HR- Does your company need one?

If you are reading this, then you are most likely ready to hire someone to run your HR work, or you might be even late. It’s all pretty simple when you are a small business, you can manage most of the work yourself. But as the company starts to grow, and depending on the speed at which it grows, you will without a doubt need some help.

Who or what is HR?

HR can be one person or a whole department, and it can be in-house or you can outsource HR tasks to a professional employer organization. Either way, HR in whatever form you chose, will help you with a lot of things such as hiring and onboarding, managing payroll, managing training and development, taking care of safety and health issues, maintaining legal compliance, helping create, obtain and adapt the organizational culture, monitoring employee time and attendance and much more. So as you can see, you will have a lot of work taken off your shoulders and you will be able to focus on other aspects of running a business.

When is the right time to hire someone?

But what most find confusing is, when to hire someone to do this. As we’ve mentioned, it usually has to do with the size of your business and the growth speed. In most cases, if you are a business of 10 people, you’ll most likely be able to do it all on your own. Once you reach 20 people, you’ll want to assign someone to do part-time HR tasks and make it official, someone who will help manage the team better. On average small businesses spend about 18 hours on HR-related tasks, but as the businesses grow, so do these tasks. As a business grows, you will get tangled in a lot of legal issues, and you’d want to have someone who knows how to do all the paperwork and make sure that everything is aligned. As the business grows, you will also need new employees. And instead of spending time on the hiring and onboarding process, HR will take care of that. 

As a company of 40 people and more, you might want someone specialized in this area of business. You can always choose to stay in-house and build your HR team and/or department or outsource to an organization that specializes in this. Both have their pros and cons, you have to choose based on your needs. But without a doubt, managing such a business is impossible without a serious HR specialist. 

Is your business expanding rapidly?

If you are a rapidly growing company, you will need HR assistance, to manage the hiring and onboarding process, and to make sure that all the paperwork and legal documents are in place. The bigger the company, the bigger the legal issues are, and it also helps if you are in a highly regulated industry. Now, what might confuse you is if you aren’t that big, but remote and hybrid working have become a normal part of doing business, or perhaps you have distributed offices, again, you will need some assistance with making sure everything and everyone is ok.

Company culture 

The HR department plays a big role when it comes to your culture. You might not have had HR when you constructed your culture, but as time passes, HR is responsible to strengthen the culture and spreading it throughout your organization. As times change, so should the culture be able to adapt. A good HR team helps a lot in the overall well-being of your employees which in turn means higher retention rates, attractive job providers, higher productivity and the list just goes on and on when your employees are happy. 

It is most likely that you require an HR specialist. So look through your options. Hiring someone to manage such an important aspect of your business is a big deal. You should hire someone you can trust and it is ok to take your time with this. It might seem like a costly move, but it is a long-term investment without tangible returns. In return, you will see your business operating smoothly, able to attract and obtain talent, and you will have time to focus on other aspects of the business.