Part of owning a small business is facing an ever-growing list of challenges. From day-to-day issues like managing conflict to long-term strategic challenges like hiring, training, and recruitment, or financial considerations like budgeting and compensation decisions, you are responsible for many different aspects of work, because most often those budgetary challenges and staffing decisions do not allow for a broad and experienced leadership team to help you resolve issues.
Unfortunately, a reality that many small business owners face is prioritizing time across all of these areas, with many areas not getting the attention they require. When conflicting priorities are putting HR best practices at risk, don’t you wish you could hire an expert HR team of your own without breaking the bank? Well, maybe you can.
Do small businesses need to worry about HR compliance?
Legal compliance can take a significant amount of time to maintain. Even if you operate in an industry that is not highly regulated, you still need to manage health and safety policies, workplace investigation requirements, and pay equity among other HR topics—and you need to develop policies and processes to do so. Paying monetary penalties for non-compliance can be disastrous for small businesses, so limiting the risk of non-compliance should be at the top of your priority list.
Small businesses often start from nothing, and their policies need to be written from scratch. This is a task that owners often take upon themselves out of necessity in the absence of an HR professional. Sound familiar? If like many other small business owners you do not have a background in HR, you could miss something critical, setting a course for disaster. In the unfortunate event of a workplace incident, poorly written or outdated policies that do not reflect current practices can make the situation even worse.
Addressing small business HR challenges
Managing recruitment, training, and development can be a full-time job; if done improperly, a lot of time and resources can be wasted for little return. If you do not dedicate enough time or attention to hiring the right people or ensuring staff is adequately trained, turnover can increase and become a costly part of your business. Also, without proper understanding of hiring principles, needs analysis, and best practices, your actions can be misaligned to your goals, wasting valuable time without creating any meaningful improvement.
Compensation and benefits best practices also require tact and considerable specialized knowledge. There is a strong connection between compensation decisions and employee behaviour, specifically organizational citizenship, employee engagement, and employees’ overall performance. To maintain a stable and reliable workforce, no matter how small the team, someone involved in your organization should have knowledge and experience with building compensation plans.
Four ways HelloHR can help small businesses
Below we discuss how HelloHR helps you manage HR issues and mitigate risk.
- Let HelloHR revamp your policies
HelloHR, both alone and as part of the complete Citation Canada, formerly HRdownloads, platform, is specifically designed to help small businesses with compliance, compensation, and other essential HR tasks. Moreover, it also gives small business owners the strength of having experienced, specialized, and dedicated HR professionals working for their organization’s specific needs. Every organization needs a solid foundation of employee policies related to health and safety, equality, performance, compensation, leaves and holidays, and what is required at the end of employment. Some of these things are highly standardized, and others are customizable. Our experienced team knows exactly how these policies need to be structured, and how to leverage policy to take advantage of your organizational strengths and maximize opportunity.
- Improve compliance and focus on what you love – HelloHR gives small businesses access to resources comparable to having your own HR team. No business can afford to be non-compliant, but even the basics can be tricky for a small business to monitor and manage. HelloHR offers access to HR advisors, consultants, and program developers with over 200 years of combined experience in a wide range of industries that will help mitigate that risk of non-compliance. They will meet with you one-on-one to develop plans that will expose areas in your organization that are compliance-sensitive and that require regular attention.
From there, plans and packages can be built to suit your specific compliance needs to ensure there are no regulatory surprises in your future. End of employment and offboarding, for example, are often overlooked aspects of HR compliance, but if not managed appropriately, they can result in costly missteps. Our team of experienced HR professionals helps you maintain compliance throughout the offboarding process. By using the platform and information provided through HelloHR, you can leave the compliance-related heavy lifting to us and focus instead on doing the things you love.
- Establish recruitment plans and understand industry best practices – Hiring and recruitment are time-consuming processes. If you don’t have a plan that moves the recruitment process along promptly or checks and balances to ensure you make good hiring choices, it’ll cost you later. Discussing recruitment plans with HelloHR guides you on what steps to take to access talent, how to structure job postings that attract top candidates, how to conduct interviews that align potential employees with functional gaps in your organization, and how to help ensure the employees you hire fit into your company culture.
- Compensate for long-term benefit – Organizational citizenship, employee engagement, and employee performance are aspects of human resources that can be challenging for a small business. Your organization’s compensation plan goes hand in hand with how employee behaviour affects your business. A thoughtful and strategic plan for compensation sets employees up for success, providing a clear relationship between effort and reward. In addition to resources, the experts available through HelloHR have the experience and knowledge to help you develop the right plan for your organization.
People want to feel valued, and in every employment relationship one of the biggest sources of value for employees is what they receive for compensation and benefits. HelloHR can help ensure your plans create long-term advantages and offer compensation and benefits packages that are meaningful to your employees.
HelloHR was designed to help small businesses develop policies, maintain compliance, hire, and develop employees the right way, so that business owners can feel more confident they are setting up their HR practices for future success. By tapping into our award-winning team of HR experts, small business owners can make the most of what they have worked so hard to build. Say goodbye to confusion and hello to HelloHR.
While Citation Canada, formerly HRdownloads, uses reasonable efforts to maintain this site/blog and its Services in an up-to-date fashion, it does not warrant the completeness, timeliness or accuracy of any information contained on this site/blog or any of its Services, whether in English or French, and may make changes thereto at any time in its sole discretion without notice. All information and Services provided by Citation Canada, formerly HRdownloads, are provided to members and/or users “as is”, “with all faults,” “as available” and at the sole risk of members and/or users. Our human resources information and recommendations are based on seasoned, best practice field experience and should not be construed as legal advice.