How to boost productivity during hiring freeze?

Ain't it an irony? Hiring new candidates and training them is stressful. At the same time, meeting deadlines with limited resources can be even more stressful too. That's exactly why we need to retain the existing employees and make sure they are happy with their work and compensation. However, it is easier said than done. Now, let us see what can be done to increase productivity during a hiring freeze?

Deprioritize unnecessary projects

Some of your employees may be keen to get their on-going projects completed before they accept new ones. However, as a manager you know it's better to discontinue them halfway than getting a low priority project completed.

Check with your stakeholders and deprioritize the projects that you think can be postponed to a later time. This will ensure that you make your resources only work on the core deliverables, and even if the deadline slips, you know you did your best.

Minimize the number of releases

If you are really in need of a hire, make sure you minimize the number of releases to production. This will significantly decrease the operational loads by:

1. spending a day for release

2. your oncall's and the developer's turnaround on P1 and P2 tickets caused by the new release

3. your quality engineer's time, who could have automated some cases in the time when they conducted the whole test cycle

4. customer support team's efforts if something serious breaks

Focus on customer-oriented projects

Said that we need to deprioritize the less relevant projects, how do we categorize what is important and what isn't?

All projects that focus on improving the Customer UI / UX are the ones that need to be prioritized over anything else. If there are specific projects that can add much more ROI, prioritize them first. You can leverage that advantage to actually get a hire in spite of the freeze.

If you are dealing with internal teams, measure the impact of the work to prioritize them accordingly. If a feature improvement can help 600 people in your company, you should prioritize that over migrating legacy system to newer technologies, which are anyways working fine.

Communicate to the team

Let your team understand that there's a company-wide hiring freeze and that you have kept your HR informed of a need for an opening in your team. This will give them hope that you have an opening, and the overload will only last for a few months maximum. It is always better to have an open-door policy when it comes to communication.

Borrow Resource if Needed

Some teams are super-agile and may desperately need resources. Even if the company is flexible to let you hire, you may not be in a position to hire and train a new candidate to your system. However, that's not the case with all teams. Only if it were, people would have not had such a process in the first place.

All that you need to do is:

1. talk to teams or drop a mail to managers of other teams regarding your need.

2. see if you can get help from people who had been a part of your team earlier, but have moved to different teams within the company

3. communicate with your HR of your need and adjust the financial settlements during the tenure

That way, you can boost your productivity without letting your team burn out.

Consider outsourcing work if necessary

Some works can be outsourced, for example, product testing with your product needs or get outsource your product management requirements in case of a start-up. This way you can cut costs, yet get work delivered without burdening your existing folks.

Focus on Automation

This is one area where you need to prioritize in case of a hiring freeze. initially it may seem overwhelming. But, getting it done can help reduce:

1. manual efforts on getting the task done

2. test cycles every week on the sprint

3. saves developers' times to push new releases to production

Sometimes, the automation can only take 2 or 3 times the manual efforts required. You need not always start from scratch to get automation done. Given the current age, there are 3P tools for everything. Check which is reliable for your task. The tool's cost can be much much lower than the cost of a new hire.

Check with HR on Contract-Based Hires

It's during the hiring freeze that you see people hiring a lot of interns. It is simply because you can have a timed contract with or without being paid easily. As interns need significant amount of experience, they wouldn't hesitate to do them. And the company can be free of insurances and other benefits it needs to bear in terms of an emergency.

But be a good leader. Let your contract employees know if or not they would have a chance with a conversion. Make sure you don't give false hopes for a timely basis, as you would be representing your whole company when you do so.