Why You Need HR to Grow Your Business

businessstrategygroup2023

Why You Need HR to Grow Your Business

This blog is about why you should make HR your Number 1 priority if you want to grow your business.

In my 30 years of Managing 8 separate Businesses ranging in sales from £800k to £12m, I have been able to return them all from a loss to record profits within 12 months, by making HR my No1 priority! That is: putting people first every time.

It is people that make successful businesses, so why is it that Companies with teams put the pursuit of Sales, Marketing & Profitability before HR? I believe the reason is simple; it is easier to focus on the ‘doing’ than the managing of people.

Managing and getting the best out of people can be hard, which is why as an HR Consultant, I have over 30 years real hands on experience in dealing with those things that employers; don’t know how to do, or don’t like to do, or don’t want to do, and that some HR consultants have only read about in books rather than experiencing first hand in managing businesses.

The more you focus on your people, the better they will perform. The people that work for you will determine where your business will be in 5 years, 10 years and so on!

Have you ever reflected back to why you first came into business?

Could it be that you wanted….

More Time for yourself
More time for Family & friends
Better Holidays
Pursue your Interests & Hobbies
Make more Money
Security for you and your love ones?
Do less & gain more

Now how has that turned out for you or other business colleagues that you know? For many owners the complete opposite has happened with less….

Your key focus should be on your people as they can cover a lot more than you given the same time.

Did you know?

In the average company = There are 3 Types of people

Disengaged on average 66% of your workforce
Highly disengaged on average 20% of your workforce
Highly engaged 14% of your workforce

This means that only 34% of salary is in engaged work! So does this mean 66% of your wages bill is wasted in unproductive work? Look into it!

So what is your choice? Carry on as you did before, or get me in to complete a team performance check to ensure you are getting more engaged work for the salary you pay?

When it comes to thinking about your team performance, Human Resources should be your No1 focus because when you get that right, growing your business, sales & Marketing becomes so much easier and fun to do.

These are some of the ways HR can grow your business

Recruitment: Our HR finds the right candidates for you to employ because we identify talent that you can mold into great Team players. This year I was asked to recruit an electrician for a local company. We offered the client a choice of 3 and they accepted all 3 because they were the type of electricians they wanted to build and grow into their team.

Team Performance: Training the good & eliminating the poor. HR will ensure you follow the legal process. With the correct people strategies in place, HR will help you retain the good too. In completing this strategy during the pandemic with an engineering company, we identified 70% of the workforce who were ‘Highly disengaged’. Once the owner had given the green light, within 4 months they were replaced with Highly engaged people. The company, is now making record profits.

Brand & Culture are key elements for every successful business. We make our HR play a huge part in building the brand and culture that works for your business. When I was asked to sort out a distribution business, that had not made a profit in 20 years, the No1 thing I sorted were the people, especially the Management. Good people were recruited and others promoted to make a new management team. This restored the pride back into the business, that then achieved its first profit in 20 years.

Growth. HR can help you create a strategy for growth so you know the right time to recruit the right people for the job. On a call to a Plymouth company keen to recruit, but not sure if they could afford to, we did a cashflow forecast. We factored in the worst possible scenario that showed them that they could recruit immediately.

Promote & develop Leaders: Our HR will help you to identify and develop leaders in your business so the business & Team deliver for you, allowing you to do less and they do more. In 2 all male dominated companies, I asked the business owners to be open minded and interview applicants from both genders. They both employed the best person for the job, who happened to be female. Within 12 months, the first company promoted the female applicant to manage the day to day running of his business and the second company plan to do the same by end of the year.

Communication: is the No1 skill that most Employers want from their Employees and all Employees want from their Employers. HR helps you deliver this. With a mechanical company, I arranged for the employees to have their say about how the management was running their business. The management were petrified of what their employees would say. But I have done this exercise so many times, I could predict what their employee’s wanted from them, which was better communication. This is now in place & working well.

Rules of the Game: Most of us will have watched or played in some field sports, like Rugby, Football, Cricket, Tennis, Volley Ball etc.

Question: What is the No1 thing all sports have in common?

Answer: THE RULES of the GAME!

Your team need to be aware of the rules. You need to give them enough space to be creative, think outside the box, take the initiative, cultivate passion, invite constructive feedback leading to positive action….and so on.

So what happens if they break the rules?

Just like on a playing pitch, you stop the game, tell them where they have broken the rules and refer them back to your “staff handbook” before they start playing again. If however, they keep breaking the rules despite the additional training you are giving them, you take them down the disciplinary route.

So how do you know if you have the right Team to take you forward to achieve your goal?

Do the 2^nd job interview test

1. Reread your employee’s job roles and create an organisational chart to see where they currently fit in your business & decide if they still deliver value to your business?

2. On a blank sheet of paper list the names of all your employees. Then decide, if you were starting your business all over again, who would you employ, why, and who would you reject?

3. Then get hold of a HR consultant like me and take action

So what does Business Success HR Do?

At Business Strategy Group, we put people first, because they drive your business. We ensure your investment in sales, marketing & customer services is delivered by a great team of people who not only communicate your services clearly, but deliver them professionally, every time whether or not you turn up at work, so your clients come back to you for more and tell others how great you are!

So let me finish this blog with a crazy HR scenario. On my parent’s dairy farm, which milked 210 cows, I wondered why the cows were producing less milk and their parlour food was lasting longer than expected. I was called in at 4am to watch what the milking person was up to. It did not take me long to figure out that the milking person was giving the cows less food so they produced less milk so he could work less. I dismissed the milking person for gross misconduct; that included theft of food rations to the cows, theft of milk production for the farm and theft of the time he was being paid to do the job.