Presented by Paystrubmakr.com 
By John Wolf and Tom Collen CPA
Business is about numbers, says the people that are in the industry for some time. HR professionals know that business is done by humans that make the numbers, What you can do with a warehouse full of goods if you have no excellent team of salespersons? Or a warehouse full of raw material without a skilled workforce that can convert it into products? How your production team will know how to make saleable products if you do not have market analysts, designers, and engineers to tell the workers what and how they should produce? There are three primary columns to put the business on, Capital, assets like buildings and machinery, communication and logistics, and the people that will make it all working.
The workforce is the most complicated factor with whom you have to deal with. Your Human Resource is the tool you mast mange professionally. We collected 35 different HR recommendations for you to use and make your HR work great.
1. No Overtime Violations
Small business founders are busy people, and they need to take care of many different tasks. When it is HR or their relations with the employees, it will involve Labor law.
Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)
Payroll, wage, and overtime are essential points to make sure you do not make a mistake and break the law with no intention of doing so. Tracking the worked time and keep a record of regular time and overtime. Pay precisely the proper time and overtime.
FLSA Overtime: Covered nonexempt employees must receive overtime pay for hours worked over 40 per workweek (any fixed and regularly recurring period of 168 hours – seven consecutive 24-hour periods) at a rate not less than one and one-half times the regular rate of pay. There is no limit on the number of hours employees 16 years or older may work in any workweek. The FLSA does not require overtime pay for work on weekends, holidays, or regular days of rest, unless overtime is worked on such days.
Violating overtime laws can end in a fine of up to $10,000. The department of labor routinely investigate workplaces for violation of the overtime law, protecting yourself by sticking to the rules, and keeping records will be your best choice. DOL Enforcement
2. Employee Scheduling
As your business is growing, you will have more employees, so more scheduling jobs work, especially if you have different working hours for different workers. You should make your life more comfortable with the online drag-and-drop scheduling tool like Homebase that is a:
Free Employee Scheduling
Save Hours Every Week on Scheduling and Payroll
3. Feedback Process That Works
Communication with and between your team is essential for the growth of a business. People need to be able to express their ideas and feelings about their workplace. An employee that has a purpose for improving a job or a process would feel better about his workplace if there will be someone to hear him and reply positively to his approach, no matter if the idea will be adapted or rejected because of objective reasons.
It is essential to hear the employee’s complaints and respond to it in a way that will show your interest in the worker’s wellbeing.
Taking into account that employee’s interest in their growth is in a high place in their list of the essential reasons why to work and keep working for a long time in the same workplace. Having in your team, people that are looking forward to their career will help your business grow.
If your employees are taking the time and making an effort to develop much higher quality work, you and your managers should recognize your workforce efforts and the success of it. Find a way to congratulate and express your gratitude and appreciation by the emotional and material way. By this positive feedback, you will encourage your team to keep looking for better ways to do their jobs for your business.
The negative feedback is a critical tool for your workplace to grow into mature teamwork.
Errors are what makes the team do a better job in the next project, your mangers or yourself if you are that small business should be able to take the time to see what was wrong, where the mistakes are done and feedback the whole team about the problem and its improvement for the next time.
A successful organization is this one that its workforce has the open to ways communication. With an atmosphere that takes errors (not those of lake of responsibility) as points of learning and improving. You better get constant learning in your workplace will avoid your employees to keep making the same mistakes. How they will learn to do better if you do not tell them that they did something wrong and how to avoid it in the future.
4. Know the Law
Your business is one plant in the law system, not a single plant that has its own laws. You must know or have someone to take care of your legal management.
- Safety and security,
- Hiring practices.
- Compensation and benefits required.
- Vacation time.
- Leave times.
- work schedules.
- Discrimination on any base.
If you do not have a consultant to guide, you use this place to educate yourself is the Federal Employee Handbook. Consult the handbook if you have doubts or need to respond to any situation in your workplace.
5. Let your Teams be Creative With Their Own Workflow
Project management tools are essential for the follow up your team or teams advancing job. If your business has a few projects at the same time, you better get a software like this one: Proofhub Multi-project Workflow Management Software If you are a small operation that works one project at a time you can use Free Workflow Management Software
6. Myths and Millennials
Do not avoid millennials in your workplace, and you will find these young people exceptionally dedicated to doing the best they can for their job, very interested in learning, with the courage to present new ideas for the improvement of their workplace performance.
