Operations, in a word, is all about balance — balance that plays into the responsibility to maintain a seamless workflow for cross-functional teams across an organization. Take Katherine Matthews, director of operations at Orchard, who does everything from managing her own team to resolving issues that come up in customer experiences to determining where improvements can be made in the product development process.
One facet of an operations leader’s role that is particularly important right now might come as a surprise: staffing. It turns out that hiring isn’t just a people team or human resources issue. At Orchard in particular, changes were made to backend operational teams’ workflows, requiring Matthews to break down processes and their timelines to identify workload capacity and gaps in hiring. “This is a tough needle to thread since staffing can be a moving target,” she explained. There’s a fine line to walk between manageable, burnout-free workloads and over-hired chaos.
While she keeps her finger on the pulse of projects and processes across the company, Matthews is also keeping her eye on future trends that could impact how she runs operations. One such trend is process automation, which will factor into how Orchard balances out their hiring capacity with the number of team members needed to manually interact with customers.
Seeing that operations responsibilities cover such vast territory, Built In Austin met with Matthews to get an idea of her role in a day-to-day context and, looking ahead, to gain insight into how she’s preparing for further change as she continues to provide balance in Orchard’s ongoing growth.
What does a typical day look like for you, and with whom do you work most closely?
At Orchard, we’re determined to create the best real estate experience for our customers. We do this by offering top-notch technology combined with on-the-ground experts to help our customers throughout the process. My role at Orchard is to manage a team of frontline experts and make sure they have the tools and guidance to provide a seamless experience.
My typical day is split between helping solve customer-facing issues in real time, reviewing metrics on how the team is doing and finding areas for process or product improvements. I work with my project and training managers to understand and prioritize our future implementation roadmap, as well as create rollout materials for our teams to understand any process changes. All of my team’s progress is shared with the cross-functional teams that we support, as well as with senior leadership, so that everyone understands how our operations team is measuring up against company goals.
What is a project you’re working on right now, and what makes it challenging or rewarding?
Orchard is growing quickly! This year, we expanded to four new markets and we expect similar growth in 2022. Currently, I’m working to further understand our labor drivers and staffing models to ensure we have the right team capacity to handle next year’s projected transactional volume. We recently changed process workflows for some of our backend operational teams, so I’m working to understand how long certain tasks take, how often they happen and where they take place during the transaction.
I’m also working to determine what the desired turnaround time is for each project so that I can ensure we are staffed appropriately to support our cross-functional partners and customers. This is a tough needle to thread since staffing can be a moving target; we want to make sure that we’re hiring enough people to maintain a fair workload and avoid burnout without over-hiring. The exciting part is that there are a lot of creative solutions we can put into place to flex our headcount while still keeping teams engaged, and we are looking to implement many of these solutions in 2022.
There are a lot of creative solutions we can put into place to flex our headcount while still keeping teams engaged.”
What are some of the trends you’re currently watching in the operations space, and how do you anticipate they will affect your team’s day-to-day work?
Two trends I am keeping a close eye on are process automation and streamlined team communications. Finding the right balance between process automation and a more hands-on approach is integral to a successful customer experience. While there is a lot we can automate, there are still many tasks that require a team member to manually guide the customer through parts of the transaction. Orchard’s core focus is the customer experience, so the key to our success will be finding the right mixture of autonomy and real-time customer communication.
The second trend is companywide communication — specifically, how to ensure streamlined and transparent cross-functional communication. At Orchard, one of our customer benefits is our fully-integrated platform. This means that on the backend, departments need to seamlessly communicate with each other. My team is helping by constantly providing updated information to multiple internal teams at once. This back-end communication is crucial to providing the best customer experience in real estate. I’m constantly looking for new ways to enable my team to communicate efficiently across the organization, as it’s critical to our success.
