6 Key HR Strategies for Scaling Your Business

Katrina Faessel:
While often used interchangeably, scale and growth do not mean the same thing. Find out how you can use culture, process, and data to effectively scale your business as we welcome TriNet colleagues Kaitlin Campbell, Senior Customer Relationship Manager, and Monika Ethier, Enterprise Account Executive, to our virtual stage.

Kaitlin Campbell:
Thank you so much for taking time to meet with us. Over the years, Monika and I have worked with hundreds of SMBs to help grow and scale their businesses by ensuring they have the tools, resources, and guidance to do so. Monika and I are here today to give you our thoughts on six key HR strategies you can take to scale your business as you grow.

Monika Ethier:
Thank you so much, Kaitlin. So scale or growth, really, what is the difference between the two? Scaling and growth do not mean the same thing. While they're often used interchangeably, there are actually two distinct concepts. Company growth refers to increase in revenue, profits, market share over time.

However, scaling, on the other hand, refers to the ability of a company to increase its output or capacity without incurring proportionate increases in costs. Growth can be achieved through a variety of means in terms of increasing sales or expanding new markets. However, scaling requires a specific set of strategies and tactics that allow a company to increase production or capacity while keeping costs under control.

And then a few examples of this. For example, a company that experiences growth by increasing its sales needs to hire more people, needs to invest in more additional resources to help with the support and the increase in demand. However, with scaling, the operations may increase production, but without having to hire that additional staff, without having to have invested in additional resources, because they're optimizing their current existing processes and they're automating certain things and leveraging technology that we use today.

So, focusing on growth alone should not be the only business objective. Small and medium-size business leaders should really focus on both in order to be effective in the marketplace.

Kaitlin:
Thanks, Monika. All right, so growth adds complexity. As an SMB grows, it can become more complex to manage. Here are a few areas in which growth can add complexity to your HR needs. Larger workforce—you may need to hire additional employees to manage the increased workload. Managing a larger workforce may require more resources, including additional management, HR and employees in an administrative capacity.

You also have increased HR compliance requirements. You may be subject to more compliance requirements due to overall changes in size, which adds complexity in terms of reporting and risk mitigation. An example of this would be FMLA or state specific mandatory sick leave requirements. You'll also have potentially expanded operations.

As a business expands, it may need to operate across multiple locations, which adds complexity in an HR related requirement. Things such as compensation transparency and job postings, local withholding requirements, paid family leave, etc. In some cases, hiring even just one person in a state like California could mean complying with several different new laws.

And then you'll also have a higher demand for technology. As a business grows, it may need to invest in new technologies and systems to help manage the increased complexity. Tasks that you are able to handle with 10 employees become very cumbersome and time consuming. You may find that PTO spreadsheet that's updated on the honor system no longer supports your business the way it needs to.

Monika:
So with that, we have six key strategies to help your company scale. There are many strategies that can help your companies scale to achieve its business goals. Every department from sales to marketing to finance to operations has a unique ability to drive scale. Your HR team, however, is in a very unique position to help support scale through a lot of different areas.

We're going to go into each one specifically on the next few slides. But overall, the six areas that we're going to focus on are creating a talent acquisition plan, deploying a performance management system, building a leadership development program, leveraging HR technology solutions, creating a culture of continuous learning and working with HR experts.

We'll look at each specifically on the next slides.

Kaitlin:
Strategy 1, create a talent acquisition plan. Like I mentioned a little earlier, SMBs wanting to grow will most likely need to hire additional employees in order to add sales and additional production capacity to meet increased demand. And in doing so, it can bring challenges. Your talent acquisition plan should consider strategies to attract and hire top talent.

This may include developing a strong employer brand, leveraging social media and other platforms to reach candidates. You may also want to develop a referral program to encourage existing employees to recommend candidates. Here are some of the key components you should consider in a talent acquisition plan.

Competitive compensation and benefits to attract top candidates. You'll need to review your screening and selection process to efficiently manage candidate applications end to end. You'll need job descriptions that clearly define the roles and responsibility of each position. You'll also want to think about what are your sourcing strategies to attract candidates.

When you're onboarding your new hires, you want to make sure that they're set up for success from day one and you want to ensure a candidate experience is positive throughout the entire hiring process. Once your method is over, metrics and analytics will be available to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of your talent acquisition strategy.

Monika:
And then we're viewing the second one which is deploying performance management system. How many of you out there have a performance management system and a robust one at that? It is extremely important in terms of scaling and growing your business. It can be extremely helpful in many different avenues. For one, it will set up clear expectations and align goals for your employees.

So they are aligned with the company's goals and objectives. They know what they're doing and why they're doing it. Feedback and coaching—performance management system can help identify high potential employees. You know who those potential leaders can possibly be and helps provide a structure to improve employee performance and develop new skills.

It's essential to retain employees in this fashion. With a performance management system, it helps create accountability, making sure everyone knows what they're working towards and they're working towards that same goal, and that individual goals are aligned with needs of the business. When they're not, then it can be clearly seen on the performance management system.