Be careful of falling into discrimination issues if you take the stereotype as something real and treat millennials negatively just because they are young men and women of a new generation.
7. New Hires Should Be Partnered with Current Employees
A new hire onboarding is your major worry. You invested a lot of work in recruiting those new employees. You do not lose them and go back to the hunt for excellent staff. Your workforce should be directed and guided to help the newcomers. You can use mentors from your old employees to support the onboarding of the new team. Your new employees will not forget the help they got at the beginning. You can count on those employees to be open and help in the future new employees. It will be part of the culture of your workplace.
Studies show that new employees will stay for long at the workplace that did partner them by having someone of the old staff open to any question or sicking for help in doing their job. It will be better to assign a worker that is not higher in the hierarchy as a guide to the newcomer.
8. Documentation of Personnel Files Archive
Starting a small business with the idea of growing into a bigger one will need you to put the basis for the future. One important HR issue is the personal data archive. You may have only a few employees, and a few papers made on a spreadsheet will be enough. Once your business grows, you will have a nightmare digitizing the personal data.
A smart move will be starting from day one with the digitalization of your HR information. Starting with a good software will give you an edge for the future. Recruiting will be easier if you will choose a good HR software. Read here and learn what the best software for you is. HR Tracking Database Software performance reviews will be consistent, and HR data will be easier to analyze.
9. Consider Hiring an HR Consultant
A small business owner with less than 50 employees will find hiring a full-time HR person too expensive for his small business while having legal issues related to HR will cost you more than the HR person. The best solution will be to hire an HR consultant to write your handbook and utilizing document and procedure. The HR consultant can train your bookkeeper to manage the payroll and the benefits if you do not use a Paystub online software. You should have the consultant “on-call” or “as-needed” to resolve any issue with your employee or employees.
10. Hire Freelancers to Expand and Diversify Your Pool of Skills and Talents.
A business will need its specialized professionals to complete the skills package that its production needs. These days you can solve this need by hiring an online freelancer to do a lot of jobs for you with no need for a fulltime employee.
The talented employees’ collection of small businesses is limited to those people who can accept commuting to the workplace. By hiring freelancers or outsource part of the work, you can save your company on overhead costs. Hiring gig industry talents can be beneficial in cost and give you the opportunity to get some highly skilled people that you may found too costly to have on your payroll.
Freelancers or gig workers can solve your need for a variety of tasks such as data input, content writing or video making, search engine optimization SEO, order input, and invoice generating documentation editing, and formatting, and many more. You can find them online at Upwork UpworkFiverr Read About: Beware Of the Legality In the Gig Economy.
11. Personality Tests Are Needed When Sourcing for Employees
As the owner of your small business, you should wear the hat of the Human Resources Director and manage the Personality Test.
By the application of personality tests, you can make sure that your new recruits have the right personality that can work in harmony with your existing workforce. Use 16personalities.com; it is free.
By understanding the candidate’s personality, you can avoid recruiting those people that are having a problem with teamwork or putting the people in the type of work they like more, the administrative work best personality is this person that likes control and order. At the same time, the creative job will be better for the people that have an open mind and courage to try new ideas.
12. Company Culture
Company Culture and employee engagement are two depending factors. The more engaged your employees are, the more thriving culture they will accept. A strong sense of purpose in your workforce will have a direct influence on their feeling of engagement.
One essential factor will be defining your company’s vision, and make your staff know it and understand it. Take care to make each one of your employees know the elevator peach of your company’s image.
Hiring the best candidate is looking for a skilled and talented person that is the right one to fit in your business workforce and company culture.
You need to get the right people for your business to keep doing good and grow bigger. Skills as a professional, Emotional Intelligence, are the values you need to make sure your new staff has.
13. Bullying, Harassment, Discrimination Are Your Enemies.
Your workplace is where people come to work; there is no place for bad behavior like Bullying Harassing other employees. You should not permit this kind of behavior. You can not discriminate against people on any base, raise, gender nationality, or Ethnics.
You must protect your business from this kind of problem. The protection will need two types of action, Legal and cultural. If you let things go wrong, you can have legal issues that will cost you a lot of money. If you let things go out of control, you can have a hostile environment dominating your workplace. And pay for it by low production. Decreased productivity, increased turnover, and reputational damage. Or lose your best employees to your competition.
Equal Opportunity Commission (EEOC) reports that US companies have paid out close to $300 million in sexual harassment at the years 2010 to 2019.
