How HR Can Ensure Your Small Business Thrives

Congratulations! Your advertising campaign was a success and now you have more leads in your lead bank or customers flowing through your doors than ever before! This is great and exactly how you envisioned your company evolving but now you have more work that you have hours in the day. You need to hire some employees!

Talent Acquisition

Attracting talented people to your organization is the first step in ensuring those advertising dollars don’t go to waste. After all, what good is having a flood of new customers if you don’t have the right employees to deliver exceptional service?

The Human Resource function of recruiting and selection includes writing engaging and legal job descriptions, sifting through hundreds of resumes, talking to multiple candidates in the hopes your diamond is out there, and then getting them properly onboarded once you do find them. Who has time for that? Your business just exploded (in a good way) and you have your hands full already.

An experienced and knowledgeable human resources professional has the expertise to not only write a job description that will have potential candidates pounding at your door, but knows how to effectively use job posting sites to keep unqualified applicants from ever reaching your inbox. Your HR pro will have interviewing down to a science while also understanding there is an art to asking the right questions to know if this person is a good fit for your organization in sixty minutes or less. 

Employee Development

You know what your business needs to thrive,but do your employees? Do you know how to teach them? Organizing your knowledge into a comprehensive training program is a huge undertaking. Different areas of learning require a different presentation, and on top of that, all people learn in different ways. But once it's done, it's done, right? Wrong. Now you have the job of making sure your training programs stay up to date with new technologies, industry standards, and regulations. And don’t even get me started on leadership pipelines.

A seasoned HR professional will have the skills needed to turn your novice staff into SMEs (subject matter experts) and to make sure those with the desire to grow with your company have the opportunities to do so. 

Retention Strategies

Now that you’ve got the right people in the right places and they’re all trained up, you have the responsibility of making sure they remain at your company so you don’t have to keep repeating this cycle every few months. That is not only expensive but time consuming. Employee retention involves everything from creating compensation and benefits packages that your employees find valuable, intentionally developing an engaging company culture, and offering opportunities for advancement. 

These tasks may seem tedious and unnecessary to some, especially those with businesses to run, but they are critical for the success of your organization. 

Legal Compliance

Its time to talk about those four letter words that strike fear into even the bravest of warriors - FLSA, FMLA, OSHA, PWFA, and EEOC. Okay, they’re not actually words and we’re not going to talk about them, but you need to be aware of their existence and when they apply to your company. Not following these federal regulations will land the business you have worked so hard to build in a lot of expensive trouble.

These laws are complicated and forever changing. When does FMLA apply? What are reasonable accommodations and do you have to supply them? Your business isn’t in the construction, manufacturing or warehousing industries so do you even need to think about OSHA? The answers to some of these questions might surprise you - and cost you a lot of money if you don’t know them. 

The first step in ensuring compliance is to have written policies that all employees are aware of and understand. A comprehensive handbook (and a great employment attorney) will be your greatest weapon when it comes to defending against legal claims.

Performance Management

Building a positive and engaging company culture begins and ends with feedback. If you want to create a place where people actually want to work, you have to communicate with them. Employees want to know when they are doing a good job and they need to know when they aren’t quite meeting expectations. 

Regular and consistent feedback will also be part of your defense if an employee ever files a complaint or lawsuit against you. To come out on top, you will have to prove that employees know what their jobs are and that they are all held to the same standards. 

Each of these functions are big jobs and require a wealth of knowledge, experience, and finesse. Let MasterDraft help your business thrive with solutions tailored to your unique business needs!