So you never wanted to be an HR professional or thought you had the right skills to be one. But as a business owner, you find yourself dealing with all kinds of HR issues—everything from hiring and firing to training and development to employment law and compliance. HR is just one of the many hats business owners must learn to wear.
The thing is, HR isn’t just a set of narrowly defined functions, such as hiring or training. It’s also a broad body of evolving knowledge that involves what makes employees most happy and productive. In understanding key HR insights and practices, you ultimately elevate mood and performance in your workplace and foster a sense of teamwork and loyalty. By helping your employees blossom, you are creating innumerable benefits for your business at the same time.
Volumes are written on these very topics. But the NFIB (National Federation of Independent Business) has singled out three HR tasks that are critical to your small business. Business owners can no longer skate by with a passing familiarity of HR. Instead, they must become students of tested HR practices, learning from the best how to recruit in a smart way, implement good and fair policies, provide training and performance management that is inspiring, effective and fun; and much more. It’s no longer an option for business owners to become fluent in HR; it is absolutely mandatory for success.
NFIB suggests three HR-related areas where most business owners need to focus more attention:
- Setting employees up for success with ongoing needs assessment. This means knowing where your employees are now and where they need to be going. In other words, having a solid understanding of where every employee’s skills fall on the continuum and how skills need to be developed or acquired to meet the evolving needs of a competitive business. The difference is the skills gap.
- For every employee, a development plan that addresses training issues. The skills gap guides you to the kinds of training needed to close it. To be effective, training needs to be meaty and current and relevant, which means hire training professionals to provide it! This is an investment you can’t not make and one that has a direct impact on employee satisfaction and retention and your business’s performance overall.
- Communicate openly and often, especially when it comes to policies and practices. While it’s easy to overlook these as mundane, consider that, in reality, the business’s policies and practices are where your employees live every day. So begin with a good orientation to your company’s culture, including your philosophy on training and development. Most employees will follow suite with their own commitment to honing their skills—a total win-win.
And communicating isn’t just for policies and the like. You need to be communicating all the time on every topic, in great detail. It’s doubtful you could over-communicate! Communicating openly helps build trust and tells your employees a variety of things: That you have clear expectations; that you intend to treat everyone fairly; that you value the give-and-take in the exchange of information and ideas.
Communication will make or break performance and productivity, according to HR specialists Zane Benefits at zanebenefits.com. The company offers six tips for effective employee communication, from clarifying your objectives to seeing the world from your employees’ perspectives. Most of all, your communication needs to be substantive and thoughtful, and always with an invitation to respond.
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