Originally written by Partner Content on Small Business
Like any other business, a small business – whether it’s a microbusiness with less than 10 employees or a fast-growing scale up – needs to take care of HR.
What does HR involve?
Staff recruitment and retention
Onboarding new employees
Training
Performance evaluation
Health and safety
Coping with long-term sickness
Employee relations issues including discrimination claims, redundancy, grievances and dismissals
However, all this can be difficult to manage for you, the overstretched business owner.
See also: Six HR mistakes start-ups make and how to avoid them
Businesses with fewer than 50 employees rarely have an HR team. Instead, a finance director who may have had some relevant experience in the dim-and-distant past is seconded to the role. Not only does this leave your small business wide open to legal challenges when HR procedures are not followed, doubling up like this reduces your FD’s productivity.
And if you yourself are handling HR, it takes time away from running your business and dents productivity – one of the biggest challenges facing any small business.
Let’s look at three of these responsibilities in more detail:
Recruiting and retaining staff
Finding and keeping talent is seen as the biggest headache for most small businesses, especially when larger companies can lure staff away