HR for Small Business

Shawnee Love   •  
November 23, 2017

We began our blog series on HR for various stages of your business last week with HR for startups.  We continue this week with a discussion on how a small business owner/ entrepreneur can benefit from good HR.

If you haven’t already had the benefits of HR support, you can benefit from all the same things as a start up entrepreneur receives from good HR as we noted in our previous blog. Beyond that, good HR will help a small business owner with:

  1. Building the 5 key tools of successful people management, aka:we can help you
    1. Offers
    2. Employee Handbook
    3. Job Descriptions
    4. Goals & Standards
    5. Performance Reviews
  2. Ensuring compliance with the various employment rules and regulations from payroll to privacy and everything in between,
  3. Developing systems and processes to handle the various issues that arise with attendance, quality of work, productivity, and conduct,
  4. Perpetuating the desired culture through the various people practices, HR functions, activities, events, rituals, and communication initiatives that occur,
  5. Managing raises, rewards, and benefits,
  6. Recruiting and orienting new hires such that they are the right people and they want to stay,
  7. Learning how to be a great manager and people leader, and
  8. Creating the staffing plan and training plan to ensure your business is ready for the next stage and/or wave of growth.

Frankly, small business owners are usually too busy growing and working in their business to be their own HR person.  And you don’t really need (nor can you afford) in house HR when you are small.

However, small business owners often don’t realize they need HR support until they get to about 15 people when suddenly the questions, resignations, conflicts and/or complaints start to keep them up at night, make their day unnecessarily long, and are a distraction from their day job of growing and operating their business.  Good HR can minimize the difficulties of making the transition from small to mid size company because it anticipates and creates the tools, practices and systems necessary to get there seamlessly.  If you have good HR working with you, you won’t know what pain you missed because you will be prepared for the changes growth creates before you face them.