- The EEOC recommends that employers sh and managers should conduct climate surveys to learn the situation in their workplaces to avoid that harassment will be a problem in their organization.
- Your workplace should have a transparent ‘multiple point-of-contact’ processes on how to report a violation. Your open-door policy will be encouraging employees to report a violation through HR, It will be better to develop more options for your workforce to say what they feel. As sometimes a complaint is a disclosure of confidential information, it will be easier for women to talk with another woman or any other employee to have a problem to disclose harassment to authority than to a coworker.
- You should create and train a team of the first respondents for your workplace. Open a hotline for complaints, an outsider, 3rd party HR professional to avoid inside influences on a victim of any bullying or other bad behavior. A coworkers review-board can be a great help too.
- Harassers cases should be eradicated fast and in a definite action sending a message to all your workforce that there will be no tolerating to this kind of behavior. Discipline should be prompt, proportionate, and consistent.
- Established your Sexual Harassment Policy and your red line. Write it thinking has a victim of harassment.
14. Adapt the Latest HR Technology
You can not ignore a critical component of creating with your employees an experience that will make them feel more connected to your company. That is incorporating digital technology tools for workflow followup.
That software tool should have the right balance between making your workforce feel comfortable and make your workplace being more productive.
Some apps and platforms are beneficial to employees and their employers alike. Productivity and organizational software like Basecamp and more, Basecamp Competitors: 5 Alternative Project Management Services
Slack and Trello do well-improving employee engagement, and there are Pulse survey tools that help management to tap into how their workforce is feeling about their workplace and coworkers and what is their overall work experience.
Giving your employees use wellbeing apps – like Limeade – shows that you care about your team beyond their contributions to the company.
15. About Documenting Everything
One of the problems that small companies have is the multiple jobs that the owner or manager has. Some responsibilities are more urgent or essential for the present, and others are not so urgent and important for the day to day activities. One of the less critical but no less critical jobs is paperwork and keeping documentation of every action. Leaving documentation for tomorrow will bring to a wrong moment when you will have a dispute about something, and you will find that the documents are lost or never done correctly.
What happens in small businesses is that once there is a dispute with an employee, HR has no documentation or only part of the information about the case.
HR and general administration must have all the documents that can show what happened in the time that concerns the disputes. Meetings must have their minutes kept. Incidents should be reported in writing.
16. Interview Questions
Adding to the fundamental questions like those bellow.
- Tell me about yourself.
- Why are you interested in this position?
- Why are you leaving your current job?Questions like, “What did your high school job mean to you? Will help you to find the right people to treat your customers with care and respect.The Ultimate List of HR Interview Questions
17. Use Your Own HR ChatBot System
The days of personal HR communication by phone or chat are gone, today, we can use Chatbots to do the HR first communication.
Deep learning, like Goole’s Tensorflow, can help you to build a list of automated queries for the chatbot. This way, you can spend time only on particular questions that were not answered before.
It takes time and training for your HR staff to make it work with no mistake. Take the first weeks as experimental time and follow each Chabot job carefully to correct any wrong results.
18. Hire Candidates Who Can Adapt To Your Business Culture”’¡
A small business owner takes a big part of the work and gets it done as one of the teams with his workforce. It is essential to have the same workplace culture team members. When you are hiring new staff, make sure that you can work with them carefully with the harmony that the same culture gives you.
Hire only those people you will be happy to work with. Do not invent tasks for your applicants, let them join the work as it is, and you will see if they can cope with the jobs. Making a list of the traits you are looking for will help you. Everybody is looking for “sociable team players.”
19. Flextime and Self-Scheduling can Increase Productivity
“Being there” for your customers or those who are interested in your product or service is one primary condition for succeeding in your small business. You have to be there for your own life and family, and so your employees, Work-life balance is your employees’ most crucial morale-boosting factor.
Flextime self-scheduling arrangements can be the solution. The computer and the Internet made it possible to work at different hours or locations. Smartphones made it possible to do customer service at any time of the day or any position of the person that takes care of answering customer calls.
Employees can select their hours and schedule their work around other priorities in their life.
Flextime arrangements are the key solution to overcome the challenges of scheduling that gives a hard time for the HR departments today.
20. Diversity and Inclusiveness in Your Organization
Begin creating a diverse and inclusive workforce and workplace with small, manageable changes. Law and society push to no discrimination. Being inclusive is the right thing to do today. Diversity & Inclusion programs get a big chunk of the budget today.
