What do we mean by “HR”?
At the moment I’m spending a lot of time out and about talking to business owners about what I do. I try to avoid jargon, the cliches like “hiring and firing”, or the focus on avoiding employment tribunals. I’m still working on a snappier explanation that makes sense to everyone. It’s a tough gig because people have such varied experiences with HR and make different assumptions about what HR is all about, and what HR professionals actually do day-to-day.
This isn’t surprising because it’s a profession that’s evolved quite a lot, as the nature of work, technology, legislation and our understanding of psychology and behaviour continues to change. Our remit tends to be quite behind the scenes, quite a lot of it is necessarily confidential so we get shut away on our own, and sometimes the only interactions people really remember having with HR are during very difficult times in their life. Depending on your experience, you might think you have no need for HR, but I would like to take this moment to explain why I’d encourage you not to overlook this critical strategic function.
Simply put, if you have people in your business, people are key. You need to manage, respect and value the humans. You need to be able to hire enough of them, keep them, develop and reward them, and do this all in a way that is fair and legal.
- Without your people, where would you be?
- If people spend their working days feeling unhappy, looking for other jobs, worrying or complaining, how much time and energy would you have to spend to manage this, and how might it negatively impact your business?
- If your people feel valued, enjoy their work and are super productive because they work well as a team, how much better could your business be?
This, in my opinion, is the best part of the job. Being able to see the positive impact on your business. Creating better working experiences for your employees, so that they feel valued, engaged and positive about coming to work, is good for business. Not putting your people first will cost you money through increased absence, employee turnover, the cost of replacing people, resolving disputes, dealing with more employee relations issues.
We can help you to work through any challenges you are having with managing people and help you to implement appropriate processes and solutions for:
- absence management
- performance management
- recruitment and selection
- managing high staff turnover
- handling disciplinaries and grievances
- improving team working
- succession planning
- improving communication
- managing change
“Is my business too small for HR…?”
Whatever the size of your business, this is pretty important. From the legal point of view, as soon as you have one employee you instantly have certain duties and obligations, and these increase further once you have 5 staff.
Let me give you an example we can all probably relate to –
Your employee is really fed up so gives terrible customer service all week, and none of those customers ever return. The damage is done, word spreads quickly. Customers have long memories and freedom of choice over where they spend their cash.
I would bet that more time and energy will be required to turn that situation around than if you had invested more in recruiting, selecting, training and managing that employee effectively, and taken the time to understand what was making them feel so fed up. It could have been something really simple to address.
An HR Professional can help you to unpick any issues, understand what is really going on and then advise on how to progress forward in a way that’s best for your business and in line with the legislation. If you are still wondering whether HR could be good for business, please get in touch. No question is a silly question.