There are limited resources, and a limited group of people to work with. You’re on top of everything that goes on within your company. Ergo, you might think very it unnecessary to have a Human Resources strategy for your startup.

Unfortunately, you’re wrong.

The people you hire for your small business venture have the power to directly impact your company’s culture, turnover rate, and future performance. This is why, when it comes to managing your HR department, you have to be smart when deciding on your company’s policies and systems.

Creating an Effective HR Strategy—What It Needs

With any HR policy for start-ups, the basics are the same: equality and fairness for all. With the main focus not just on implementing an effective strategy so the company can reach its revenue goal, but to create an atmosphere so the staff can feel satisfaction in their work as well.

For that, here’s what your company needs for an effective HR strategy:

1.    An Established Organizational Design

You don’t need to have this component of your strategy planned out on the day your company makes its mark in the world. However, you will need at least a basic plan for operation and structure. This plan needs to work as a guideline within the company so it can expand and develop.

2.    Established Onboard and Recruiting Procedures

Your startup is small but you’re dedicated to hiring aggressively. In order to target the right candidates, the recruiting procedures in your HR strategy require specific details on where your job ads will be posted, the target audience, and an easy straightforward structure for onboarding. This system will work as the basis of your hiring scheme. So, you’ll need to be certain that it has all basic details included, such as an offer letter, all information for payroll, an I-9 employment verification, equity paperwork and any other employment agreements.

3.    Regulations for Health, Safety and Compliance

Your workplace has to be safe for employees and must meet local and federal regulations. In addition to complying with the OSHAct or the Occupational Safety and Health Act, your policies should also have clear plans and rules for all matters concerning safety and professional behavior.

Developing this component of your startup’s HR strategy not only gives your company legal protection, it ensures that your company is in compliance with local and federal laws.

4.    Compensation and Benefits

Considering that you’ll want to keep your employees connected with the company in the long run, your startup will need to establish rules and regulations concerning benefits and compensation. For example, the pay structure and policies concerning sick time and vacation, retirement benefits and the system needed to conduct payroll. Details regarding maternal and paternal leave, student loan help and more, a clear description regarding compensation and benefits will help your employees learn their rights and dues as well. You can use this student loan consolidation calculator to know where employees stand with their student loans.

5.    Employee Relationships

Addressing employee concerns is a major factor in HR. You’ll want to take the right steps so you can handle complaints and grievances, and you’ll want to do so in a way that actually gives us results. A prepared strategy for managing an employee’s issue by outlining the situation, creating a proposal to address that problem and designing a system to gather their feedback—your HR strategy must have a system in place for maintaining employee relationships, otherwise lack of preparation will lead to employee dissatisfaction.

6.    Performance Management Methods and Training Programs

Given that this is a startup, you’ll think that you don’t have the time at present to train and evaluate your employees. But if you want to grow as a team and help your people improve their skills, you’ll want to give them the opportunity and the means to exercise their talent and get valuable feedback. Failure to establish such a system will result in bad performances and a higher turnover rate, since your employees won’t see the point in spending their days in an environment that doesn’t offer them any growth.

7.    HRIS (Human Resource Information System)

Such technology helps you keep track of your new and old employees, their time, paychecks and benefits, administrative tasks, records and more. Available with a range of features, this type of software does get more expensive as the list of features grows. However, by simply evaluating what your startup needs, you can cut down on the list of tools and just choose enough that’ll help your HR department manage their work easily and smoothly.

Conclusion: An Effective HR Strategy

Your HR strategy requires plenty more for it to be useful for your start-up. But to start with, incorporating the above factors with the right professionals at hand will not only give your human capital management a strong foundation to move forward with, it’ll give you the chance to bring in more talent so you can take your endeavor to the next level.