Managing Your HR Duties

One of the toughest jobs you have as a business owner is dealing with your HR duties. In almost every business this can be a huge headache and a never ending nightmare. However, there are a number of tactics you can implement to relieve the so-called headache. Since this nightmare will never go away you need some strategies to make it a pleasant experience or at least as pleasant as possible.

The very first tactic to consider is “ATTITUDE”! You may not realize it but your attitude about hiring and all the HR duties you have is the most important element you need to master to make business life pleasant. You must force yourself to have an excellent attitude and be positive even when things are not going your way. This one tactic can change everything for you and your outlook on life and your business. Your positive attitude should permeate every part of your business – customers, vendors, business partners, family members and especially employees. If necessary, change your attitude and you will be surprised at how pleasant your HR duties will become.

The second strategy to focus on is “BUDGETING TIME” every week to work on your HR functions. For example - placing or renewing ads, reviewing resumes, phone interviewing, face to face interviewing etc. If you will make your HR duties a priority and schedule time every week to focus on these tasks your HR nightmares will turn into pleasant dreams. Finding excellent, qualified painters is a function of your time and effort. It’s a numbers game. You may have to weed through 20 applicants to find one excellent painter so you have to budget enough time to accomplish the numbers game. Just realize and except the fact that you need to work on HR tasks every week and then it won’t bother so much.

The third strategy is making sure you “ORIENTATE AND TRAIN” your new hires properly and spend enough time helping them understand your business and way of doing things. They need to buy in to your model and the only way they will is if you sit down face to face and orientate them properly. If you schedule some time weekly, bi-weekly or monthly for training, evaluating and coaching you employees your HR troubles will shrink. The reason this is so important is that when you invest energy, time and resources into making your employees be the best they can be they will be happy employees and your retention rate will shrink, which leads to less hiring. You have to treat your employees like partners in the business. They need to be like family. They still need to know the boundaries and expectations and there needs to be accountability but they need to feel that you care about them and are genuinely interested in their life and happiness. If you have that kind of attitude you will have lifelong employees and very little turn over.

If you will institute those three strategies when it comes to your HR duties your business will run much smoother and you will have a lot more fun. Remember the first strategy, “ATTITUDE”, it can make everything in your business positive.

Keep Peddling

It seems as we try to build our BP3 business and as we take on new web site projects we are not really making any progress. This feeling happens to most business owners, especially within the first year or so. However, if you ask someone who is looking in from the outside they would probably say, "wow, you guys are doing great and growing by leaps and bounds".

The title of this particular blog posting is "keep peddling" meaning, don't stop building and working on your business like we are doing with BP3. When you are in the thick of it all it does not seem like you are making any progress but if you were to step back and look from the outside you would actually realize you are making some progress and usually significant progress. You have to keep working the business. If you fall off the bike you have to get back on and keep peddling. If you think you are not getting anywhere you still have to keep peddling and realize that those who are looking from the outside can see you are making progress.

One of the most important things to remember about this process is to work smarter and not harder. Spend the majority of your time working on your business and not in your business. Think about the tasks you perform each day like for BP3 it's building web sites and then determine if those tasks are building your business or are they just tasks that get you some money for today.

In my opinion the most important tasks you can perform that will build your business and help it grow each day is sales/marketing and human resources. You have to find people to buy your product and service and you have to help convince them that they do need your service or product and then you have to find good workers to help you provide the service or sell the product. Finding good employees is key to your success and finding customers is key to your success. You still need to perform all the other daily tasks like buying paper clips etc but you should budget time to work on those critical tasks of sales/marketing and human resource management.

If you budget time for these critical task your business will grow and you will not fall into the trap of working in your business and not on your business. At BP3 we are always looking for talented programmers and we are always looking for potential clients. This is never ending and if you do it right it will lead you to extreme success.