And lastly, data driven decision making. You can use that performance management system to provide HR data and insights that can be used to make effective and formal informative decisions about staffing, training, development, efficiencies, really helps create a strategy for your overall long-term success of your business.

Kaitlin:
Monika and I have both seen that employees really do value feedback, but each respond very uniquely to that feedback, having resources not only to build a plan, but also ensure leaders are effectively trained and understand any type of bias that might come into play. What we find overall is that what you're one and a half as likely to outperform competitors when you have an effective performance management program and employees are 1.25% more likely to be more productive with this plan in place.

Monika:
Then once you have a performance management system, it's really actually very easy to do the third strategy, which is career building and developing a leadership development program. As your business grows, it's important to have a strong leadership team. Do you know who those leaders are? If I ask you today, can you identify those employees that will be moving up the chain, moving up the corporate ladder?

If you're C suite leaves, do you have somebody took success in that plan and in that position, extremely important to think about the future in terms of your company growth and having the right leaders in those roles. So with that, some of the reasons of why it's important is it helps leadership continuity. As your business grows, the organization has a strong line of future leaders who can prepare to take on new challenges as your business scales. They care about your company. It develops leadership skills including communication, strategic thinking, decision making and team management. These are critical for success as the organization grows and becomes more complex. It helps with retention because it fosters a strong culture so today's and tomorrow's leaders are aligned with your company organizations and priorities, which is critical for maintaining a cohesive and productive workforce as a business grows. And as your business scales, there is going to be change. There's going to be a lot of change. And with that you want to have leaders that are able to support change management.

So they're better equipped to guide their teams through those periods of change, which is essential for scaling the business. And then lastly, it promotes innovation. So leaders have strong innovation skills and are better equipped to identify new opportunities and drive inventions as a company grows.

Kaitlin:
And then just some important stats on this. So, 80% of companies report that there is a leadership development gap, but less than 50% of businesses use a program like this to upscale talent into leadership roles.

Monika:
So with that, the fourth strategy we want to go over is HR technology solutions. And the technology is here to stay. We all know this. AI is becoming much more of on the forefront. And so, we really want to make sure we use technology smartly and make sure that we use it in the best way that we can. So utilizing technology helps to streamline your HR work.

You didn't come to the business to do paperwork, so using next technology can really help you through that. And with that, some of the ways that HR technology can help is through employee data management. So using HR technology to house your employee data, which includes their information, employee history, benefits and performance records.

Using software, for example, for employee self-service portal, empowers your employees. Let them do their own updates on their personal information, on doing benefit enrollment, on time off requests and performance reviews. Do that all through the technologies that are available now today.

The other part of using technologies through your recruiting processes, making sure using an ATS system, no longer using an inbox and just having emails or resumes being flooded to your inbox. Instead, use an ATS system to help streamline. ATS system stands for applicant tracking system, but helps streamline your job post, your resume screening, you're creating a candidate pool and you might have find out that candidate you have in that candidate pool may not be good for the position you currently have, but could be a great candidate for a position you have later. So really creating that robust system and for you to have a good way to hire qualified candidates.

Onboarding training platforms. These platforms, we have so much required training now, many states have specific training, like sexual harassment training and you're sure certain positions have certificates that they need to obtain or uphold year over year.

So, using your training platforms to your advantage to reduce paperwork and streamline the training as well as the onboarding process for an employee. Time and attendance management—using that software instead of having paper time sheets, use the software. The software can then help automate time calculations.

So specific states have different overtime needs, making sure those overtimes are enforced, enforcing also your leave policies and having that integrate with your payroll system so it reduces time as well as saves, well just errors as well.

A few other ones is performance management software. So before we talked about having developing a robust performance management system, how essential that is to ensure the employees are accountable and they're driving to your business goals, but using software as another add on instead of using something like Google Docs, right? Using software that can help you through making sure you're tracking, setting goals, tracking progress, providing real time feedback to your employees.

And making sure that they're always on track. Other ways to use the technology, leveraging HR solution to HR technology is data and analytic reporting. So you can really drive your, you can really take the employee data, because if you think about it, your employees are one of the most costly things on your P&L statement.

So really making sure that you're using your employees wisely, using the employee metrics to make sure that you have reviewing your turnover rates, reviewing training effectiveness, making sure your performance are trends. You can really use data and analytics and reporting to kind of see an analysis of how your employee install base looks.

Another way to use HR technology is through expense management. I know I've seen many companies before come to us with spreadsheets in terms of Excel expense management and just submitting a Excel spreadsheet to get approved to their accounting team. Take that away. Take away that, reduce some time there and reduce some error by using an expense management system where things can be approved either online or through an app. You can create real rules. For example, people have to submit receipt to the expense management system, really making it a very robust system for your organization.

And then last but not least, the payroll processing. Whether you have a full time and part time employees in one state, or you have many states and you possibly may even, in the future, if you just have one state now, you might have many states in the future when you scale, right? Because, you know, now that we have a global economy right now. So, with that, you know, you want to make sure your payroll systems are set up for that, you have payroll processing to be set up for that.

They can then manage it through ensuring the tax withholdings are set up correctly and the reporting set up correctly. Really using the systems simplify the task of paying your employees.

