Anyone in the process of launching a business should know certain things about company management, particularly in relation to human resources.
This is especially true for any startups that will be starting out with more than 10 employees. Being unprepared in regards to HR will only result in a waste of time and effort put into employees and assets that won’t pay off in the long-term.
The crux of HR is ensuring that your team is doing everything needed to live up to the company goals, objectives, mission statements, and visions at all times. In essence, HR is the practice of managing your most valuable assets, the people that will represent and operate your brand from the very beginning.
Selecting the right employees is only the first step in the process, so what else should you know about HR if you’re getting randy to launch a startup? Start with the following five tips and you’ll be on the right track:
1. Recruiting is not everything
A lot of novice entrepreneurs and CEOs tend to confuse HR with recruiting. In reality, recruiting is just one aspect of HR, albeit a very important one. Other than actively seeking the right people for the job, a balanced approach to HR requires a wider range of tasks than simply reviewing applications and conducting interviews.
Some of the best online HR Masters programs teach that checking up on recent hires and training your existing workforce is equally imperative as recruiting new help. In addition, keeping employee morale high by focusing on benefits and compensation is another aspect that shouldn’t be neglected.
2. Employee engagement is essential
As a startup you need the people in your corner to believe not only in the future of the company, but also in the profitability of their individual role in the business.
In a sense, a startup that is aiming for success should really be competing to retain the talent it has worked hard to acquire, and doing so often involves using incentives, commissions, and other extra benefits that will drive your staff to perform at their best and continue to show up for work enthusiastically each day.
3. Orientation and training should be top priorities
Every startup should have a detailed onboarding process planned out to make the most out of newly recruited talent. Every team member should know exactly what their role is, what they’re expected to do, how to do it, when it needs to be done, and why they’re doing it at all times.
Maintaining such a highly informed workforce ensures that nobody is left out of the loop, thereby maximizing productivity. Use a combination of videos, articles, guides, speeches, and meetings to introduce new staff to the company’s overall game plan and how you intend to achieve it.
4. Every HR team should build a strategic forecast
A huge part of what HR does for a business is helping to project what will be needed in the future in terms of workload allocation. Being able to calculate the cost of payroll and plan employee scheduling in advance helps you create more accurate short-term and long-term goals.
In fact, informed planning is one of the main reasons why HR can be so beneficial to a startup that aims to expand quickly. So many under-educated CEOs place too much emphasis on “the now” when discussing HR with managerial staff. The focus needs to be on the future at least once every week, preferably at the end of each day.
5. HR can’t fix everything
Sometimes you take all the conventional measures you can and you still wind up with a few bad apples or a string of unexpected events. There are never any guarantees in any business, so there’s always the possibility that you’ll have to go back to the drawing board and start with new players.
If you do run into a situation where you need to rebuild your team and training process, be sure to take a closer look at the weaknesses that caused you to backtrack so that you can learn from them rather than repeat mistakes unnecessarily.
You can become a human resources expert
When a startup has a large budget to throw around, it’s not a problem to hire an HR pro to get the job done. But if you’re starting from crowdfunding or a more independent entrepreneurial approach, it is perfectly possible to learn HR well enough to implement its principles in the founding of your startup. With that said, your chances of gaining a firm grasp on the subject would be better if you were to pursue a Masters degree in HR.