I just recently presented to a group of small business owners on the topic of Human Resources. Given that I just had the group for the one session, I had to think of the most important topics that a small employer would need to think about. We certainly covered a lot of ground in a short time. In thinking about yesterday’s session, I wanted to highlight a few items that you may find helpful as a small business owner:

• Employee Relations is not just disciplining employees and conducting investigations. Think of employment as a relationship with your employees that helps support your mission. You provide them with a paycheck and benefits, but you also provide them with opportunities for growth and learning. In return you hope that they will stay with your organization for a while and will strive to perform their best, making your business successful. 
• If you hire the right person who can carry on the organization’s mission and if you onboard/train them correctly and give them the resources they need to do the job, hopefully that will be the case.
• 60-80% of most companies’ overhead is spent on human capital. Think of your employees as an investment. If you don’t spend the time up-front, properly interviewing, doing reference checks, doing background checks, setting expectations and effectively onboarding and training the new hire, think of the potential customer relations issues, reduction in employee performance, time spent managing employee issues, cost of theft and cost of rehiring and training that you will spend. Doing it correctly in the beginning should positively impact your budget as opposed to the cost of not doing so. 

If you’ve done all that and the employee is still not working out, then you may want to talk to an HR Consultant about next steps. Some employers think that having at-will language in their handbook will take care of the problem by enabling them to quickly terminate a person if they are not working out. However, there are other elements related to at-will employment that you need to know about, other employment laws, and your handbook to consider. We will discuss employee handbooks further in next week’s article.

At Southwestern HR Consulting (SWHRC) we can help you through the employee work-life cycle and set in place the items to help you with a successful employee relations climate and sound HR practices. You may contact SWHRC through their website on the link above.

Written by | Magdalena Vigil-Tullar

HR Consultant | MBA, SPHR, SHRM-SCP, CLRP

Phone: 505-270-7494 | Email: magdalena@swhrc.com

PO Box 14274 | Albuquerque, NM 87191