By Arnab Dey
Nothing beats the feeling of knowing that your business is growing. All the hard work and the anxiety-filled nights have already paid off. But as your business thrives, the challenges and difficulties you’ve faced before may pale in comparison to what’s in store ahead.
Your workload will pile up, your database will expand, and you’ll need more people to bolster your workforce. As you go along the process, you can easily wing around these with much more ease than before. However, that will only be possible if you hire more people to help you.
And that’s where the human resources (HR) team comes into play to help you manage people, hire more talent, and generally do other foundational tasks, like career coaching, to scaffold growth.
But as the employees grow in number, managing them becomes quite tedious. That, alongside other issues entailing business growth, may hamper the productivity of your HR team.
To help you out, here are some tips on how to overcome HR challenges in your growing business.
1. Automate HR Processes
Gone are the days of the clunky spreadsheets you used to do basically everything. From managing your employees’ days off, their leaves, attendance, and performance to customer-related tasks like sales and inventory—it’s time you relieve your spreadsheet of its duties (albeit not entirely).
The problem with most spreadsheet software nowadays is that, while they’re extremely functional, loading them with tons of data makes it hard to navigate around them.
And since the HR department makes use of confidential and important information, you’d want to minimize the hazards that could potentially ruin your business.
Fortunately, a lot of HR software has gained traction in the past few years because of its capacity to automate important HR processes. These tools can monitor attendance, compensation, and benefits, as well as provide employees’ performance reviews and self-service portals in case they need to speak with HR.
2. Leverage Recruitment
As mentioned, a growing business needs talent to help it sustain its growth trajectory. These are employees that embody company values and are in possession of skills, talents, and the potential to offer something good to the company. However, searching for people like this is hard, even with the tight job market today.
It’s important to help HR, especially the recruitment team, find the right people to hire. As a business owner or someone who’s part of the management, the only way this can be possible is when there’s a competency framework put in place—one that’s tightly dependent on the company’s needs.
Without such a framework to help HR, the entire hiring process may be left in shambles. This can lead to hiring the least compatible candidates for the company, which is harmful, especially when the business is growing.
To aid this, you must work with HR to identify the gaps in the business process—places where there’s a clear lack of people who can fill them in. Doing a prior ‘needs analysis’ and adding a competency framework can help the recruitment team know whom to hire and for what purpose.
3. Improving Employee Compensation And Benefits
When a business grows, it’s not just the owner who should bask in its glory, it should include the employees as well. Indeed, the growth of a business is a collective effort of the people who are a part of it. That’s why you should work with HR to improve your employees’ compensation and benefits package to reward them for a job well done.
While your employees may be overjoyed to hear that they get extra credit for their work, HR may say otherwise. The process of assessing salaries is quite tedious. That’s why working with all the teams concerned is important.
And you don’t want this to be a one-off thing—that is, increasing everyone’s pay because of a growth spurt. You’d want to draft a scalable pay, especially if you’re looking forward to the steady growth of your business.
It’s important to properly compensate employees for the work they do since a happy employee can always offer something good to the table. Check out this post to give your HR ideas on other ways to make your employees feel appreciated.
4. Regulate Workplace Environment
Maintaining the culture inside the company may have been a walk in the park before, but as the company grows, you’d have to expect a massive change in the workplace environment to happen. This makes sense, especially because it takes a massive amount of time for everyone to get used to new hires.
Issues may arise, like differences in values, opinions, and dispositions. Some may even be uncomfortable with the introduction of new people in the workplace. In rare situations, the entire dynamics of the team may even change, since a larger group is harder to regulate than a small one.
And as the beacon of ‘human’ management, HR is tasked with making sure that the workplace environment still fosters the same healthy relations it had, despite the increasing population of employees.
Furthermore, management and HR should implement guidelines that will mitigate social issues like discrimination and workplace harassment. This is to ensure that, even with the huge number of people at work, everyone will feel safe and accepted.
Final Thoughts
The Human Resources department is one of the most significant business units in a company since they manage the most important component of any business: its employees. But since humans are, at best, unpredictable, helping them out as the business grows will benefit everyone who’s part of the company.
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