It’s every HR chief’s highest calling to make sure his or her employer has the most excited, switched-on, and capable people on the market. Here’s a list of the things your HR head should be doing right now:

1. Collaborating with you and other leaders to design and communicate a vision for the company, using every communication vehicle you have.
2. Selling your company to the “talent population,” in person, online, and via print and broadcast media. An HR leader should articulate the organization’s culture and story, not only for recruiting purposes but to fuel all of your activities with clients, vendors, media, and the business community.
3. Teaching all employees to tell the truth at work, especially when sticky interpersonal or political wrangles crop up. (Note to CEO: This includes telling you when you sound like a crazy person.)
4. Reinforcing a culture that emphasizes ingenuity over irrelevant, one-size-fits-all metrics.
5. Building a pipeline of qualified, energized people to fuel the company’s growth – scrapping the requisition-by-requisition, transactional recruitment model.
6. Shifting the HR function away from a break/fix model (“Benefits question? Second door on the left.”) to an embedded function in your business units.
7. Installing just enough HR process to meet your company’s regulatory compliance needs but not so much that people are stymied or treated like children.
8. Building a culture of collaboration that fuels every important program at your company. If your HR chief isn’t the advocate for people and evangelist for your culture, that’s a bad sign.
9. Asking your team members every day for their input on your business, their own careers, and life in general – not via a sterile, once-a-year “employee engagement survey.”
10. Replacing fear with trust at every opportunity, in policies, training sessions, management practices, and via every conversation in the place.

It’s a new day in HR. Is your company on the cutting edge, or bringing up the rear?

If you are stuck up in HR Processes or want a reliable partner for HR Outsourcing, contact Savvy Network today.

In this setup, sometimes known as co-employment, your staffers still do their day-to-day jobs for you. But on paper they work for another company called a professional employer organization. These outfits function as the HR department for hundreds or thousands of small businesses, doling out paychecks, managing employee-related taxes and administering benefits.

They also make big promises about simplifying back-office operations and making small companies more competitive. But you’ll need to do some heavy lifting to get the most of out of the deal – from researching your potential partner to easing employees’ fears about the setup.

Shifting the burden
The big selling point of co-employment, obviously, is streamlining. Small companies can skip lots of the hassles involved in human resources, such as managing employee paperwork and staying current with employment laws.

Then there’s the matter of benefits. Professional employer organizations can pool together workers and get lower rates on health insurance than a small business could find on its own. These firms also “can offer your workers other perks you never see in a small organization,” such as extra training, a crisis or counseling hotline and easy online access to benefits information, says Frank J. Casale, chief executive of the Outsourcing Institute, a research and consulting firm in Syosset, N.Y.

What’s more, many professional employer organizations offer companies employment-practices liability insurance—often expensive for small businesses seeking it on their own—to pay damages and legal costs should a worker sue for, say, wrongful termination.

Be on guard
Still, using a professional employer organization carries risks. Consider what happens if it makes a mistake.

In general, if a professional employer organization goofs, such as missing a filing deadline, it’s responsible for fixing errors and paying late fees or other penalties. But certain kinds of errors can create headaches for you. If the firm, say, underpaid employee taxes, the Internal Revenue Service would likely come after you for the money, says Richard Raysman, an outsourcing attorney at Holland & Knight LLP in New York. Then you would in turn have to fight it out and settle the matter with the firm.

Meanwhile, if a professional employer organization is acquired or goes under, you could lose access to employee records, or some employee benefits might evaporate.

So, do homework about a potential partner. For starters, look to see if it’s accredited by the Employer Services Assurance Corp. Among other requirements, an organization must submit audited financial statements and evidence verified by a certified public accountant that it’s properly paying taxes and insurance premiums.

If you are stuck up in HR Processes or want a reliable partner for HR Outsourcing, contact Savvy Network today.

