Do you know about all the employment laws that affect your business?
Are you taking care of your staff members’ training needs?
Have you benchmarked your compensation to make sure it’s competitive?Are you doing everything you can to keep your staff safe, to resolve conflicts effectively, to create a diverse and inclusive workplace, and more?
When you’re running a small business, there are so many things to take care of—sales, marketing, product development, etc.—not to mention the very important task of trying to make a profit and stay in business.
With all of that to worry about, human resources (HR) work can sometimes slip down the list of priorities. That’s a shame, because there are some very important HR basics that every small business should be taking care of. For example:
Hire the Best people
No matter how good your business concept, your marketing, your planning and everything else, it’s your employees who must put it all into practice. If you don’t have the right people designing your products and representing your company to your customers, you’ll be in trouble.
Get New Staff Up to Speed Quickly
When you’ve gone to so much effort to hire the right people, the last thing you want to do is lose them. But that’s exactly what can happen if you don’t have the right onboarding training. A recent survey found that 40% of employees leave a job within the first year if they receive poor job training.
Keep Your Employees Safe
This may not be something you think about much, especially if you run an office-based business with few obvious hazards. But consider the fact that in the United States in 2015 alone, 4,836 employees died from injuries sustained in the workplace.
Have Clear Employment Policies
Small businesses are often run very informally, and sometimes that can be a strength. But it can also lead to confusion, inefficiency, loss of productivity, and sometimes potential legal problems.So, it’s worth taking the time to create an employee handbook with clear documentation
Provide Effective Training
Training is a consistent requirement. If you want to stay ahead of the curve in an evolving and competitive marketplace, you’ll need well-trained employees who are constantly learning new skills. Good training can also be a powerful tool for improving employee satisfaction and retention.
Keep Your Staff Happy and Improve Retention
Good communication and effective training, will lead to happier staff who stay with you longer. But it’s still worth paying particular attention to this area and tracking your staff turnover rate. High turnover can be costly for your business, not just because of the cost of hiring and training replacements, but also because of the lost knowledge and expertise that departing employees take with them. It can also be disastrous for staff morale to see people quitting all the time.
Be Efficient With Payroll and Other Paperwork
Everybody loves to get paid on time. Running payroll effectively should be quite straightforward, especially if you use good software to help you, but it’s still possible to make mistakes. There’s no surer way of losing an employee’s trust than being late with a paycheck.
Handle the Termination Process
If you’re doing HR right, your employees should be happier and more productive in their jobs, and fewer of them will want to quit. But still, no matter what you do, at some point you’ll have to handle the situation of an employee wanting to quit—or sometimes, you’ll need to fire someone for poor performance.
From ensuring a smooth handover to covering your legal bases, there’s a lot to do. And you’ll also want to run an exit interview to make sure you know what went wrong and how you can improve things to avoid similar situations in future.
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