HR Tips for Startup Business Owners and Managers

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When starting a new business, we tend to focus on all the here-and-now elements involved in designing products or services, branding, researching the target market and competition, creating websites and other marketing collateral, sorting out finance, etc.

One factor that gets left pushed down the list or isn’t thought of very much by many entrepreneurs, though, is human resources. If you’re an owner or manager of a startup, you may not have a big team yet, but this doesn’t mean HR should be an afterthought.

In fact, if you want to increase the likelihood that your venture becomes a great success, human resources should be top of mind. You can follow some top HR tips to help you cover this area effectively now and into the future.

Hire the Right People

Managing a team is a whole lot easier if you hire the right people to begin with. Before you start advertising roles, interviewing candidates, or telling anyone they have the job, sit down and determine what goals you have for your business and the jobs you want to hire for. Ensure you know your current and future needs, too. This clarity will help you see what you need to find in potential hires and how to ensure you pick someone who will satisfy your short-term and longer-term goals.

Also, consider the culture you want to create in your company. What types of personality traits, values, beliefs, etc., do you place a lot of credence in and want to see in your team? For instance, you might be on the lookout for people who live and work with a focus on perseverance, kindness, creativity, integrity, excellence, growth, and more.

As you interview people, you can ask questions to get a feel for these traits, in addition to learning about candidates’ skills, knowledge, and experience. Then, as you build your team, you can create a group of employees who should get along at least reasonably well because they have some core values and ways of interacting and seeing the world in common.

Outsource Functions to Specialists as Needed

Human resources involve a wide variety of tasks, including handling payroll, employee onboarding, paperwork, training, hiring, firing, promoting people, performance reviews, and a whole lot more. As a startup business owner, you will likely find it hard to find the time and energy to handle all these areas or complete them effectively.

As such, it’s worth outsourcing some tasks. Hire a specialist HR firm such as Workhuman for one or two tasks or many or all of them, depending on your needs and budget. You still need to have a good understanding of leadership and management, but external firms can help you take care of a lot of the nitty-gritty details, big-picture planning, and so on.

Use Helpful Tech Tools

Another way to save time and energy is to streamline your HR processes wherever possible. Using helpful tech tools is one way to do this. There are many great options on the market, including free and low-cost tools. For example, you could invest in payroll automation programs, online training software enabling you to roll out the same instruction repeatedly, and applicant tracking systems to initially sort candidates when you advertise a job.

You can utilize employee recognition tools to enable colleagues to reward and recognize one another, regardless of location, which is handy if you have a team located around the country or the world. Plus, some programs offer a suite of feedback tools so you and your workers can make reflection and communication a part of your routine, with surveys, individual agendas, performance review templates, etc.

These are just a selection of tools available these days that can help startup and small business owners better manage the various tasks involved in human resources. If there’s some tech help you require, do some research, and you’re sure to find an option that will deliver your requirements.

Other HR tips for you to consider as you plan out the rest of your year include offering your staff members good benefits and perks, enabling flexible working hours and locations, and continuing to train, educate, motivate, mentor, and challenge employees, so they continue to grow and develop. Provide regular feedback, recognize, thank, and award workers, and create policies and processes for as many different HR tasks and topics as possible. A close up of a keyboard

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Every step you take to manage human resources elements more effectively will help you improve yourself as a manager, boost morale in the workplace, mitigate risk, and create overall better results for your organization.

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John is a serial entrepreneur and writer who is passionate about helping small businesses launch and grow. His work has been featured in Huffington Post, Entrepreneur, and Forbes.