Download 3 FREE Employee Performance Templates
Download 3 FREE Employee Templates
What will any business owner typically tell you takes up the majority of their time, money and energy?
Whether its employees, contractors, suppliers, consultants or customers, they’re all people. Relationships and how you make connections or establish agreements and terms with all the people around you will determine how successful any business is.
When we think of ‘HR’, most people will limit that thought to employees working for an employer. The reality, though, is so much that comes out of HR work impacts the experiences all other people will have when interacting with your business.
That means, your business’ income is impacted by how well you do HR. So, understanding how important it is to get this right seems like pretty simple mathematics.
HR related work touches almost everything in a business. Unfortunately, most of us easily become overwhelmed by everything that should be considered. But, there are only a few major HR items you should prioritise to have covered, which will give you a solid platform to stand on from a legal, operational and management viewpoint.
Below are the 5 critical components new (and all) businesses must establish to maximise the likelihood of success and access the profitable benefits from all people and their relationships with your business:
1. Wages and salaries > cost of operating > price of products > profit margins
Modern Awards determine everything you must pay your people. There are more than 120 of them, so more likely than not, your current or future employees will fall under their coverage.
Discover the correct Modern Awards (there can be multiple) that apply to your business now, and in the future.
Work out the minimum cost of every position in your workforce plan, annualise it, and add 5% for the following year.
This information will impact decisions, like:
where and what workspace you can rent;
how many people you can afford to hire; and
how much you should be charging for your services or products to get a reasonable profit margin.
2. The quality of first experiences result in returning paying customers
As such, you need to determine acceptable behaviours from your people, contractors, and anyone else that interacts with other people on behalf of your business.
You do this by creating a simple set of values and defining what they mean , behaviourally.
You can also create a simple, short position description that includes a list of those values.
To go further, you can even create an employee handbook, which sets out all the rules of the workplace.
The further you go, the more clarity and understanding you provide to your people about how they should be conducting themselves in all of their interactions.
3. People operations – how we do one thing is how we do many things
From something as simple as how you name a file or where you save a document, to how your most complex of processes is most efficiently performed, you need to ensure the “how-to-do” information is documented and available.
Giving customers a consistent, good experience with your business relies on your peoples’ performance being consistently good.
Not ensuring the “how-to-do” is available for people means they’ll create their own way of doing everything, and usually those processes are developed based on what is easier for them, not what is best for the customer experience.
This is simple but effective work, it really must be done if you have any chance of controlling your customer experience.
4. Protecting your business’ customers when things inevitably go wrong
At some point in time, relationships you have with employees, consultants and contractors may sour.
You will part ways with some people, eventually, maybe even quickly.
Sometimes, the most detrimental part of those departures will be the loss of customers or other staff that go with them, due to poaching.
You must have a robust, yet not over-reaching set of employment contracts to cover you and protect yourself from damage that departing people can bring.
5. Defending yourself from vexatiousness
A result of implementing all the above tips is the ability to defend yourself against claims brought against you.
These may be unfair dismissal claims, accusations of harsh management, general protections claims, or others.
Doing all of the above sets the platform you can manage from. This means you’ve set the tone for what is fair and reasonable management within your business.
Having all of that down and well-practiced means you can defend yourself well, when claims reach your doorstep.
I know, all of that sounds like a lot of work to do. Lawyers charge like wounded bulls for simple contract templates and I really don’t believe the legal professions typical approach to creating workplace contracts is worthwhile, nor valuable for most businesses.
These days, you can engage a workplace consultant to conduct an audit style of assessment on your business and produce everything you need, not just contract templates, for a very reasonable and affordable cost.
If you’re inclined to take on the work yourself, it’s do-able, but be aware the industrial relations system in Australia can be a minefield for the untrained. The vast, subtle and highly technical differences between casual employees, permanent employees and contractors can bring heavy financial losses in claims if you miss the nuanced details.
