gas leaders evaluating staffing needs, that distinction could change the conversation.

When More Business Means More Work

Now, bring that same question into a company preparing to expand its customer base.

The opportunity looks promising, but its operations team is already stretched.

Schedulers are managing exceptions, billing employees are resolving discrepancies, and experienced staff members are answering questions that others don’t know how to handle.

Leadership begins discussing additional headcount.

It’s a reasonable response. But before making that investment, consider how much of the team’s workload is necessary to serve customers and how much exists because of established processes.

Take a billing department where employees manually verify contract terms against information entered into another system.

As transaction volume increases, so does the time required for verification. Hiring another employee could help manage the workload, but the underlying process remains unchanged.

The organization has added capacity to perform the work without addressing why so much manual intervention is necessary.

That approach may solve an immediate staffing problem while creating a longer-term growth limitation.

What Your Workarounds Might Reveal

One of the best places to investigate operational capacity is the spreadsheets your employees rely on every day. These spreadsheets often begin as practical solutions.

Someone needs information that isn’t readily available, develops a way to reconcile inconsistent records, or creates a calculation the existing system doesn’t support.

The solution works, so it becomes part of the process.

Eventually, the organization may depend on that spreadsheet and the employee who understands how to maintain it.

Rather than treating spreadsheets as problems to eliminate, leaders can use them to uncover where existing systems and processes aren’t adequately supporting the work.

Ask why a spreadsheet was created and what would happen if the person who maintains it were unavailable.

Could another qualified employee step into that role tomorrow and continue the work without significant disruption?

When routine processes depend on one person’s knowledge or undocumented decisions, the organization becomes vulnerable to disruptions, particularly as experienced employees retire or move into other roles.

Preserving that expertise matters. So does ensuring employees have the capacity to use it where their judgment matters most.

Are Your People Doing the Work That Needs Their Expertise?

Consider an experienced natural gas scheduler.

Their value extends beyond entering nominations and reconciling volumes. They understand contract requirements, changing conditions, customer needs, and the operational implications of potential imbalances.

That experience becomes particularly valuable when circumstances don’t follow the expected pattern.

But hours spent gathering information from multiple systems or resolving preventable discrepancies leave less time for decisions requiring that judgment.

The same challenge exists in billing, contract management, and other operational functions.

This is where intelligent automation presents an opportunity that goes beyond processing transactions faster.

Which activities genuinely require human judgment, and which could be handled more consistently through better processes and technology?

The distinction matters.

Routine activities governed by consistent rules may be candidates for automation. Exceptions, changing conditions, and consequential decisions may continue to require experienced employees supported by reliable information.

For a growing organization, the potential benefit is significant: Employees can devote more attention to work that draws on their expertise while routine activities become less dependent on manual intervention.

That doesn’t mean growth will never require additional staff.

It means leaders can make more informed staffing decisions when they understand how effectively their existing employees’ capabilities are being used.

What Happens When You Scale a Flawed Process?

Consider a natural gas contract with multiple pricing tiers and adjustments.

During contract setup, someone enters a volume threshold incorrectly into the billing system.

Every month, the system generates invoices without flagging an exception. The calculations match the information entered, but that information doesn’t match the contract.

Months later, an audit uncovers the discrepancy. By then, contractual recovery windows may have closed on some of the underbilled amounts.

The system performed exactly as instructed. The problem was the information it relied on.

Now consider what happens when an organization automates that same process across hundreds of transactions.

Greater processing capacity doesn’t necessarily mean greater operational effectiveness.

Without reliable data and appropriate controls, automation can allow errors to continue across a larger volume of business.

That’s why scaling requires leaders to consider more than how quickly transactions can be processed.

They need confidence that contract terms, operational information, and financial records remain consistent as work moves through the organization.

They also need to understand how exceptions will be identified and who will resolve them.

Otherwise, the organization may become more efficient at producing problems its employees must later correct.

Before Your Next Staffing Decision

The next time increasing workloads prompt a discussion about hiring, consider examining one process that’s consuming significant employee time.

Follow the work as it actually happens, including the spreadsheets, emails, manual entries, and informal steps that may never appear in an official procedure.

Then ask what would happen if transaction volume increased substantially.

Would the process accommodate that growth, or would employees simply have more of the same work to perform?

Could another qualified person manage the process if its usual owner were unavailable?

And does the information supporting the work remain consistent from beginning to end?

The answers may reveal opportunities to improve capacity before committing to additional resources.

Sometimes the opportunity is a process that could be standardized. In other cases, employees may be spending valuable time reconciling information that should already be consistent.

And occasionally, as with the employee preparing an unread report, the most useful discovery is that the work no longer needs to happen at all.

The larger leadership question is whether the organization is making the best use of its existing capacity.

Because adding people to an inefficient process doesn’t necessarily make the organization better prepared to grow.

From Recognizing the Problem to Scaling More Intelligently

Identifying unnecessary work is a starting point. The next challenge is determining where automation can create meaningful capacity, what information it needs to work reliably, and where experienced employees should remain central to the process.

These are the decisions we’ll explore in the next session of SGA’s From Operational Excellence to Market Leadership executive workshop series.