Although there are many types of businesses, the challenges that growth can bring to each of them is surprisingly consistent. Knowing what these risks are, and facing them head on, can help to ensure ongoing success. Here are some of the core areas that should be addressed and monitored in order to ensure the health and productivity of your growing business:

1. Time management: Whether your business is a startup, a relatively new enterprise, or a veteran company, it is important that you clear your daily calendar – and that of your management team—of time-consuming administrative clutter that, although important, can be easily outsourced or digitized. In doing so, you will free up your time to concentrate on finding scalable solutions to address your current business growth. You will also gain quality time to brainstorm creative, new ideas that can ignite even greater business expansion in the future.
2. Review your business’ processes: The processes your business uses to facilitate mandatory functions—payroll, tax administration, employee benefits – and to manage growth – inventory, fulfillment, customer relationship management – obviously become more important as your business moves into expansion mode. By conducting regularly scheduled process audits you can identify and document new procedural requirements and new technological enhancements that will help ensure that your business is positioned to meet future growth projections on an ongoing basis.
3. Give up control: The desire to control things is embedded in the genes of most entrepreneurs. And yet, as a business starts to expand, the entrepreneur must evolve from a multitasking jack-of-all-trades mindset into a big-picture leader who inspires his or her managers and employees to meet and even exceed the organization’s mission.
   “I hire people brighter than me and then I get out of their way.” – Lee Iacocca
   The bottom line is that no one can do everything once a business starts to blossom. You will be able to play a much more valuable role in your company’s future if you leave transactional activities such as payroll, benefits and tax administration to specialists. Instead, recognize that when your startup enterprise transitioned into successful growth mode, it became the “team’s” company, not just “your” company. Let your team do what they were hired to do and inspire them to ascend to even greater heights.
4. Hire smart talent: Most entrepreneurs recognize the crucial role that talent plays in the success of their enterprise. But once a business encounters accelerated growth, entrepreneurs and managers often panic and go on ill-advised speed-hiring binges. Of course, the down side becomes evident when they quickly realize that they hired the wrong person for the job and the old adage- should have hired more slowly and fired more quickly—springs to mind. Hiring the best talent requires a skilled acquisition professional who will identify the skills your ideal candidate must have, use best-in-class tools to launch a targeted search, qualify applicants through pre-screening interviews, schedule management interviews with finalists, and conduct background and reference checks once a job offer is made. Unless such a professional is a part of your business’ team, it is often a good idea to outsource the process to a firm that can fulfill your recruitment requirements.
5. Keep an eye on cash flow: The foundation of your business’ immediate and future growth is investment—investment in your business, that is. Entrepreneurs often are so energized by the sheer excitement that occurs once a business goes into growth mode, that they neglect to manage their cash flow on a daily basis, assuming that everything will take care of itself. But growth means expenditures for additional staff, technologies, office space, supplies and much more. A few tips that can improve your cash flow include:

• Projecting what your monthly sales and expenses will be
• Collecting client payments as soon as possible
• Paying invoices on the last day they are due
• Setting up a cash reserve account in case of a shortfall
• Learning how to decipher financial statements
• Reconciling your monthly bank statements -yes, banks can make mistakes
• Build in contingencies to meet the demands of change successfully

As your business develops over time, there is one constant challenge that you and your team will need to confront: the element of change itself. It’s a given that even the healthiest of businesses will transition through periods of growth, contraction, and renewal. The important thing is to recognize that you cannot control the external forces that impact your business. What you and your team can control, however, is the way in which your company responds to the changes these forces cause. The best way to ensure the continued growth of your business is to approach the demands that change brings from a strategic perspective. Build structural and procedural contingencies into your business model that will allow your products and/or services – and the managers and employees that keep things moving—to adapt to impending changes as quickly and seamlessly as possible.

Business growing pains and challenges are notably consistent amongst all types of business categories. Addressing and monitoring these challenges head on will ensure the health and productivity of your growing business for years to come.

If you are stuck up in HR Processes or want a reliable partner for HR Outsourcing, contact Savvy Network today.

To properly assess its impact on your business, employee retention should be examined in the most comprehensive way possible. Knowing how best to retain employees will be beneficial in the stability of your company. Often, company leaders stick to examining attrition rates—which are important—however, such data simply identifies the problem rather than solving it. Therefore, when it comes to employee retention, all the issues that come into play need to be assessed and corrected.  For instance, it’s vital that the true cost of losing a good employee is determined in order to calculate the real effect low retention has on the company’s bottom line. It’s also important to acknowledge that the considerable cost of recruiting someone to replace a departing employee isn’t the only expense involved. There is also a loss of productivity that occurs during the period of time a new replacement spends learning how to perform their job at optimum levels. And the negative impact a departing employee may have on your business may begin well before the day they leave. Even top talent can become de-motivated if issues important to their wellbeing are ignored. Once that employee decides to start searching for another position they may be less productive from that point forward.

