Just because you aren’t paying for outsourced HR doesn’t mean it isn’t costing you. When small business owners and growing businesses handle HR on their own, or delegate it to someone else in the organization who is already overtasked (and has no background in HR), the soft costs involved may not be worth the money saved. Here are just a few of the ways that handling your own HR without a dedicated HR resource actually costs your organization more time, energy, and money in the long run than outsourcing it to an expert.
- Distraction from Priorities – Putting so much energy and concentration into something as time-consuming as HR takes your strategic focus away from growing your business- the thing that you do best.
- Compliance Endangerment – Compliance issues can turn into costly lawsuits, fines, and penalties that add up quickly. You can hope you’re covering all your bases but as with any compliance sector, if you don’t know it thoroughly then you’re leaving yourself open to risk.
- Increased Liability – Employee complaints. Equal opportunity hiring. Discrimination. Enforcement. Performance. Hiring and Firing. If you aren’t an expert in HR, you leave your business open to liability issues if you don’t follow the right steps at the right times for things like the above.
- Time Constraints – Business leaders are busy. That’s a fact. Your time is important, and anything you can delegate to someone else translates into more time in your already packed schedule.
- Employee Relations & Development – Aligning a workforce on paper is one thing. Dealing with the realities of how human beings relate, react, and produce work together is a completely different animal. Having resources available to navigate the hard and soft aspects of human interactivity can make all the difference in your brand’s reputation, retention, and ultimately, work product. Without HR staff, who’s realistically going to be proactive about this?
- Manager Training – Leaders and high performers within your organization don’t just want to make their work and teams better… they want to become better themselves. Providing a clear path of managerial training, certification, education, and investment is essential to creating a strong middle-tier of leadership in your organization. This is something that’s very hard to institutionalize without dedicated staff- at least something more than the occasional conference or workshop.
- Promoting Positive Work Culture – While the idea of “culture” seems something abstract, there are real strategies and tactics you can employ to develop a certain kind of culture, or to be sure that the right conditions exist to foster the kind of culture you want. This takes experience in both the analytic and intuitive and isn’t something that overburdened leaders are usually good at (or have time for).
Chances are if you lead a high-growth company, you wear a lot of hats—and you do it well. But you don’t have to do it all on your own. Leadership involves constant evolution, reevaluation, and change. The more you grow, the more your business will benefit by you focusing on the things you alone can do to move your organization forward. Want to see how getting HR off your plate could actually save you time and money in the long run? Smart HR can help.
