Welcome to the world of Human Resources (HR)!
Starting a business can be both exciting and challenging. As a founder or entrepreneur, you are likely to focus heavily on product development, marketing strategies, revenue generation and financial management. With so much on your plate, it’s easy to overlook the importance of Human Resources (HR) in the early stages of your start-up.
In fact, it’s very easy to assume the importance of HR is related to the size of a company’s employee base, when in fact, the importance of HR is related to the impact of a single employee on a business’s productivity and culture, with both a negative and positive impact of a single employee being greater the smaller the employee population of your business.
With this in mind, early adoption of HR practices can be crucial for the short and long-term success of your start-up. So, let’s take a look at what Human Resources is, the myths and misconceptions and why successful start-ups invest in HR so early in their life-cycle.
As a HR professional with over 20 years’ experience, I am familiar with the ‘Hire & Fire’ perception of my industry, particularly from employees and managers who we tend to have limited interaction with. I understand this perception, in the early 90’s this was a fair description of the limited remit of HR, however, 30 years later HR’s seat at the leadership table is well and truly secured and our impact on business success has become more and more significant. In fact, my fellow HR professionals are responsible for positioning people as a sustainable competitive advantage for the most successful brands in the market today, directly enabling their companies in achieving global success, while protecting them from financial and reputational risk.
In this series of articles, I will be sharing with you a founder’s guide to Human Resources. While as a founder, you would have likely had interactions with HR during your career, maybe as a people manager or an employee, these experiences likely will have provided limited insight into the world of HR and it’s significant impact on business success. With this in mind, I would like to guide you in uncovering the purpose of HR, and help understand more about an area of business that I believe is a predictor of start-up short and long term success.
The ’Founder’s Guide to HR’ series will provide you with insight into the purpose of HR, uncover key HR strategies and tools, explain the benefits of Employee Well-being, Diversity & Inclusion, Employee Relations and help you connect the complexed world of Human Resources to Start-up success.
To ensure you, don’t miss out on our series, give us a follow us @ Linkedin or reach out to us at hello@nub-hr.com for more information.