Here are some suggestions that will put you in a better place.
- Using gender-neutral language in all your HR adds that are related to hiring new staff.
- Appreciating different cultures in your workplace social events by serving foods potluck related to the minorities that make your workforce.
- Celebrate the holidays or events for ethnic or gender minorities that work in your workplace.
- Use inclusive bathroom signs
- Make your website fresh and contemporary.
21. Millennials and Baby Boomers Are Good Mix
Generational differences make older people think negatively about younger people. Millennials and baby boomers can not be the same. Business owners may be the in-between generation that believes that the young ones are nor great as the old ones. A negative reputation in the business world and many business owners may try to avoid hiring Millennials. It may be a significant and costly mistake. After all jumping, a whole generation will be creating an empty space in the workforce. The mix of old experienced teammates with young, energetic people that are more experienced with technology.
22. Your Key Officers Opinion Should be Heard Before Rolling Out New Programs
HR people may be too professional and ignore some right brain, they have as managers. Thinking out of the box is not an easy thing to do. Get some opinion out of the group may bring some out of the box ideas, Human Resources staff should take the initiative to invite critical leaders to participate in the presentation of new programs or processes before making the decision to execute or roll them out.
HR managers need to have their leaders identified and join the team members that have an influence on the directors and up to the shareholders. HR will have a more comfortable life if it will have the decision-makers as part of the team that presents the new program or process.
Feeling part of the business will make people to adopt changes in an easy way.
23. Keep Employee/Culture Handbook Up-to-Date and Invest in Training Your Employees
Small businesses can achieve great brands but still struggle with time resources plentiful employees.
The first step for effectively implementing the best HR practices, start creating your employee handbook and company policies on the first day and keep it relevant and updated as your business grows from the small personal level to a bigger one. Make sure that it is communicated to the new hires by a training and onboarding established process. Doing so will assure you a workplace with a pleasant atmosphere.
24.HR Professionals And the Network
Labor laws, Laws against discrimination, and tax reforms are continually changing; keeping track of these changes is not an easy task for a small business owner. Here is where the network of professionals is needed.
Small businesses do not have a whole HR team, but they do have HR jobs to do. One employee means much more to a small business than to a big corporation. Time to respond or good advice on the moment that an issue is created will make the difference between a problem and a case, Keep your HR backed by having a network of HR professionals that can respond to you in real-time.
Refresh your handbook and make sure that your labor posters are all on the places they should be. HR audits are necessary to be successful and legal in this evolving business climate. Consult a legal expert and HR consultant.
25. Encourage Your Team to Take Risks
Make real new ideas take courage, your employees will need to feel your support for their effort and risk-taking to go ahead with new ideas for improving products or services.
Being a small business makes it harder to have the courage to take a risk and pass the message to the workforce that may be afraid to lose the job in case of a failure. It is like walking on a thin rope, significant achievement, or a bad fall.
26. Give Your workforce A Clear Vision of their Role in the Business
You work hard to get smart and skilled people to work for you, do not let them down by not being capable of illustrating them the future.
Provide your staff with a clear strategic vision about the way your enterprise and their future will collide, fulfilling both sides’ growth interests. Let your vision go ahead five and ten years.
Your vision should be transmitted to your bins with documentation and training sessions with you. Do not let then lose the hope of growing in your workplace.
27. Constant Recruiting
The best time to recruit is when you do not need an urgent filling of a critical part of your chain of production or services. Looking for the best person in the market requires constant attention and patience. By hiring with no pressure, you can effort looking for the best. You do not hire if it is not the one you desired all the time.
28. Social Media is One Good Hiring Tool
I can not imagen looking for hire with no use of social media. The way people are expressing themselves on their social media profiles can tell you about them what an interview may not let you see. Scanning the candidates’ profiles will tell you how sensible they are if they have their profile private or fill it with inappropriate staff, open to everybody.
29. Let Your Staff be Involved in the Hiring Process
Often, small business owners are pressed like a one-person band, and trying to manage HR activities can be challenging. Why does not share the pressure with your best confidante managers? Get your staff involved, looking for applicants, interviewing them, and bring all the information to you for the decision making. Lead your team with the parameters to go by and ask them to take over the mission and present you with their recommendation(s). This will increases the engagement of your mangers’. You have given them the opportunities to go outside of their regular duties and contribute to another level.
