How You Can Achieve More By Doing Less

If you’re the owner of a start-up or an established SME, it can be easy to dismiss HR as something that only big companies need. However, if you’re going to give your own business 100 per cent as well as conduct all HR duties, you may find you’re overloaded and lack focus on your core role. We look at what functions HR perform and ask if you’re fully prepared to do everything they do, as well as your own work.

What do HR professionals actually do?

A HR role is far more than ‘just’ hiring and firing. The professional body for HR, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), states its aims as… “Improving practices in people and organisation development … to ensure that work benefits individuals, businesses, economies and society.”

HR functions are varied and complex and include such things as: recruitment of new employees, maintaining employee records, sourcing appropriate training and development for employees, ensuring that employees get the right pay and any benefits they are entitled to, managing any complaints or disciplinary procedures, conducting appraisals, advising both management and employees on pay negotiations or redundancy payments, keeping up-to-date on employment law and ensuring that the company abides by any new laws and developing appropriate policies and procedures. Not to mention arranging welfare or counselling, ensuring that equality and health and safety policies are promoted and adhered to, sourcing contractors, dealing with complex, confidential information, writing employee handbooks, administering payroll, dealing with induction materials, and liaising with management to improve the workplace experience of all employees. A rather exhaustive list, to say the least.

However, HR isn’t simply about looking after employees. It’s also a vital component in the management chain, helping senior staff build and maintain relationships with those on ‘the shop floor’, training line managers how to deal with their staff effectively and developing the leadership and managerial qualities of senior staff so they can do their jobs successfully. For these reasons, HR staff must have a deep appreciation of how a business functions together with its ultimate aims and objectives.

How can outsourcing your HR help you?

Anyone in business knows that there are never enough hours in the day to accomplish what must be done. And if you’re faced with the comprehensive list of tasks above, as well as your own responsibilities, you could be putting not only your health and wellbeing at risk but also the success of your business venture. Can you afford to neglect that client call while you deal with writing an induction pack? Will those order spreadsheets generate themselves while you deal with an employee’s paternity leave forms?

If the answer is ‘no’ it’s seriously time to think about outsourcing your HR functions to an organisation which will let you get on with making a success of your own business, safe in the knowledge that you won’t have to worry about dealing with the latest tranche of auto-enrolment pension information, develop a training manual for your latest recruits or work out who’s on holiday in three months’ time. Outsourced HR can help free up your time to concentrate on your business so you accomplish more by doing less.

To find out more about outsourcing HR functions, get in touch with a member of the P3 People Management team today by emailing info@p3pm.co.uk or calling us on 0161 941 2426.