Business startup considerations – why HR matters

Your HR department is a lot more than a friendly voice at the end of the phone when someone calls to enquire about a job you posted. HR means payroll. HR means training and development. HR means employee relations from the moment you speak to a potential candidate until the time comes – years down the line – to bid each other a fond farewell.

Without an HR department (and the correct hris systems in place), you have no interface between the business decisions that steer the company and the staff who make everything happen. A gaping void like that can cost you dearly as an employer, with lower employee retention rates, which subsequently make your business a less attractive prospect for top talent to join. Let's get into why HR matters.

HR staff do all the heavy lifting behind the scenes (so you don't have to)
You might not have considered the breadth of the roles that HR take on. Suffice to say that HR staff know a thing or two about running a company and they can confidently cover all administrative aspects of daily operations, enabling your staff (and you) to turn attentions to core objectives.

Here is a sample of the roles that HR can fulfil:

• Advertising job opportunities, filtering applicants, strategic hiring
• Processing and managing the granular aspects of annual leave
• Developing and implementing an onboarding process
• Tracking and organising staff training opportunities
• Conflict resolution

Wherever even one of these basic considerations is not met, the company can begin to see the effect in terms of not hiring the right staff and experiencing daily operational glitches.

Features of HR that you may be overlooking 
If you believe that you can simply handle your own hiring and firing, and if you think that all other aspects of attracting and nurturing a productive group of staff can be picked up and dealt with on an ad hoc basis, you may be conveniently forgetting some other aspects of HR.

Aspects of HR that your team will handle:

• Culture
  Your business is nothing without culture. Ask anyone who works in a low paid job why they stayed for so long and they will tell you it's because of the people. Ask anyone leaving a high paid job why they're moving on and they will tell you it's because of the people. Staff need a home, not just a nine to five. HR can create a culture through engagement – something you don't have time to do.
• Tracking KPIs
  KPI stands for key performance indicator. One company's KPIs might differ significantly from the things another brand sees fit to track. The whole point of a KPI is to measure your efforts towards goal completion. Your HR staff could, for example, track sick days and find methods to reduce staff absences.
• Tracking budget and technology 

Your budget feeds into your technology, which in turn feeds into how productive you can be as a business. HR staff can track your budget, set KPIs for upgrading your systems, and implement training to help you remain competitive.