No one ever starts a business with the intention of spending most of their time tied up in the administrative tasks that come with operating one. But the truth is, the more successful your business becomes, the more people you hire, the more staffing demands and HR tasks multiply.

Taking care of HR tasks like managing holiday requests, finding someone to cover parental leave when one of your employees leaves to have a baby, or managing overtime – not to mention staying on top of employment law changes and keeping your policies up-to-date – can feel like your full-time job, particularly when you don’t have an HR manager.

Of course, along with the day to day HR tasks, there’s also a number of strategic HR issues to get your head around if you want your business to thrive. And this is really difficult without an HR manager or consultant to call on.

For instance,

• Are you doing enough to develop your culture and create an employer brand that will help you attract and retain top talent?
• Have you set and aligned your employees’ performance goals with your strategic business goals?
• What about your benefits package? Along with an attractive salary, offering attractive perks, career development opportunities, and flexibility are so important if you’re going to attract and retain great people.

If you’re spending more of your time on managing your workforce, rather than strategically growing your business, then it’s time to get some help.

Here are four telltale signs you need to hire an HR manager to help scale your business.

 

Sign 1:  You’re spending way too much time on HR admin

When you employ people, there’s a stack of HR tasks that go with them. And HR issues have a habit of being very time-consuming.

Whether it’s trying to learn about employment law or the latest updates to awards and rates of pay, or trying to hire a new designer or office manager, these HR activities pull you away from revenue-generating activities.

The more time you spend on HR admin, the less you spend on developing your business (which is why you went into business in the first place!).

 

Sign 2: HR issues are keeping you awake at night

As a business owner, it’s highly likely that the skills you’ve used to grow your business are based on your area of expertise and not on any formal HR training.

As such, there’s probably a big knowledge gap in HR rules and regulations governing everything from hiring practices, to what you need to pay your people, applying and enforcing workplace policies, meeting training needs, and to how to fire someone in a legally compliant way.

As Australian employment law is complex and ever changing, it’s difficult to keep up-to-date and fully compliant if it’s not your full-time job. But there are hefty penalties for getting it wrong, and ignorance is no defense.

 

Sign 3: Your Excel spreadsheets have reached their limits  

While your spreadsheet may have been perfectly adequate for your HR needs when you started out, you’ve probably outgrown it without even realising it.

Remember, the humble spreadsheet wasn’t designed specifically to manage HR needs. When the amount of HR data you’re handling becomes unwieldy and spans multiple spreadsheets, a huge amount of unnecessary duplication and human errors start to sneak in. Which in turn encroach on even more of your valuable time.

 

Sign 4: Payroll is becoming a nightmare

Payroll processing is time-consuming. You need to keep track of new hires or terminations, penalty rates for overtime or weekend work, annual leave entitlements, benefit deductions, and so on, not to mention the record-keeping demands that keep you compliant.  

All this can be a massive time drain when you’re not a payroll professional. The more time you spend on this task, the more time you’re not spending on generating sales, prospecting new opportunities, and delighting customers.

 

What if you can’t afford to hire an HR Manager?

In an ideal world, you’d leave HR and payroll to the experts. But unfortunately, you just can’t afford to right now. What do you do then?

Thanks to technology, reducing time spent on HR admin doesn’t necessarily mean hiring someone. Instead, you can use cloud based HR software to automate a lot of the manual, error-prone tasks that take up much of your time.  

With an HR platform in place, you can choose to hire someone to help on a part-time basis, given all of the basic HR tasks are automated and taken care of via the system. Plus, a solution with an employee self-service functionality will dramatically reduce the HR workload. This frees you up to meet customers, and work on things that inspire and motivate you to grow your business – without having to increase your headcount.

If you’d like to see how HR software can benefit you, check out Employment Hero (you can sign up for free).