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Operations roles play a crucial role in saving time for key staff members, allowing the organization to scale, and preventing catastrophic failures. By freeing up researcher time, operations staff can potentially save more than the time they invest. Additionally, smooth operations enable quicker hiring and efficient scaling, ensuring that the organization functions effectively as it grows. Moreover, operations personnel can avert major disasters by identifying and addressing potential inefficiencies before they escalate.
As organizations expand from a small group to a larger team, they encounter various challenges that operations roles must navigate. Ensuring smooth communication channels, anticipating growth challenges, and maintaining operational efficiency become crucial as organizations transition from a close-knit group to a larger entity. Operations professionals play a pivotal role in managing these challenges and facilitating effective organizational growth.
The value alignment of individuals in operations roles is essential for long-term organizational success. While some roles may be suitable for non-value-aligned individuals, senior positions in operations should be filled by those who resonate with the organization's mission and values. Value-aligned staff contribute to a cohesive organizational culture, effective decision-making, and overall operational efficiency.
The strategic significance of value alignment in senior operations roles is critical for maintaining organizational cohesion and upholding the organization's mission. Hiring individuals who share the organization's values ensures consistent leadership, clear decision-making, and a unified team approach. Value alignment at the senior level positively impacts the team dynamics and drives operational effectiveness throughout the organization.
Having the necessary skills and mindsets for effective operations roles is crucial. One key aspect is the ability to understand the specific requirements of the role and efficiently manage tasks like project management and executions. An effective operations professional should possess diverse experiences and be adaptable to different industries. Success in operations also hinges on past accomplishments and recommendations, reflecting a track record of reliability and quick learning. Finding individuals with a proactive, reliable, and adaptable approach, especially in fast-paced environments like tech startups, plays a significant role in operational success.
Outsourcing operational tasks to external professional service firms or freelancers presents a strategic approach for efficiency. Drawing from the historical trend of internalizing expertise in the 70s and 80s, organizations now benefit from outsourcing for specialized services efficiently. The focus on leveraging economies of scale and specific expertise highlights the advantages of outsourcing for tasks like payroll management, visa processing, and other common operational needs across various organizations. Centralizing and outsourcing certain operational functions allows for streamlined processes and shared learnings across organizations.
As the industry matures, promoting centralization and collaboration in operations emerges as a key strategy. By consolidating common operational tasks such as visa processing and dealing with regulatory bodies, organizations enhance efficiency and learning opportunities. Centralized services offered by external organizations facilitate shared resources, reducing redundant efforts among entities. This approach enables organizations to specialize in outsourced operations, contributing to streamlined processes and effective coordination across the community. The trend towards centralization reflects a strategic shift towards optimized operational practices and resource utilization.
Automating tasks, although initially time-consuming, offers long-term benefits in saving time and effort. Despite the temptation to complete tasks manually for immediate gratification, investing time in creating automated systems can significantly reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks and increase efficiency.
Working in operations roles within effective altruism (EA) organizations can provide valuable career capital. While specializing in EA organizations may not always translate directly outside the community, handling operations in startups offers a more diverse and flexible experience that can be transferable. Exposure to various projects and stakeholders in startup environments can equip individuals with valuable skills for career transitions and professional growth.
Today’s guest, Tanya Singh, sees herself as doing something like that every day. She’s Executive Assistant to one of her intellectual heroes who she believes is making a huge contribution to improving the world: Professor Bostrom at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute (FHI).
She couldn’t get more work out of Bostrom with extra donations, as his salary is already easily covered. But with her superior abilities as an Executive Assistant, Tanya frees up hours of his time every week, essentially ‘buying’ more Bostrom in a way nobody else can. She also help manage FHI more generally, in so doing freeing up more than an hour of other staff time for each hour she works. This gives her the leverage to do more good than other people or other positions.
In our previous episode, Tara Mac Aulay objected to viewing operations work as predominately a way of freeing up other people's time:
“A good ops person doesn’t just allow you to scale linearly, but also can help figure out bottlenecks and solve problems such that the organization is able to do qualitatively different work, rather than just increase the total quantity”, Tara said.
Full transcript, summary and links to learn more.
Tara’s right that buying time for people at the top of their field is just one path to impact, though it’s one Tanya says she finds highly motivating. Other paths include enabling complex projects that would otherwise be impossible, allowing you to hire and grow much faster, and preventing disasters that could bring down a whole organisation - all things that Tanya does at FHI as well.
In today’s episode we discuss all of those approaches, as we dive deeper into the broad class of roles we refer to as ‘operations management’. We cover the arguments we made in ‘Why operations management is one of the biggest bottlenecks in effective altruism’, as well as:
* Does one really need to hire people aligned with an org’s mission to work in ops?
* The most notable operations successes in the 20th Century.
* What’s it like being the only operations person in an org?
* The role of a COO as compared to a CEO, and the options for career progression.
* How do good operation teams allow orgs to scale quickly?
* How much do operations staff get to set their org’s strategy?
* Which personal weaknesses aren’t a huge problem in operations?
* How do you automate processes? Why don’t most people do this?
* Cultural differences between Britain and India where Tanya grew up.
Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.
The 80,000 Hours podcast is produced by Keiran Harris.
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