By Emma Miller
As a small business owner, it’s your responsibility to ensure you have a productive workforce that will help your business grow. Managing your employees can oftentimes become difficult, and even complicated. This is especially true if you don’t have an HR department within your organization or at least an HR manager on board.
Fortunately, modern technology has helped small business owners manage business operations and work-related tasks more easily. That means, you can effectively manage your employees and also handle HR-related duties, even without professional assistance. Here are a few affordable HR tools for small businesses.
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As mentioned before, every small business needs a productive workforce to help it grow and develop further. However, it’s important to find the right employees for your organization first. This means finding the most suited candidates for job openings and ensuring that the candidates are not just qualified, but also able to fit into company culture.
LinkedIn is one of the most effective tools for finding the right talent for your small business. What’s more, LinkedIn is also a business-oriented social network, which allows you to market your business and search for potential recruits. In addition, this network offers a variety of affordable tools especially designed for companies of all sizes that can help you find the right recruits and make the entire process more seamless.
Organizational tools and storage
If you want to effectively manage HR responsibilities and tasks, it’s important to have the right tools at your disposal. Handling employee-related documentation and worksheets can be extremely time consuming without the appropriate tools. Luckily, Google has provided a set of tools in their G-Suite package that can be of great assistance to small businesses looking to improve their HR management.
Google’s G-Suite includes tools, such as mail, video conferencing and calls, instant messaging, calendars for organizing tasks, as well as documents, sheets, forms and presentations to better manage projects and people involved. What’s more, you have access to Google Drive – an online cloud-based storage. That way, you can safely store important documents and various HR templates, ranging from employee contracts to letter of resignation templates. G-Suite is affordable for small businesses, with prices ranging from $5 to $25 based on your needs.
Employee payroll tools
Taking care of payrolls is another HR task you must handle as a small business owner. Depending on the number of employees you have, this task can get quite daunting, especially if you’re doing everything manually. Ensuring everyone gets their paycheck, while including taxes, benefits and time off can get complicated at best.
Fortunately, with tools, such as Gusto, you can automate most of the process concerning your employee payrolls. This tool can help you calculate salaries, make direct deposits, automate tax payments and filings, track time off and, most importantly, avoid payroll errors. In addition, this tool is affordable for small businesses and medium-sized organizations.
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Good communication is an essential business aspect of every organization. Establishing effective lines of communication between members of the company isn’t just an HR responsibility, but the responsibility of business owners as well. Without proper means of communication, there’s no way to effectively share information, organize tasks and collaborate. That’s why it’s important to have a communication tool that everyone can use. A good example of such tool is Slack, which has both a free version and an affordable version if you want more features.
This communication software allows real-time instant messaging. In addition, you can create custom groups and channels and add teams accordingly. That way, your employees can collaborate and share ideas more efficiently, while working on the same project. Furthermore, Slack has an archive option that can store old messages and communications, in case you ever need them again. What’s more, Slack can be integrated with various other apps for more effective and streamlined communications and data sharing.
Collaboration tools
Collaboration between employees is another important business aspect that ensures productivity and engagement. Equipping your small business with the right collaboration tools can greatly improve your business operations. For instance, tools, such as Trello have both a free and priced option, based on your business needs. You can use this tool to assign different teams to project and ensure they can effectively work together towards achieving common goals.
Moreover, Trello implements high visualization, which allows employees to understand the scope of the project and their responsibilities better. Furthermore, you can add various staff members and set due dates, while employees can add attachments and engage in discussions. All of the activity is displayed on a board for better navigation and understanding.
HR is an essential component of every organization. Even if you don’t have an HR department or a manager at your small business, it doesn’t mean you can neglect HR duties altogether. With the right tools and software at your disposal, you can effectively manage your employees and all the HR-related tasks with ease and efficiency.
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Emma Miller is a digital marketer and blogger from Sydney. After getting a marketing degree she started working with Australian startups on business and marketing development. Emma writes for many relevant, industry related online publications and does a job of an Executive Editor at Bizzmark blog and a guest lecturer at Melbourne University. Interested in marketing, startups and latest business trends.