30. Encourage Feedback from Employees
You need to know what is going with your business, one way is the books, another approach is hearing the people that make your workforce. Make the extra effort to create an open line between you and your workers. Top Survey Software
Google docs and surveys are an excellent tool for a small business to collect, manage, and learn employee feedback. You better use this tool a few weeks after the first day in the work of a new employee and later confirm the feedback again a few months later. Regular surveys should be done every quarter or after an essential change in the workplace was made. Using Google Docs makes it easy for the HR team to do whenever they find it necessary. Surveys can de unanimous or not.
31. Onboarding Process
Small businesses should have a formal onboarding process. As it is hard for small companies to do like big corporations, they can use videos like Vyond and written instruction on their website. The truth is streamlined, electronic onboarding can help level the recruitment playing field between smaller companies and larger organizations.
Onboarding is simply a process that makes the new employee know what he needs to do, what he is expected to know, and who is there to help him when he needs help.
Starting before actually hiring up to six-month of working will help your new hire time and tool to adapt to the new workplace.
Establishing a clear, formal onboarding procedure can let new employees get better chances for success by helping them navigate in the organization and understand how to thrive in their new workplace. A comprehensive onboarding should transmit cultural norms, make clear expectations about performance, and help improve workplace communications and interrelationships. There is onboarding automated paperless software.
32. Use the HRIS System
An HRIS system (or Human Resource Information System) refers to the software that lets you do it all by one person. Payroll, hire and terminate workers, update addresses, track vacation, etc.
Small businesses have to find a way to keep up the control of information about their employees and applicants. Human Resources Software can help you be as informed as to the big corporations. If you are really small like a one-person self-employed business, you can use paystubmakr.com for your payroll.
33. Do Not Dealy on Firing People You Need to Let Go
You want to get the best of your workforce so you should hire only the best people, or try to do so. If you see that one of your recruits can not fly that high as you were expecting him to fly, it is time to say goodbye. By letting this person go, you do good for both sides. You will find a better person for this job, and the fired person will have to find a better place for him or her to grow and be happy. The reasons for firing your employee can be in his skills or social problem in getting your culture and character of the relationship between your employees.
34. Employee Appraisal
Appraisal your workforce using some good instruments and methods will be helpful for you to know the performance of your workers. To make the best by these tools, you will need to have your supervisors trained to do the best job when they evaluate the performance of their subordinates.
You must have your supervisors trained on how to appraise your employees objectively, avoiding potential errors like the following:
- Halo Effect a mistake refers to the idea that a positive impression of someone will impact how this person is perceived by the people that work with him. In simple words, it means that if we like this person, we will avoid looking at the mistake that this Haloes person will do.
- Leniency, some people tend to evaluate all people as outstanding positive employees by producing inflated ratings rather than the real performance level.
- Central Tendency The average standard error “The lake dept is 2m” People are not the same. You can not just average them, some are faster than others that can be more creative. Evaluating each employee to the real value will give you the right information for making any decision about this employee’s future.
Supervisors may look at the nice to do/know and overlook what the employees should be good at doing/know
35. Do Frequently Your Performance Review
Your new recruits can show their performance within a short time. Do not wait for the whole year to start looking at their performance. Your onboarding plan should heave evaluation reviews for the first months of work. Your interest in the performance of your new employees coincides with the natural ambition of the same employees to know who they do in their new job.
Feedback, opinions, or simple critics on the results of your employees is the balance of the time they work and the practical benefits in productivity. Only constructive feedback will yield your improvement in the performance and growth of your business and the employees. Discussing the conclusions and the future goals (agreed by you and your employee), you will learn what resources you will need for your employees to be successful and motivated. Sharing the feedback by both sides will develop a culture of constant learning, development, and improvement. To make input your business grow, you need to share it and supervise it every quarter to see the results and respond to new situations.
Summary
We call small businesses those businesses that have fewer people working in a very close working ambient. One employee can be a vital part of the workforce. In a small workplace, workers and owners may share the physical space as well as the relationship in the professional atmosphere. Starting from day one with good HR work will keep your business as a good business and create the base for growing to a bigger one.
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Disclaimer: John Wolf and paystubmakr.com are making a total effort to offer accurate, competent, ethical HR management, employer, and workplace advice. We do not use the words of an attorney, and the content on the site is not given as legal advice. The website has readers from all US states, which all have different laws on these topics. The reader should look for legal advice before taking any action. The information presented on this website is offered as a general guide only