Extra steps, duplicate records and outgrown tools: how growth quietly tangles HR, and what to do
Old houses that have been extended over several decades tend to share certain quirks. A hallway ends at a wall. A bathroom can only be reached through a bedroom. Wiring runs in directions nobody can explain. Each addition made sense to whoever built it, and the trouble only shows once someone tries to live in the whole structure at once.
Growing organisations develop the same quirks in their people operations. Processes pick up extra steps, tools arrive in isolation and records multiply, until a function designed to support the business starts to slow it down. For HR leaders, the challenge lies in spotting the build-up early and deciding whether to simplify, automate or rebuild.
Lisa-Marie Moegle, director of people operations at Sitemate, will be speaking at a Zoom webinar on the topic above and more, hosted by sponsor Rippling on October 21 at 11am AEST. To find out details and to register, click here.
The quiet accumulation
For Moegle, growth changes the shape of HR work as much as its volume.
"When a business grows, the people work doesn't just get bigger; it gets more tangled. You end up with more systems that need to work together, more markets with their own rules, and dependencies nobody planned for. Usually, the People team hasn't grown at anything like the same rate," said Moegle.
The tangle rarely traces back to one bad decision, which is part of what makes it so difficult to see coming.
"What makes it hard to manage is that the complexity builds gradually. Someone adds a step to a process after something goes wrong, and it never gets removed. A tool gets bought before anyone has decided which system is the source of truth, so the same information ends up in three places, and the records don't match," said Moegle.
Leadership teams tend to feel the effects when they ask basic questions about their own workforce and wait far longer than expected for an answer.
"Individually, these are small issues. Over two years of growth, they can become the reason a simple headcount question takes half a day," said Moegle.
Choosing a source of truth
Her first recommendation goes after the root of much of that duplication.
"Pick your source of truth and be strict about it. A lot of what looks like process complexity comes from never deciding which system to trust when two disagree," said Moegle.
The order in which a team tackles a messy process also shapes the outcome, particularly when automation tools promise quick relief.
"Standardise before you automate. If a process is messy, automating it just means the mess happens faster. Be clear about where a human needs to make a call, then take the manual work out of the steps around that," said Moegle.
Moegle borrows much of her thinking from disciplines that build and maintain systems for a living.
"A lot of HR complexity is a design problem. It responds to the same thinking any operations or engineering function would apply: work out what the system needs to do, build the simplest version that does it, measure how well it works, and rebuild when the business outgrows it," said Moegle.
Where AI fits in
Artificial intelligence has added a further layer of uncertainty for HR functions already stretched by growth.
"HR leaders are dealing with the familiar complexity of scaling while also working out how AI fits into their function, with tools and ways of working that are still evolving," said Moegle.
Her suggestion for getting started is to keep the first experiments modest and well defined.
"On AI, there isn't a mature playbook to follow, so start with something small and contained, keep people in the loop where judgement matters, and build in a way that can adapt as the tools change. There's still a lot for all of us to work out, which can feel unsettling, but you don't need to have everything figured out before you start," said Moegle.
Sitemate's own trials will feature in the session, including the ones that fell short.
"I'll also talk about where AI agents have actually helped in People Operations, where they haven't, and a few things we'd do differently," said Moegle.
Letting go of what you built
In the old house, the rooms hardest to knock down are usually the ones the current owners built themselves, and Moegle argues that HR systems deserve to be judged against the stage of growth they were designed for.
"Accept that what you build will need to change. A system designed for 80 people isn't wrong when it starts creaking at 200; it has done its job. Try not to get personally attached to a system or process," said Moegle.
Detachment of that kind is easier to recommend than to practise, she acknowledged.
"The part people find hardest, myself included, is letting go of their own work. Something you built two years ago and were proud of may now be the thing slowing everyone down. Being willing to retire it is a big part of the job," said Moegle.
Inside the Sitemate playbook
The session is built around practical tools that attendees can put to work almost immediately.
"The aim is for people to leave with something they can use the following week. That includes how to recognise when a process has stopped scaling before it fails, how to work out which parts of the employee lifecycle to connect first, and how to separate the complexity you can't avoid from the complexity your own processes are adding," said Moegle.
Much of that material draws on Sitemate's expansion across four countries, managed by a notably lean people function.
"I'll walk through what we've done at Sitemate as we've grown from under 80 people to close to 200 across Australia, the UK, the US and Canada, with a People team of under three FTE. That includes rebuilding the employee lifecycle end to end, automating the administrative layer, and putting levelling and performance foundations in place," said Moegle.
The webinar will take place virtually on October 21 at 11am AEST. To find out details and to register, click here.
