When can you do it yourself, and when do you need an HR Consultant?

There are a number of reasons for when you may need to use and need an HR Consultant when running your own business. Setting up and tailoring policies and procedures to your business and industry. Dealing with an employee issue. Deciding to make a change to your structure and roles. Managing absence or performance to name a few.

You may not have the budget or size for an in-house team. Or you may be an SME with in house support, but the team just needs extra resource or guidance. Bringing in a HR Consultant can provide specialist knowledge for a fraction of the price of a permanent HR Manager.

As small businesses grow, you must increase your staff to manage the workload and then learn how to develop and implement HR policies. This is often done the hard way through trial and error, and after a lot of time and money has been spent. As well as many mistakes, headaches and sometimes sleepless nights. The faster the growth, the more likely you are to experience problems. For many, these problems centre around finding and retaining high quality employees, not having clear roles and duties and employees unsure where they fit into the team.

You must suddenly become expert in HR management and behavioural psychology, as well as employment law. Learning and implementing key areas such as recruitment and selection, promotion and retention, payroll, salary and benefits, compliance as well as training and development, which can all be time consuming, inefficient, costly and divert attention from the operational side of the business. Impacting profits and results.

However, not getting these right, can be equally disastrous for business.

Potentially creating risks of fines, tribunal claims or low morale and performance.

You must develop a knowledge and understanding of these areas, but you don’t need them to take up all your time and there are definitely things you can do yourself, or implement once you have the tools.

So when can you manage yourself and when do you need to get help?

When you reach the point you need to recruit additional support.

Research into SMEs has shown that finding, motivating and retaining good staff is a critical bottleneck in business growth. This requires more than just an informal chat and ‘I think they’d be ok’ or ‘they’ll do’, or ‘quick, I need help now!’, to fill important positions in your business. Setting expectations, creating relevant and protective employment contracts, and job duties requires a bit extra input to get it right first time, and save yourself time and money later on replacing staff and dealing with issues. As well as meeting the legal requirements all businesses have to comply with.

Knowing your rights, employment law and successfully managing employees from the start, will make leading your team much easier in the long run, dealing with issues and problems effectively and quickly. Becoming a confident, effective manager will give you the tools to develop and grow your business, your way, taking your employees along with you.

However, at this stage, depending on your industry and requirements, you may just need a HR for starters pack to get you going and ensure you feel confident to take that first step. Regular support may come later when you have built to 5 or more staff and have more complex employee issues, policy changes, require some support in your new management role, need to develop those performance plans to reach those new business and financial goals or you just need someone to take some of the HR work and questions off your hands so you have the time back to run the business.

When you need some guidance on essential and best practice HRM – and how these can support your business.

You may need direction on the key factors in creating a high performing team, resolving conflict, creating accountability and achieving results. Or a trusted advisor to discuss concerns and act as a sounding board. However, this can be done on an ad hoc basis and you can then implement the actions yourself.

Once you have started recruiting, what is required is the development of some essential and key HR policies and practices which are adapted to your business, straightforward to manage and efficient to allow you the time and attention to run the business, as well as on-hand expert guidance and support to answer questions as and when needed. This will ensure you continue to be legally compliant, streamline processes so you aren’t involved in answering every question, as well as utilising the benefits of great HR management practices, tailored to your business, taking away those headaches.

Also, this should be flexible and not a mere additional to the bureaucracy. Implementing an off the shelf or free document, can have the downsides of not meeting the operational requirements of your business, not providing the additional contractual protection you require in your industry, or not supporting the business goals moving forward. They also may not be legally compliant. Also, having issued a document, does not equal an implemented and usable management tool. To be effective, it needs to be relevant and active.

When it’s time to take a step back and learn to delegate.

It is most likely that in the initial years you may be required to be a micro manager, constantly engaged in the everyday details of the business. However, as the business grow, you need to develop a team and learn to delegate.

It is at this stage, you will need to take a step back and let go so you can concentrate on where you want the business to go in the long term and develop the plans and blueprint to achieve that, accompanied by training and developing your employees in the right direction. This is the time you must learn how to communicate your vision, mission and values and present these in practical, useable policies along with a clear understanding of how the firm aims to achieve these goals.

Developing delegation and teamwork skills is crucial and coaching can help at this stage. Are the team working when you are not there? Are you confident they are delivering what you need them to if you aren’t on hand to answer questions? This includes defining the structure, job descriptions, duties and person specs required for each position, along with performance standards and goals. Once you have these basic HR policies and practices in place, you can concentrate on growth. A careful balance must be created to enable conditions for accountability, ownership and performance.

And if you don’t get your HR in place?

Risks include lack of time to undertake important planning and business development tasks, failure to get the best out of your people, fines and legal non-compliance issues and your health, from the dangers of burning out under work pressure. You can get these issues all right in the long term, but we've done the hard work for you so if you would like some help taking the short cuts from our years of training, experience and research, get in touch!

Contact us today to see how we can help you get all your documents and people plans in order and in line with your business and goals.