Shawnee Love   •  
March 24, 2011

If you are a start up and dreaming wistfully of when you can hire people to help you, think again. Leading people is rewarding, fun, and ideally a way to relieve the pressure on you by sharing the work. Having employees also can be challenging.  Either way, here are 3 things to consider before hiring anyone:

1. They are a costly (a.k.a.valuable) asset.  Consider the actual costs of finding, hiring, orienting, training, and keeping employees (salary, benefits, perks, taxes, etc.) and right away you know that they are valuable to your business. Now consider the knowledge they hold of your business, their job, your customers, your other employees, your products or services, your processes, etc. and their value goes up even more. Lose someone great or hire someone awful and watch productivity decline and you will see yet another measure of the value of employees.
2. They are a mobile asset.  No other asset (information, finances, materials, equipment, etc.) leaves at the end of the work day. No other asset can make the decision to go work for your competitor. No other asset gets hurt on the weekend because of its personal activities.
3. All else being equal, employees generally perform better when they are happy and motivated and there are things you can do to encourage those positive feelings. More on how to get happy, motivated employees in other articles from Love HR.

After reading this, what do you think? Are you up for the joys and pains of having employees?