Workday Podcast: Building a Culture Fit for Agility

This podcast was recorded before the global pandemic. While the world looks a lot different today, we believe this content remains valuable for helping organizations move forward.

Harvard Business Review coined the term "hypergrowth" more than a decade ago, anddefined itas “the steep part of the S-curve that most young markets and industries experience at some point, where the winners get sorted from the losers.” Companies in hypergrowth must have the right talent and systems in place in order to rapidly scale. Otherwise, they risk quickly falling apart.

I had an opportunity to chat with a leader in the professional services industry, Chris Skinner, CEO of TopBloc. We discussed hypergrowth at TopBloc and how the firm is able to scale while remaining agile. His three biggest pieces of advice for other companies that want to emulate TopBloc’s successes are quickly onboard new hires; invest in your employees; and adapt your processes to meet business needs.

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Below you’ll find a few highlights of the conversation, edited for clarity. You can find our other Workday Podcastshere.

• “One of the main things we preach internally at TopBloc is that no one is an expert on everything. We have consultants who have been around for quite some time and are experts in certain verticals, but no one can do an entire project by themselves. And frankly, that is our true strength as an organization: the team.”

• “Back in mid-2018, we took a look at our operational systems landscape, all the systems that we were patch-working together in order to run the business. We decided that in order to maintain the kind of growth we wanted going forward, we were going to need a little more cohesion within our internal processes. So we implemented Workday with core HR onboarding, compensation benefits, and payroll in December of 2018, with absence, time tracking, projects expenses, and then full-blown financials within the next 60 days. Having all of those functions under one umbrella has allowed us to remain pretty lean on the administrative side . . . And it let us focus on our core business. So much so that we've doubled in size this year alone. Leveraging Workday has been a very large part of maintaining that momentum with minimal overhead.”

• “保持竞争力作为一个企业不是很东亚峰会y, especially in our ecosystem. We pump a lot of money and manpower into innovation and development so that we can continue to add value to our customers. For instance, every minute we spend doing manual admin data entry, maintaining multiple systems, correcting data errors, or even worrying at night about when and what we're going to have to upgrade to from a system's perspective, that's time that can be spent focusing on the core of our business.”