How Workplaces Can Enable Hypergrowth

Workplace design and product design have a lot more in common than is often first thought. This short article identifies these overlaps and demonstrates how the workplace is more than just bricks and mortar; it’s a tool that connects and augments your strategy during turbulent periods of hypergrowth. Whether you’ve reached the hypergrowth curve now or you can see it just around the corner, this guidance should help you overcome some of the common challenges associated with hypergrowth.

What are the common issues experienced with hypergrowth?

At the outset, startup teams are small. The entire company collaborates on a particular set of objectives. It’s easy to see and understand what everyone else is doing and create cohesive products and experiences. However, in hypergrowth, the number of people and projects dramatically increases. Companies frequently need to add new staff and share workloads to keep pace with the scaling business. As a result, they split into multiple teams, each focusing on different facets. Unfortunately, the new moving parts don’t always fit together seamlessly. Communication and coordination become increasingly complex, and teams can solidify into isolated silos that create fragmented experiences – for personnel and customers.

The workplace’s role is to counterbalance this dislocating and fracturing effect of hypergrowth. When approached correctly, it creates a holistic experience for staff where company culture is celebrated, collaboration is a core focus, and agility is fused into the company. The workplace forms connection and cohesion, enabling teams to work together, even when turbulence is pulling them apart.

Read the case study for our project with Eigen Technologies to understand how we helped relocate them to a new office space that would help facilitate their expansion plans.

What are the critical elements to workplace hypergrowth?

So, how does the workplace facilitate hypergrowth? We’ve broken it down into the essential elements. Bear in mind that these concepts don’t operate in a vacuum. Each is co-dependent on the other for ensuring hypergrowth success.

Scalable Business Systems

One of the core competencies of hypergrowth involves creating repeatable systems and models that enlarge and evolve alongside your company. The essential difference with just “growth” is that scaling is achieved by increasing revenue without incurring huge costs. So, while adding customers and revenue exponentially, costs should only increase incrementally, if at all.

Rental costs, refurbishments and tech and furniture purchasing are significant expenses for any business. During hypergrowth, getting them right the first time is paramount to keeping these costs low. From understanding space densities for the next six months to recreating office spaces in different locations, your workplace needs to be just as scalable as your product offering.

Agility

Hypergrowth means companies need to respond and adapt to the challenging pace of expansion posthaste – the speed of that response is your agility. Flexible, lean processes that are scalable and straightforward operations provide maximum flexibility with minimum constraints.

These conditions for agility occur naturally at a smaller scale, but as the company grows, they need to be nurtured through workplace design and functionality. Harnessing the power of different workstyles (such as Activity Based Working) to innovative space models (such as Core and Flex) are just two prime examples of how the workplace can leverage performance and motivation to speed up response times.

Planning for change

In hypergrowth, you’ll be growing the team in line with revenue – every 6 to 12 months on average. At this rapid pace, you could go from 20 to 200 people in two years and 500 to 1,000 people in four years. In this time, you’ll be integrating new departments rapidly (marketing, finance, HR, legal), potentially expanding internationally, while product road maps open new areas and markets to explore.

With this in mind, you will effectively be managing a different company every six months. As the business scales and increases in complexity, you will need to change the organisational structure of the company to reflect the new talent, new functions, more employees, and changing alignment against your market and product. In other words, reorganization will occur frequently, so you need to prepare and plan for this rate of change.