How Should You Build Your Small Business HR Team?

Written on April 10, 2011 – 5:43 pm | by Ashley Johnson

As a business owner, you have certainly imagined a “dream team” of your top executives. In addition to having the best people managing your production, operations, administration, finance, and sales, you need someone to manage all of your employees. Your human resources department could be one of the most important of all, since it is responsible for hiring, firing, and maintaining overall employee morale.

How do you plan for a dream HR staff that will have the greatest impact on your employee management and satisfaction? You first need to determine whether you want generalists or specialists in your HR department

HR Generalists vs. Specialists

HR Generalists are those with a broader range of HR experience, and they can typically operate all aspects of your HR department. The problem is, however, that a team of generalists may not be best equipped to deal with certain specific issues when it comes to tough HR problems.

In contrast, specialists are those HR professionals who have a background in certain areas, such as benefits or recruiting. These professionals are great at handling practically any possible scenario in their niche. However, as a specialist, they also are not well-versed in other areas of HR.

What Areas are Important in HR?

There are several facets to human resources, including:

Recruiting – One of the main functions of HR is recruiting new hires. They keep track of all job descriptions, post job ads in local, regional, and national publications, and usually do initial interviews.
Training – Part of HR’s responsibility is maintaining all training of employees. They usually help create training manuals, hire trainers to teach new hires, and provide ongoing career training as needed for individuals and departments.
Payroll – These individuals are also important in keeping track of all hours worked by employees, maintaining payroll rates and raises, and submitting payroll data for periodic payments.
Benefits – HR benefits helps maintain all employee benefits like paid time off, health insurance maintenance, and other employee perks or rewards.

Whether you hire a few generalists to cover all your HR bases, or hire a team of specialists in each field, it is well worth your time to get the right team in place to manage your most important asset – your employees.

Perfect Business!