As a business owner, you not only have your own personal finances to worry about but also your business’s too.
And recently, you may have been looking at ways to reduce costs and protect your future revenue.
HR can play a big part in this and we’ve listed 5 ways HR can stop your business from losing money below.
Let’s get started…
1) Stop wasting your valuable time on stuff someone else can do for you
You’ve heard it before…time is money. And if you’re spending your time doing the wrong things, you’re wasting money.
What’s the answer? You need to delegate more.
To do this, think about all of the things you’re doing on a daily basis that could be handled by someone else. Including managing your HR, as this can take up a lot of time and headspace.
You could easily delegate tasks like managing holiday requests, back to work interviews after absence, expenses, appraisals and any other big projects you’ve got going on like hiring a new employee.
You can either delegate this to a member of the team, find HR software to help you or outsource to a HR consultancy like us.
2) Reduce absence
You may have not thought about it before, but absence is a huge HR cost that could be managed and reduced. And if you have employees regularly off sick, it will pay to try and stop this from happening.
In HR, we call this absence management and the course of action depends on why your employees are calling in sick.
If they’re calling in sick because of childcare, then this will need to be handled differently than if they’re calling in sick because of stress etc.
That’s why, to improve absence management, you must first understand why there is absence to begin with. To understand this, you could start by tracking absences and conducting return to work interviews after each absence to see if there are any common trends that need to be addressed.
3) Avoid costly employee claims
One of the biggest HR costs employers potentially face are employee payouts and tribunal claim awards.
The number of employees taking legal action against their employer is massively on the rise and the average payout for a case like unfair dismissal currently stands at over £10,000.
If you handle an issue with an employee incorrectly, the risk of them taking action against you is incredibly high. Which is why it’s important for you to follow employment law legislation and Acas guidelines to avoid a costly employee claim.
If you have a concern about an employee, it pays to get expert advice first before taking any action.
4) Improve employee productiveness and retention
Unhappy employees take more time off, aren’t as productive, cause more problems and generally leave sooner – all of which costs.
To reduce costs, or prevent such costs in the future, it pays to focus on your employee’s happiness. Because happy employees are more motivated, productive and stick around for longer.
There’s lots of things to consider here. What’s your company culture like? Do you offer an incentive package? Do you look at employee’s health and wellbeing? Do you check-in with them on a regular basis etc?
Much like managing employee absence, it’s key to understand what factors could be causing your team to be unhappy at work and this generally starts with an employee survey.
5) Stay legally compliant
Employment law is there to keep you, your business and your people protected. But it’s constantly changing, so it’s sometimes tricky to stay up to date.
It’s really important that as employment law changes, so does your contracts, policies and handbooks because these are what often stand in between you and a costly employee claim.
If you take just one thing away from this article, it should be to get your documents sorted and updated now.
We’re here to help
My recommendation would be to find an expert outsourced HR professional who can take care of all of this for you.
But by outsourcing it to an HR support company, you’ll have the peace of mind that everything is being dealt with in exactly the right way. Better still, it will save you lots of time and it doesn’t have to cost you a fortune either.
If it’s something that you’d like to explore at the moment, we’d love to talk to you about how our HR plan may be able to help you. Just give us a call to arrange a conversation.
