Human Resources (HR) can seem overwhelming to business owners who are typically “ideas” people and often aren’t excited about policies, benefits, and employee management. But HR plays a big role in helping your business thrive. Whether you have an HR manager, or you’re handling things on your own—here are 10 areas you need to be managing effectively to keep your employees happy and your business secure:


1. Hiring—including Recruiting & Onboarding
Whether you have jobs open or not, hiring is something that should be on your radar year-round. From writing job descriptions to determining what your screening and onboarding process will look like, hiring is something that requires regular attention, cultivation, and planning in order to be done well.

2. Training & Professional Development
Develop people who show potential by helping them gain additional skills and continue to grow in their careers. Organizing regular training is an important part of retaining a talented, connected, and high-performing team.

3. Goal Setting & Performance Evaluation
What are you working toward as a business and how will your team’s performance help you get there? Communicating expectations around performance metrics is a key part of growing your business and HR will help you define and communicate these goals.

4. Compensation—including Incentives & Benefits
Monitoring health and/or retirement benefits for affordability and value is critical as the needs of your team will change. Compensation decisions take market research, budget savviness, and a lot of time to pinpoint. These are complex conversations to have and can be “deal breakers” for both current and potential employees.

5. Leadership Development
Management training is different from professional development among employees. Leading people with varying personalities, backgrounds, and skillsets is challenging. Executive retreats are a great way to help your leaders recalibrate and become better at making key business and people management decisions.

6. Compliance—including Policies, Handbooks, & Documentation
HR communicates company policies (typically through an employee handbook) and also maintains compliance with things like short-term disability and frequently changing employment laws. Not exciting stuff, but very necessary.

7. HR Technology
This includes everything from tracking and processing payroll to gathering and storing employee information both during and after employment. There are tons of different HRIS platforms to choose from and identifying the one that best meets your needs takes a lot of business savviness.

8. Culture Definition & Nurturing
Articulating your company culture while cultivating and communicating it to your employees is what makes building your dream team possible. As your business grows, your culture and key values will change.

9. Company-wide Communication
Communicating company-wide information usually falls to HR. Whether it’s planning for bad weather and office closures, or communicating policy changes and updates about the business, this is an important responsibility.

10. Employee Relations
Managing conflict, documenting grievances, having difficult conversations, and reacting the right way during sensitive employee relations issues is the cornerstone of Human Resources.

Ask us your HR and employee relations questions via the online chat tool in the lower left corner of your screen. We love helping businesses solve their people problems and we love to share what we know!