We all know the importance of smoke alarms in helping to prevent a fire, the need to have your car regularly serviced if you’d like to avoid a breakdown and the requirement for insurance in case the worst happens. But when it comes to your business, are you being as careful?
All of those things listed above are the preventative or proactive actions we take in order to protect the future. And, while most small to medium sized businesses may well have put some measures in place to protect themselves and their business in the face of catastrophe, there is one major area that many don’t think about until it’s too late – their staff.
Your employees are the life blood of your organisation. You need them to do their job in order for your business to succeed. Ideally you’d probably like them to be happy while they do it and if they weren’t you’d like to think they were able to come and tell you about it so you could sort it out. But it doesn’t always work out that way.
And that’s when we as HR consultants tend to get a call. Something happens; a staff member has a grievance, you’re struggling with staff absences or you need to make redundancies – the problems are wide and varied but it’s only once they occur that many businesses realise they need someone who really knows what they’re doing.
Now at Crispin Rhodes, we’re proud of our ability to help you sort those problems out, ensuring your business can return to normal as quickly and with as little disruption as possible, but what we’d really love is if we could work with you to make sure those problems didn’t happen in the first place.
As HR experts we can make sure you’re complying with all the necessary legislation and that your policies and procedures are working for you rather than just gathering dust in a folder on the shelf, we can help you monitor, evaluate and manage staff performance and we can help you achieve open channels of communication with your staff – one of the best ways to avoid issues occurring in the first place.
So, next time you’re checking the battery on your smoke alarm or renewing your insurance, take a minute and think about the last time you really thought about your staff, the impact they can have on your business (good and bad) and how you manage them. Then give us a call.
This is a guest blog by Crispin Rhodes, who offer human resources and outsourced personnel advice: complying with employment legislation, discipline and grievance, recruitment and psychometric profiling and redundancy.
