Holy crap, it’s 2017! I’ll be back with a new original post next week but it’s a guest poster for this week – HAris Quintana with 5 Things Startups Should Know About HR:

Anyone who is in the process of launching or starting a small to middle-sized company or a start-up should know that company management might not be as big of a headache for you as human resource management will be. The HR department is your biggest asset, period!

When you think about recruitment, retaining employees, training and appeasing them with accurate performance evaluation, HR personnel are your go to guys. When we say a company and all its success relies on how productively and sincerely the employees work, we may not be far off from the truth.

When we say that HR is responsible for managing those employees and some of the most important business operations for you, that is an undoubted truth, which is gleaned from years and years of dealing with small start-ups.

Do you know how? They made it big because they realized that in order to maximize their assets and employee effectiveness, all they have had to do was focus on re-conceptualized HR practices that paid off in the end.

They are Masters of a Number of Trades

HR does everything including managing your mission statement, common departmental goals and their alignment, objectives that are divided and structuralized according to each department, operations, projects, and employees, and a collective vision that the entire company is working towards. The HR personnel are the people who are your valuable assets and who are responsible for operating and pushing your brand identity in the right direction, that is forward!

Recruitment Isn’t Their Only Goal

Most novice entrepreneurs and start-up CEOs tend to confuse HR as a recruitment branch. Although it is an important responsibility as we have mentioned above, it isn’t everything. Seeking, recruiting, and hiring the right people for the job is a balanced approach for an HR department. However, you will need to realize that human resource is so much more than that. Monitoring the recent hires, training the existing employees and keeping a high morale among your workforce by employing exceptional compensation and incentivized strategies is an important aspect of HR management that shouldn’t be ignored.

They are Serious about Employee Engagement

When you start a company, you want people to not only believe in the imminent success of the company but also in the vision of the path that you have chosen. They must also believe in their roles as individuals who are necessary to ensure the profitability and success of a new venture. A start-up’s aim is not only to retain the best talent in the job market but is also to provide them with competitive training platforms to encourage them and providing extra benefits, compensations and commissions that will drive them to perform at their absolute best.

They have Their Priorities Lined Up

Each start-up usually has their on-boarding process lined up. The role of the HR department is multidimensional and they usually put orientation and training at the forefront of their mission. They have to ensure that each member that they recruit for a start-up knows exactly how to perform, what their duties are and how to get them done in the most efficient and effective manner possible. A highly effective workforce can only be built and managed if you have a strong HR team who uses every training and orientation tool at their disposal to tell them about the overall game plan and how to make it successful.

Strategic Forecasting

Inexperienced start-up CEOs put all their focus and efforts on the NOW when they should be thinking about the future and how well their young company will be able to withstand the problems that come with time. Workload allocation, legal compliance, future forecasting, employee scheduling, and definition of short term and long term goals fall in the domain of the HR department along with the responsibility that helps them make informed planning and company expansion a reality.

Haris Quintana is with Full Steam Consulting in Australia.