The Replacement Hierarchy in Startups

A startup is different from an established brands in many dimension- one of which is the hierarchy and growth of employees- So what exactly is the replacement hierarchy?    

Back in Our childhood days- We used to celebrate certain festivals & functions in Grand ways- there used to be lot of people visiting the native and each set of people used to get busy in their own set of tasks, there was one common rule- if the next set of people (based on age) can do the same set of tasks in similar fashion in same time- then the tasks needs to be done by them as this leads to more time to overall better efficiency.

This we call the Replacement Hierarchy.

Replacement hierarchy is based on the below concept

1. About 20-30% of time of all employees is spent in Knowledge transfer - which involves both getting KT from their manager as well as giving KT to their juniors

Pros

• You're Making your employees Skillup faster in domain, leadership & soft skills- This accelerates their career path and leads to overall better satisfaction which is tough to be matched by your competitors

• Balanced Environment- It creates more balanced Atmoshphere where employees are continuously trained thereby balancing the company dependency on core employees- KT that happens at the notice period might have lower interest from the person giving the KT with no guarantee of follow-ups morever it would be tough to transfer skills learnt in years in matter of few weeks

• Better Team Bonding- Because of the continuous knowledge and skills transfer that happens between the team- this leads to better communication and bonding between the team members

• Documentation- Documentation of learnings are very vital to companies working in specific domain- especially agencies and service based companies- the continuous KT makes sure there's lot of documentation which will be useful for the new employees and would benefit the overall growth of the company

Possible Cons & Solutions

• Your employees might get trained way too fast than employees in other companies which could raise attrition rates by good margin- paying better than industry standards could solve the problem

• The Approach might not work with all employees: Employees who're more introverted, possess more of domain skills and less of training & leadership skills, People who don't like to pass on their core work due to various reasons- This problem needs to be tackled by creating groups that are compatible

2. If Junior can do it with same efficiency- Task needs to be passed on to the Juniors unless juniors are occupied completely 

Pros

• Improvement in overall Efficiency 

Consider a person gets paid 50$ for an hour and is able to finish a task in an hour time and if person who's getting paid 30$/hour can do the same task in same time with same quality- there's no reason why 30$/hour employee shouldn't do the tasks- this improves the overall ROI- Person getting 50$/hour can do tasks that can't be done by employees getting paid lower.

• Better Structure

This creates an hierarchy where seniors are always more skilled than the juniors thus improving the quality of decisions taken collectively

• Leads to more employees down the funnel which brings stability to the organization

Possible Cons & Solutions

• Efficiency is relative- Efficiency of all tasks might not be quantifiable in hours- it might involve the kind of decisions taken which differs with experience- this can be solved with supervision

• Tasks might involve follow-ups, training and leadership qualities which would be tough to be replaced in shorter run- this can be solved with soft skills training

Is your company following the replacement hierarchy?