How Technology Allows Small Businesses to Delegate Their HR

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What is one way your small business delegates tasks to employees who are traditionally not under HR?

To help you learn ways to delegate HR tasks to your employees, we asked CEOs and HR managers to share their best insights. From aligning tasks with employees’ goals to using self-service HR software, there are a number of ways SMBs can delegate HR tasks in order to possibly shed the need for traditional HR roles.

Aligning Delegated Tasks With Employees’ Goals

Employees see delegated tasks as distractions taking up time they could be spending on their primary responsibilities. From this viewpoint, extra tasks don’t ensure their job satisfaction. So, in our startup, we do our best to delegate HR tasks in a way that allows employees to develop their careers. For example, an employee who wants to develop skills in data analysis will fit nicely in employee performance analysis. Thanks to this approach, HR tasks become an opportunity for growth, not a chore.

Tomek Mlodzki, CEO at PhotoAiD

Leveraging Employee Social Media Power for Recruitment

As the market for qualified candidates continues to heat up, and businesses are still fighting the effects of the Great Resignation, management has now allocated much of their recruiting efforts to their employees. Social media is now an integral part of most businesses, and over 90% of all employees have multiple accounts on social media platforms, which many companies now view as a potential extension of recruitment.

Through encouraging our employees to talk about job opportunities on their platforms, place images from work on their profiles and even post articles about industry opportunities, they we’ve greatly expanded our candidate pool. In addition, by using their social media networks, our team can often verify the interests of candidates, and also verify their qualities and potential value. By leveraging our employees’ social media powers, we have been able to improve our recruiting and thus, the candidates we bring through our door.

Adelle Archer, CEO and Co-Founder at Eterneva

Non-HR Manager Curating Employee Training

Traditionally, in a large organization learning and development would be handled by HR. They would have an individual, or even a team, that curates training for employees. This would be for everything from sexual harassment training to continuing education to presentations on workplace communication.

However, in our small business, my product manager handles that. You don’t have to be an HR pro to create and organize this type of content. There are literally dozens of companies online that sell such training, and for really affordable prices. I think it takes our product manager maybe an hour per month to find, purchase, and prep whatever courses we need.

It’s so simple and streamlined at this point that I find it hard to believe companies still have HR folks in-house that create these courses. Anyone can be an L&D pro. It just takes some common sense and a small budget.

John Ross, CEO at Test Prep Insight

Team Lead Deals With The Needs of The Team

One responsibility as a company is to effectively delegate a team lead or department head is to connect and understand the needs of the team. Traditionally, HR must look after the overall well-being of employees and create a healthy work environment, but delegating this to the person who has a more intimate relationship with the employees is better. Also, it is more convenient for such a person to interact with his/her colleagues as there is a greater scope for them to open up and express their thoughts freely. Lastly, speaking from the company’s perspective, it won’t look like a burden on one person because looking after each other and encouraging teamwork come under the company’s principles.

Nathan Hughes, Marketing Director at Diggity Marketing

Hiring Managers Are Tasked With Onboarding

The topic of the hour is how to recruit, develop and retain people in our new world of work. One of the traditional HR support areas that we are seeing embedded into other functional roles is onboarding. While traditionally centered in HR, onboarding is now serving as a cross-business-unction process. Through this model, onboarding becomes less “plug and play” and more specialized and curated depending on the hire at hand.

Hiring managers, across business lines, are being tasked with creating onboarding action plans for their new hires and helping to forge connections and identify necessary resources. Given significant movement in the economy and heightened focus on talent development and retention, this tailored approach is a great way to ensure that onboarding is owned by the team and a process touching the broad employee base — after all, this type of access and connection is what helps employees feel valued, supported and heard.

Chelsea C. Williams, Founder and CEO at Reimagine Talent Co.

Non-HR Running Certain Employee-Centered Programs

You must be careful about delegating HR responsibilities to a staffer because of the privacy concerns that surround HR. However, we have done some things differently, such as allowing non-HR employees to oversee mandated programs for all workers. This includes things like our substance-abuse awareness program and safety programs. These employees have been through the programs several times so they are aware of how they are supposed to go.

Tanya Klien, CEO at Anta Plumbing

Using Self-Service HR Software

The emergence of more affordable, cloud-based HR tech solutions in the past decade or so has certainly made it easier for small businesses to outsource admin tasks to their employees, which is especially useful for organizations that don’t have the resources for a dedicated HR department.

In our business, we have long been using our core HR software solution to empower our employees to keep their personal details up to date, make holiday requests and check their entitlements, read and confirm their understanding of policy documentation and so on. This has really helped our customers save time on repetitive admin tasks too. Using secure software means these tasks are more accessible to employees and this takes some of the burden off managers and HR or administrative staff.

Fiona Sanderson, Marketing Manager at myhrtoolkit

Image: iStock

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