First published on Thursday, August 8, 2024
Last updated on Friday, August 16, 2024
Today’s demanding business landscape is pretty unforgiving—so much so that ‘scale or fail’ is the reality for many ambitious startups and SMEs.
Businesses share some common HR challenges across industries, from recruitment and regulations to compliance and culture. Those without an HR solution that enables the kind of scalability required to survive will sadly fall by the wayside.
Thankfully, there are ways to overcome them and that’s exactly what we’re going to do—guide you through the challenges and how HR growth tools are the solution as your business grows.
Let’s dive right into the headline challenges…
Talent acquisition and retention
Growing quickly means hiring quickly, but it’s very rarely that easy to find talent. If you get hit by a rapid growth spurt after a big win or two, you can find yourself in a bit of a pickle before you know it.
Even if you do manage to find some great new hires, you’re then faced with the challenge of fast tracking their onboarding to get them up to speed and maybe cutting a few corners to get there. It’s not unheard of for new staff to become disillusioned with a role if they start to see such cracks from the inside or feel it was mis-sold to them, so it’s crucial to get it right from day dot.
Acquiring and retaining the talent you need to grow becomes much easier with modern HR software that does the hard work for you. You can get smarter about recruitment with a central hub to manage it from beginning to end for you. From templated job descriptions to seamless onboarding journeys, it’s the only way forward for the modern business.
Compliance and regulation
A huge part of HR is keeping your business in line with employment law in the UK. It can be a bit of a minefield, especially when your workforce is getting bigger and bigger, and your contracts are getting more and more detailed.
Staying on top of staff training, including health and safety, takes constant monitoring to make sure everyone’s up to speed.
As your business grows, managing workloads can be a challenge, considering the tough tasks of monitoring things like:
Working hours
Payroll
Holiday and other leave entitlements
Overtime
Absences and sicknesses
Health & safety
Even dismissals or tricky probation periods could come into play and if you don’t comply with the law, you could face some hefty fines. So, getting the right HR advice on employment law for when your business grows can keep you on the right side of the law.
Cultural alignment
You can also get help from HR software that grows with you on the culture front as an organisation—it can be of the easiest things to disintegrate as you bring in more staff, so it pays to keep on top of it with the right tools at your disposal.
Some HR solutions, like ours, includes access to exclusive online marketplaces with cost-saving perks and discounts for staff, that also doubles as a marketplace for you to boost your sales with unlimited adverstising. Others come with e-learning training courses for managers to cultivate a rewarding culture.
Plus, utilising HR tools such as a clock-in and out app can give your workforce the freedom to work remotely while still being able to check in and log their hours. This can be a great way to not only keep your existing staff happy, but also to attract new staff when you’re looking to fill vacancies for your growing business.
If you give your staff a reason to want to stay, you’ll be more likely to be rewarded with their loyalty.
Performance management
As your team grows, so does your responsibility to manage its performance—we’d say sorry, but you knew that already.
Regular reviews, promotions and contract negotiations are all part of your role at the people-focused centre of the business. So it gets increasingly important to have a great solution to help you manage it.
Keeping on top of all the documentation that comes with tasks like these has arguably been a pain in the past, but you can now make use of unlimited HR document storage to help you along. The ability to access documents from anywhere and confirm key updates with alerts and read receipts means that performance management in HR has never been easier.
Training and development
Naturally, a growing workforce needs constant access to training and development opportunities to help your business stay ahead of the curve. It’s your remit to put a programme in place to facilitate this, but it’s not a straightforward task, especially if you have multiple departments to keep in sync.
That’s exactly where an HR learning management system can come into play—help your staff with personal development opportunities and the capacity to meet all your needs as a fully compliant business, from HR to health and safety.
Get HR software that grows with you
From a technology standpoint, the main challenge that lands on you is the implementation of a business-wide solution that grows as you do (no biggie then).
It’s actually not as daunting as it sounds when you’ve got a full suite of HR growth tools at your fingertips. Sure, growing your business is still no mean feat, but it’s a darn sight more streamlined when you’ve got BrightHR on your side.
If you’re ready to prioritise scalable HR solutions to give yourself the best chance of sustainable growth and success, get in touch today to book a demo.
