Why Your Human Resources Plan Is a Recipe for Disaster
As your startup expands so do your obligations to hiring, payroll, benefits, training, and dealing with employee conflicts. This is where your HR department comes in, but is your human resources plan driving your best talent away?
Nobody is immune from HR. No matter how small your startup might be, if you don’t have a proper human resources plan and infrastructure in place, your business will suffer.
A shockingly high proportion of startups have no human resources structure in place at all. Thus they often fail as a result of not being able to keep on top of training, recruitment or employee conflicts. Implementing HR for startups may seem like a daunting task, especially if you have no experience in it, but getting it right will pay off massively.
Whether you’re just starting out or beginning to expand, now is the time to solidify your human resources strategy. Starting an HR department will ringfence you against legal troubles and administrative waste. It will also ensure you’re able to attract and retain the very best talent.
Here’s what you need to do and what to avoid when compiling your human resources plan.
Avoiding Admin Overload with a Human Resources Plan
Maybe when you started off you didn’t think you’d have to dedicate much time to pesky things like payroll, contracts and vacation time. Thing is, the same rules apply to your plucky startup as they do to the biggest companies in the world.
Keeping on top of your staff’s payroll, sick days etc. will quickly become overwhelming if you don’t address it head-on immediately. If starting an HR department seems too costly for you at this stage, much sure to utilize HR software in the workplace.
For example, you can use free or affordable software to track vacation days for employees, file contracts and even create a paystub. Not only do these solutions make your business more efficient, it will also keep your head above water in a legal sense.
Attracting the Best Talent
Recruitment is by far one of the greatest concerns for any startup plan. Poor HR will drive away the best potential talent. It will also stop you from retaining talented workers who are put off by a haphazard workplace and lack of procedure.
You need an attractive, dedicated workplace culture which appears welcoming. The best way to implement this culture is by having dedicated HR professionals or consultants working on it full-time.
You also want to be able to keep track of candidates and have an effective screening process which matches industry standards. Do this by liaising with bigger fish in the area, and bringing in experienced outside HR talent to help.
Conflict Resolution
After the scandal-plagued year suffered by startup giant Uber, smaller companies are scrambling to figure out how to start an HR department. This is because they’ve realized the need to get a proper system in place to deal with legal disputes and inter-employee conflict.
Your business could implode if you don’t have a formalized, on-paper framework for dealing with commonplace issues. These include sexual harassment, unconscious bias, pay disputes and equality standards. Many companies have their policies publicly available through open source, like Facebook, so a good start would be to take a leaf out of their book and copy their standards.
Learn More
To learn more about the human resources plan that your startup needs to thrive, don’t hesitate to get in touch with any questions or queries you might have.
No startup is too good to fail, and a proper HR strategy is one of the best protections you can give yourself.
