Human Resources can seem overwhelming to business owners who are typically “ideas” people and don’t get as excited by things like benefits, people management, policies, hiring, and compliance. But HR plays an important role in helping your business grow and thrive, and it’s also necessary in order to hire and retain great people. If you’re leading a growing business and feeling challenged by HR, we’ve got you covered! Whether you have an internal HR Manager, or you’re handling things on your own—here are 10 Human Resources areas you need to be managing effectively to keep your employees happy and your business secure:
1. Hiring—including recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding
Hiring should be on your radar year-round, whether you have jobs open or not. Attracting and staying connected with great candidates is smart for business, that way when you do need to hire the process is faster and easier. A strong hiring strategy includes writing compelling job postings, agreeing on an interview and screening process, creating templates for offer letters, and outlining an onboarding plan. It’s very important that these areas are consistently adhered to across all departments to ensure fairness in hiring.
2. Training & Professional Development
Developing people who show potential is an important part of employee retention, and a valuable benefit to employees if done well. Show your team you care about their development by helping them find opportunities to gain additional skills and experience by organizing regular training, promoting opportunities for career growth, and coaching managers on how to talk to employees about their career goals.
3. Goal Setting & Performance Evaluation
What goals does your business have, and how does your team’s performance impact your ability to reach those goals? Creating, documenting, and communicating goals and performance expectations is a key part of growing your business, and HR will help you define and communicate these goals.
4. Compensation—including Incentives & Benefits
The health and financial needs of your team will vary and change over time. Your company’s budget and the value to employees are two of the most important factors to consider when creating a robust compensation and benefits plan. A competitive package takes extensive market research, financial savviness, employee feedback, and time to create. Your compensation and benefits plan can be a “deal breaker” when it comes to attracting and retaining talented people, so time is well spent here.
5. Leadership Development
Management training is different from professional development among employees. It’s difficult to successfully lead and manage people with varying personalities, backgrounds, and skillsets. It’s important to have a strategy to help your leaders work cohesively toward a common goal, promote the same core values, and be confident in making key business and people-related decisions.
6. Compliance—including Policies, Handbooks, & Documentation
HR creates and communicates company policies (typically through an employee handbook) and also oversees things like short-term disability, documentation around employee performance issues, and ever-changing employment laws that vary by state. Compliance is a robust area of HR. It’s not exciting stuff (to most people), but it is critical to keep up with in order to reduce risk to your business.
7. HR Technology
This includes everything from tracking and processing payroll to gathering and storing employee data and information both during and after employment. There are tons of different HRIS platforms to choose from and identifying the one that best meets your needs takes a lot of business savviness.
8. Culture Definition & Promotion
Defining your company culture, giving examples, and communicating it to your employees is a strategic way to help your business grow, and ensure you have the right people on board to do the work.
9. Company-Wide Communication
Communicating key business information usually falls to HR. Whether it’s planning during a pandemic, communicating weather-related office closures, sharing policy changes, or giving an update on a leadership change, this kind of communication is an important responsibility.
10. Employee Relations
Managing conflict, documenting grievances, having difficult conversations, conducting investigations into serious claims, and reacting the right way during sensitive employee relations issues are at the heart of HR’s role.
Ask us your HR and employee relations questions via the online chat tool in the lower left corner of your screen. We love helping businesses solve their people problems and we love to share what we know!