Losing a good employee can easily de-motivate other employees as well. And ultimately, even in a down economy, when word gets out that a company has high attrition rates, its reputation can be damaged and its ability to attract top-level talent may be compromised as well.

How to improve employee retention

Although the things that motivate one employee to stay with a company may be different from those that attract another, several recent studies reveal that there are some universal benefits a company can provide to raise its retention levels. For instance, a survey conducted by Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and CareerJournal.com revealed that the top reasons that employees would be motivated to start looking for another job were:

• 53 percent for better compensation and benefits
• 35 percent for better vacation and holiday benefits
• 32 percent because they were ready for a new experience

Add to these results the fact that another recent survey revealed that 68% of employees believe benefits are more important than salary, and it doesn’t take much of a leap of faith to conclude that a robust employee benefits package may be something to consider if a company is looking to motivate employees and improve retention rates.*

Survey, survey, survey!

Compensation and benefits are certainly powerful motivators but it’s important not to forget the emotional needs that employees have. This is vital when examining employee retention strategies. The satisfaction that someone derives from their work—along with the appreciation and acknowledgment they receive from their co-workers and supervisors—can have an enormous impact on whether they decide to stay or leave a company. The challenge for the employer is to determine the kind and character of emotional rewards that will resonate with his or her employee base. Because they can vary depending on the job function of the employee and industry category they are working in, confidential surveys can provide actionable insights that are specific to the company at hand.

Improved retention means increased profits

When the financial impact is revealed, it’s easy to understand why it just makes good business sense for leaders in nearly every business to work toward establishing employee retention strategies that are ongoing and continually evolving. Such efforts can increase both the stability and the bottom line of the organization.

If you are stuck up in HR Processes or want a reliable partner for HR Outsourcing, contact Savvy Network today.

For the most part, the way to make the right hire is the same as it’s always been:

1. Define the requirements carefully. This sounds ridiculously easy, but it’s amazing how many business owners will embark on a search without determining exactly whom they want to hire. It’s important to detail the specific job requirements and desired personal characteristics, creating a “hiring scorecard” that can be used in screenings and interviews to determine if a candidate can fulfill the requirements of the job. Needless to say, it’s also critical to determine if the candidate will be a cultural fit as well.
2. Look for repeated patterns of success. Don’t just look for tactical job responsibilities and skills — find the applicants who have repeatedly made a mark and exceeded expectations, time and time again. Drill down in the interview to ask those questions; find out how they measure their own success and whether their employment history tells a story of a superstar.
3. It’s the network. With so many resumes flooding in for each open position, you should rely on inbound candidates even less than you ever have. Your friends and their friends know the fantastic players who are searching for their next opportunity; tap into them and save yourself a lot of paper time.
4. Find a recruiting platform that allows for prescreening. When you do need to wade through resumes, use a recruiting system with pre-screening questions and candidate rating capabilities. This allows you to focus on the exact capabilities you need and only review the candidates who have passed the initial screening, saving yourself massive amounts of time.
5. It’s still about the passive seekers. I personally recently hired a VP of Marketing for my company, but when I first came across him, he was already installed at another company. I courted him for months, persuaded him and eventually he came to work for me. In essence, I treated this executive search as though it was occurring during a gangbusters economy where talent is scarce. The reality is, the truly premium talent is still scarce, and always will be. If your bar for talent is as obscenely high as mine, passive seekers can make or break your search.
6. Don’t settle. Almost every tip I’ve provided works in both a good and lousy economy. But let’s be honest: When the good times roll, it’s easier to find someone and say “good enough.” But in a down economy, you should never do this. Take the time you need to find the right candidate, either active or passive, and make the right hire. There’s no question this is a great time to hire people. But don’t make the mistake of thinking it’ll be easier. The exceptional hires are out there, but just as in the old days, you may need to do some detective work and actively seek out the people who will make your company great.

If you are stuck up in HR Processes or want a reliable partner for HR Outsourcing, contact Savvy Network today.