Kaitlin:
And what we find is that 44% of HR leaders say driving better business outcomes is their number one priority for technology transformation, while only 35% of organizations with less than 500 employees plan to increase HR technology spend. Fifty-seven percent plan on spending the same as last year.

Monika:
So the next strategy to go over is creating a culture of continuous learning. Well, with your employees, we really want to make sure that, you know, we're investing in them. And one way to invest in them is to ensure that there's a way to create a continuous learning culture so that they feel that they are, Improving on the job.

They're learning on the job. They're gaining the experience they need to continue on moving forward through it. That also helps when you're thinking about your performance management system, or you're thinking about building your leaders within the organization, right? So having that continuous culture of learning, with that is an essential for business growth and scale.

Adding incremental skills to existing employees is often the most effective way for an organization to scale talent. Therefore, organizations should consider providing employees with opportunities for training, professional development, skill building to help them be competitive in the industry. Let them go to those seminars and show them all the online trainings they get to have, viewing a mentoring program.

There's many different ways you can do a continuous learning program within your organization. It doesn't have to be and it could be formal or informal. A company with a strong culture with continuous learning can help its identity based on shared values, attitudes and beliefs that employees matter.

Employees feel that the company is investing in them and they feel like they're in the right decision. It helps retain that important talent.

Kaitlin:
Okay, let's talk about the ROI. For every dollar companies spend on reskilling and career mobility, they get back three dollars. 375 million people are estimated to need new skills globally in the next two years alone, which is why it's so important to have training and development resources that fit your organization's changing needs.

Monika:
And we've now landed on the last strategy, strategy six, which is work with HR experts. So with that, partner with your HR experts. So, there's many different pillars of HR and to hire somebody for each pillar, which is, you know, workers comp, employee relations, all the different types of items within HR, leaning on a partner such as TriNet will help you because that team has already created with TriNet. There is an expert within TriNet to help your business scale, help your business grow because you came into your company to focus on your business strategy and your company business stations, business mission.

So really getting back the time to focus back on that business, taking away the administrative burden and then being able to focus on why you came into the business in the first place. It helps with the kinds of scale, helps with accessing big company benefits to attract top talent.

Top carriers are with leveraging HR and HR experts on that front, you can benefit from the HR expertise and risk mitigation. There's many different industries when you partner with an HR expert and they've seen all these types of industries and what the best practices. So providing expertise right of the bat.

Optimizing people practices, so ensuring that your policies are in play, your handbooks in play, that everything's set in motion so that you can go back to again focusing on your business. And then lastly, when not least, but leveraging leading HR technology. So all the technology I mentioned in the previous slide in terms of employee data management, employee self-services, the ATS system or applicant tracking system, online onboarding and training platforms.

The time and attendance management, the performance management software, the data analytics and reporting, expense management, the payroll processing, all of that technology is already available at your fingertips.

Kaitlin:
So come scale your business with TriNet. By teaming up with a full-service HR provider like TriNet, you're freed up to focus on your people and scale your business. With TriNet's help, you're able to create a compensation benchmarking plan. So, TriNet provides a compensation benchmark report. It's powered through salary.com. It includes a database of 15,000 unique job titles across 225 industries by company size and ZIP code. You'll gain critical visibility into compensation data intelligence. We also offer access to comprehensive benefits plans that you can attract the very best talent with. You'll also be able to create a top notch performance management strategy.

So you'll be able to make smarter business decisions with better insights into your HR data with TriNet's proprietary solution for performance management. You can gain access to create and build more effective performance management plans with help from our HR experts. And you'll be able to develop your future leadership.

As you scale your company, TriNet is here to help with a range of strategic services that will help grow along with you, including organizational design, leadership, development and more.

Monika:
Additionally, scaling your business with TriNet, you can leverage your leading HR technology solution. So manage HR in real time. I mean, the keyword is real time. Now you can put on a report on what it's looking like now for your employees with the TriNet's comprehensive platform that helps you support your business growth.

You can easily access payroll information. You can view TriNet's sponsored benefits. You can visualize your HR data. We can create in bar graphs. You can create in charts. We can do KPIs. We can do many different dashboards. So executive dashboards, HR dashboards that can really help you organize and understand your business in a different fashion and form. With TriNet, you can create a culture of continuous learning.

We offer many different types of learning programs in addition to employee engagement surveys. So see where your employees are at, get a temperature base and then from there build programs from that temperature base. We have targeted training workshops and resources and focused modules, which helps employees learn, grow and be heard.

And then lastly, working with HR, with HR experts, with the leaders in the market, in the fields, get access to comprehensive HR resources that were once limited to large enterprises. TriNet offers you access to big company benefits, risk mitigation and HR compliance best practice guidance, payroll service and technology.

Since no two companies are ever the same, we offer industry tailored HR solutions to help your organization with your unique HR needs.

Kaitlin:
So let us show you how our HR experts can help your business in a competitive market. Understanding the HR services that can be outsourced already provides a clear view of the benefits. We encourage you to visit our product booths to learn more about each of our services and talk directly with our team on your individual needs.

Thank you again for your time.