The backbone of every successful business is having the right people in the right place, taking care of projects and delivering great results. People are the greatest advantage of any company especially of those with strategic HR professionals, who know how to recruit, engage and keep those people. However, when running a small business, HR can be a very complicated aspect of it, so it’s often considered burdensome and unnecessary until it’s too late.
Having an HR Mindset from the Start
Small-business owners have to master taking on multiple roles and that oftentimes leads to making mistakes (which includes ignoring human resources) and having serious consequences.
If you considered the things that will affect your business in the long-term, it’s vital for your business strategy to include HR mindset from the very start. And no, HR is not reserved for large organizations only – it can even be a one-man show at the beginning, but eventually that business is expected to grow.
So let’s consider some processes that can’t be done efficiently enough without HR assistance.
Making a thoughtful Hiring Process
From poor job postings to bad ways of interviewing, small businesses sometimes tend to make costly mistakes. Hiring decisions are either prolonged or hasty, which means that hiring good talent may be delayed or, due to managing things in a hurry, bad hires may happen.
With HR strategy, you can create more accurate job descriptions which increase your chances of attracting quality talent and it can prevent you from dragging the whole process from interview to making decisions, and thus letting your potential best talent go for other job offers.
Defining Company Culture
HR has the ability to impact company’s culture from the moment it’s defined what it should be like. This is why there is so much more to HR than just hiring and retaining the best talent. HR managers evaluate candidate’s fit within company’s work environment, take care of employees, inspire good ethics and morals, and put all the details necessary to create an atmosphere where people would want to work at. When building and maintaining company’s culture, it is also important to recognize and eliminate bad cultural fit.
People are the loudest brand ambassadors, and the better they’re treated the better stories they might spread.
Once again, it’s of great value to have HR assistance early on these aspects too, because if you wait for years to make the decision on your company’s culture, it may be that by that time it has built itself, and turned out irrelevant to the kind you wanted.
Creating Potential Revenue Opportunities
One of the reasons small businesses avoid forming HR departments are the misconceptions that they’re costly.
Well that doesn’t make sense, since this kind of assistance:
- drives business goals by recruiting and developing the skill sets needed by the team
- analyzes data and acts on their findings
- impacts employees’ ability to innovate
- impacts employees’ competitive advantage in the marketplace
Implementing these practices is more likely going to drive revenue or, at least, add to the bottom line, than it would cause major costs.
Mastering Software for Simplifying and Accelerating HR Processes
Over the years, HR managers evolved into professionals who manage a lot more than just taking care of benefits and earnings. Managing all the aspects of company’s workforce requires a more strategic set of tools and it can no longer be done solely with basic tools such as MS Word or spreadsheets.
Recognizing the need for new tools and finding the right fit for the team makes it easier to keep business up and running.
First it’s necessary to define actual needs of your business – it’s not enough to just go for innovation. It’s a big challenge to choose from many HR solutions out there but it’s not impossible and it will help your business in boosting productivity. Also, if you’re unsure about what package best matches your needs, you can test out different HR software since many offer trial versions.
Implementing HR strategies for small to medium sized businesses makes it easier to:
- track data on employees’ work habits, talent and recruiting
- track where the money is going
- automate various everyday HR processes
- measure ROI – since many operations are being done by the software itself, it’s possible to reduce labor costs
- improve security – it reduces the amount of paperwork.
And on top of it all, it provides busy business owners with the insight on how to make smart decisions and advance their business.
Embracing technology that reduces stress caused by accounting and paperwork is beneficial even for business owners that may not have room for HR professionals on their team but their companies outgrew the point where it’s easy to handle HR tasks on their own.
In an age where time equals money, embracing technology is rewarding for the whole team.
Conclusion
For today’s small business owners to be successful, it’s not enough anymore to just master the art of juggling multiple roles and responsibilities. They have to be backed up with proper strategy and tools that can keep the focus on and correctly manage company’s most important resource – talent. So in the end, it’s clear that having some kind of HR assistance from the very start can do a lot for the success of your business.
