Start with accountability
As ZS began to grow outward, adding offices all over the world, Bajaj and other senior leaders noticed that while one office would have a killer solution to a problem, another would have no idea how to handle it. Similarly, there had been no minimums or maximums to basic systems such as head count.
“So there was a need for global scheduling systems,” Bajaj says. “There was a need for global head count hiring, because why would you overhire in Japan and then never use those people?”
When you begin to think about getting different people in different places on one page, it can seem overwhelming. But Bajaj says you wouldn’t believe how much low-hanging fruit is out there.
“The idea really was to think of the major levels that would have the quickest impact first, so we identified partner accountability as the first place to start off because you want to start with senior-most people being accountable before you start making the whole firm accountable,” Bajaj says.
But ZS didn’t want to completely kill the creativity that it had been built upon. Previously, partners had never been asked to submit any kind of plan. ZS didn’t want the exact opposite, where partners would feel they needed to spend all their time creating and criticizing each other’s plans. The best result was in the middle, asking them to submit overviews they believed they could achieve.
“So partners had to develop plans around their clients, plans around what they wanted to do and hold themselves accountable,” Bajaj says. “It’s not so much someone saying, ‘Hey, do this,’ it’s about, ‘What is your plan?’ and then giving them advice on how to improve the plan, so you do it in a fashion that’s consistent with the concept of being a partner.”
ZS then plucked another piece of low-hanging fruit: Creating basic systems to tie employees to units of business to make better sense out of productivity expectations, creating practice-area teams in areas where the most common client problems arise.
Beyond the 20-plus practice area teams at ZS, the company has also benefited from placing people together in skill tracks — they are sort of like minors in college, with expertise focused in a particular area. You may have offices in Milan and Chicago, as ZS does, that have only one person focused on operations research, but the two working together could create a track.
People can change tracks at any time, but their existence meant that suddenly ZS knew what gaps it needed to fill and that it would need to help with the hiring and recruiting required to fill those gaps.
“So if you are trying to change a staffing process, you make sure these tracks around the world understand what we are doing, question it, absorb it and become an element of change,” he says. “They have similar backgrounds, and they feel this unity, and there are global track leaders who can then leverage these tracks as part of communication and change.”
Though all of this has created better global staffing, ZS still allows for some flexibility in its hiring to fit in creative people — or stay a little short if the talent is not available.
“There is always room for great people, so an office may have a hiring goal of five people and they may have already hired six, but here comes No. 7 who is absolutely amazing and just walks on water, you are hired,” Bajaj says.
“Now, the flip side is you never lower the standard. You have a goal of hiring five people and you found only two that are amazing, you don’t lower your standards just to fit the head count because that’s going to kill you in the long run.”
