6 HR Priorities for the Small Business Owner
We’ve all been here before.
As a team member for a small-to-medium sized enterprise (SME), there’s not the budget available to fund a proper HR department so the responsibilities of keeping your organisation’s human resource operation falls to you, the ‘team of one’.
But where do you start? With the New Year just getting underway and budgets and goals being discussed between now and April, how do you lay out your priorities to ensure your business remains successful?
We’ve approached this question head-on and provided for you the list of six key HR activities we’d prioritise for your business to keep your head above the water.
1: Establish Business Understanding and Communication at all levels
As a small business this first step should be easier to establish but nonetheless important. A good business operates successfully because each member of the team knows the plan and purpose of the organisation.
Too often large businesses become siloed into teams and cross-functional communication is either confused, slow or non-existent. Particularly with the invent and spread of remote-working organisations, the ability to clearly understand each individual’s role in the organisation and how interactions should take place to benefit the whole is an important step that is often missed.
Carefully consider how teams meet, communicate and work across functions to ensure all employees are aiming in the same direction. Onboarding processes and behavioural assessments can help with this endeavour.
2: Know your Business’ Strategic Goals
In tandem with the communication work provided in point 1, it’s of vital importance that the goals of the organisation as a whole (plus the goals for each department and individual) are clear to allow you to make decisions quickly and confidently.
If the HR department (in this case, you) is going to have a positive effect on the organisation you must know what it is trying to achieve, and the values it represents on route to this goal. Working well strategically will mean being able to align the plans and goals of the HR efforts to meet the goals of the company – this permeates all activities from talent acquisition to personal development, leadership growth and more.
It may be that you need to ‘sit-in’ with other functions in your organisation to understand how they work, or consult with the management team/board to get the true account of what the business is trying to achieve.
3: Develop Employee Engagement Plans
In line with point 1 again, employee engagement becomes the act of putting into practice those communication channels and plans you’ve introduced. You know how you’re going to talk to staff, you know what needs to be said from the goals, but how do you ensure your employees are giving you the full picture?
The top reason employees leave an organisation is because they are unhappy or don’t trust their management and that they perceive the company values making money more than growing alongside its workforce.
Especially now with more remote working roles operating as standard, it’s all too easy for employees to ‘drift away’ from the company mindset so you need to formulate feedback opportunities to help identify trust issues within your organisation.
It’s useful to combine this with training and development opportunities to help employees feel appreciated and supported to learn and grow with the business.
4: Plan your Payroll
Once you’ve got your employees in place, you need to make sure you keep them and, until the world changes, money in our pockets remains the no.1 influencer for the retention of a workforce.
However, in this case we’re not extolling the virtues of simply introducing pay-rises or bonuses as financially this isn’t always possible. Instead, this focuses upon getting your processes in place so that your workers are remunerated exactly when and how they expect to – with a fair level of pay in comparison to colleagues and industry peers.
This work focuses on completing three tasks:
Drawing out a long-term pay structure so that equality and growth is sustained and transparent across the organisation
Planning any benefits packages in advance so that employees are aware of how bonuses are provided (if any)
Implement a robust payroll management system. This will help you to avoid the wastage of time and potentially costly issue of payroll errors
5: Plan your Talent Acquisition Process
No organisation is every going to be able to grow continuously without the integration of new staff, whether existing employees leave or simply new skills are required in the team. Therefore, working on your talent acquisition plan should happen early in your business timeline and should focus not just on wages and benefits.
The speed of acquiring new staff is slowing down all the time with recruitment processes elongating and often the quality of candidate not suitable for the roles advertised. It is worth analysing how you intend to hire your new employees in advance to avoid the most common recruitment bottlenecks.
However, it is not only your own process that you should identify and resolve, but also the reputational elements of addressing why better candidates should apply for your positions in the first place. Your company branding, presence, values and transparency of quality of worklife (including employee satisfaction) can all be elements that affect a potential candidates decision in applying for your roles.
It is not just you that researches the candidate, but they too will run a background check on your organisation first – usually before you even know they were interested.
6: Ensure Health and Safety (and other legal) Compliance
The final priority we’d suggest targeting for your small business is health and safety compliance. Your work environment must be compliant with your local and national laws before you establish yourselves as any false move could completely hamstring your organisation.
This ultimately falls into adopting policies for two categories:
Safety – from emergency plans to first aid kits and employee training
Behavioural – including equal opportunities, sexual harassment and disciplinary/mediation planning
Having stringent documentation to cover these eventualities will serve you well should the issues ever arise within your organisation. This rule also applies for any other legal or governing legislation that your company should be compliant with. Standard employment laws are often well known and documented, but do be sure to check if your industry has specific guidance that may not be common knowledge.
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Of course, if you need any help with addressing the points above, or for the resolution of more niche HR practices or ongoing support, Dolen HR are here to help.
We have many years of experience delivery HR solutions for a range of clients and industries and can work in a flexible way to suit you, whether you require a full outsourcing service, pay-as-you-go, hybrid HR or even just our mentoring support.