HR Strategies for SMEs – Part 2

In my last blog I looked at essential HR strategies that can help SMEs to mitigate risk and strategies to help retain and motivate staff. I’ll now share some HR strategies to help SMEs entering the business growth phase.

HR Strategies for SMEs – Part 1

Although I’m sure there are plenty of HR consultants who will disagree with me, it’s not essential to have cutting edge and best practice HR initiatives in every business.

Every decision you make in business needs to have a commercial basis, and spending time (and money) on human resources will come at an opportunity cost.

You must decide what the right balance is for your business and make decisions that will yield the highest return on investment.

How to Build a Great Organizational Culture

Culture isn’t just a warm fuzzy thing that you can promote to prospective employees. Great culture yields commercial value and positively impacts your bottom line.

One of the most common responses when I ask people why they love their job is – ‘the culture’.
Organizations with great culture produce highly motivated and engaged staff. Research shows that organizations with high employee engagement consistently achieve up to 20% more profitability than those with low engagement.

So what is culture, and how do you create a good one?

Dealing With Difficult People At Work

You only need to start the conversation at a dinner party or function to hear countless tales of woe in the workplace about “that idiot I work with”.

If you are unfortunate enough to work with difficult people, you can sometimes feel powerless to effect any change.

You could leave, but difficult people are not centralised to your workplace so looking for greener pastures may not be the answer.

How To Motivate Employees

In my last blog I addressed the problems associated with financial bonus payments for employees. If throwing money at your employees won’t keep them motivated, what will?

I’m not going to list a bunch of initiatives about how to keep your employees motivated without spending a cent .

What I will do is discuss how, as an employer, you can develop effective non-monetary motivational strategies in your business.

I came across a great definition of motivation on Business Dictionary.com. They define motivation as…

Why Money Isn’t A Great Employee Motivation Strategy

I had an interesting conversation with another HR professional recently discussing employee motivation and retention strategies.

Too many businesses fail to hit the mark when implementing effective, successful retention and motivation strategies. We both reflected on our experiences and agreed that money is often a significant factor.

It can be difficult to get the remuneration balance right in a company: too little will leave employees dissatisfied, but too much can be equally detrimental.

Motivation theorist Fredrick Hertzberg believes workplaces are made up of two factors – hygiene and motivators…

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