Highlights
- HR best practices are essential to guide your business through the challenges of this new year, from staying compliant to offering competitive employee benefits.
- Partnering with a Professional Employer Organization (PEO) allows SMBs to delegate time-consuming, administrative tasks and focus on their core operations.
- Paramount PEO Solutions is a leading PEO broker in the U.S., helping businesses find the right partner based on their needs. Contact us to learn how we can help!
For small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), managing an engaged workforce can be quite a challenge. HR teams often juggle countless tasks, from finding and retaining talent to handling payroll and ensuring compliance with ever-evolving regulations. By adopting HR best practices, businesses can boost efficiency and be well-equipped for the challenges ahead.
In need of a fresh perspective on your processes and strategies? You’ve come to the perfect place! Keep reading to explore the 4 HR best practices for this year.
Let’s jump right in!
Craft a Compelling Benefits Program to Attract Top Talent
The decision to take a job offer relies heavily on the quality of your benefits package. For small businesses, it is essential to design an enticing benefits program that promotes employee well-being and work-life balance.
Employer-covered healthcare remains the most desired benefit among employees.
By gaining a deep understanding of your workforce’s individual needs, you can tailor an employee benefits package that perfectly aligns with their personal preferences and lifestyles.
Keep this in mind when crafting your employee benefits package this year:
- Join forces with a PEO to provide better healthcare insurance. PEO services are a game-changer for small businesses in search of cost-effective yet competitive healthcare insurance options for their employees.
- Make mental health and well-being a top priority. Enhance your benefits package with inclusive wellness programs and valuable mental health resources. This could mean providing access to professional counseling services, organizing stress management workshops, or even offering subscriptions to cutting-edge mental health apps.
- Offer childcare benefits for working parents. Consider providing convenient on-site childcare facilities, reliable backup care services, or flexible childcare spending accounts to support employees in achieving a harmonious work-life balance.
Optimize Your Budget and Resources with Payroll Outsourcing
Time is precious for SMBs — and managing payroll can eat up a significant chunk of it. From crunching numbers to handling deductions and taxes, it demands a lot from your HR team.
Outsourcing your payroll can be a game-changer for your business. It not only lightens the workload for your small team but also reduces the likelihood of costly errors and their financial implications.
“Businesses that outsource payroll save 18% compared to those that handle it themselves.”
— Software Advice
Here’s what you can do to speed up your payroll process while ensuring all your employees are paid accurately and on time:
- Team up with a PEO to lighten your administrative load. With their support, you can focus on what truly matters while ensuring your business remains compliant every step of the way.
- Integrate an automated payroll solution to your operations. Payroll software can save your team precious time in calculating payments, overtime, and taxes. It also allows you to centralize all your payroll information and let employees access their pay stubs.
- Adopt automated solutions to efficiently monitor time and attendance. No more tedious manual record-keeping – embrace a flawless time-tracking system that keeps detailed records of your employees’ work hours. Choose software that seamlessly integrates with your payroll and HR software for a smooth operation.
Maintain Compliance with Labor Laws and Regulations
To ensure a safe and legally sound workplace, small businesses must stay up to date with the ever-evolving labor laws and regulations. It’s not only federal laws that need to be considered, but also those at the state and local levels.
Compliance requirements are not one-size-fits-all; they vary depending on the industry and encompass critical areas such as anti-corruption, IT security, and anti-discrimination laws. For HR teams, keeping up with all these can feel overwhelming, but doing so is key to avoiding hefty fines and penalties.
Enhance your compliance efforts this year with these best practices:
- Ensure your HR team receives regular training. Organize frequent compliance training sessions and offer them opportunities to participate in webinars, conferences, and local events to stay well-informed.
- Integrate an HR software solution with built-in compliance features. Automating compliance checks and updates lightens your workload, minimizes the risk of errors, and keeps you on the right side of the law.
- Classify your employees correctly. Misclassifying employees can have serious legal and financial implications. It is vital to ensure that workers are appropriately categorized to comply with wage and hour regulations, determine eligibility for benefits, and meet tax obligations.
Drive Business Growth by Investing in Training Opportunities
A business that invests in training opportunities shows employees that it values their growth while keeping them motivated and always moving forward.
“59% of millennials say opportunities to learn, and grow are extremely important to them when applying for a job.”
— Gallup
Unlocking the full potential of your employees not only empowers them but also fuels your business growth.
As you plan and develop a training program this year, here’s some advice:
- Embrace the possibilities of online learning platforms. Equip your employees with subscriptions to platforms like LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, or Udemy so they can explore and find courses aligned with their job responsibilities and long-term ambitions.
- Start a mentorship program. Empower senior staff members to serve as mentors for junior colleagues. By offering individualized guidance, this program not only cultivates a supportive and team-oriented work environment but also has the power to shape the professional development of employees.
- Enhance employee performance with soft-skills training. Explore the possibility of providing training in customer service, leadership, teamwork, negotiation, and emotional intelligence.
Regardless of the size of your business, your HR team holds a crucial role in attracting talent and ensuring employee engagement. However, administrative tasks like calculating and processing payroll, or negotiating employee benefits can be too much to handle.
Partnering with a PEO can reduce your team’s workload, give you access to better benefits, and enable your HR team to focus on more revenue-generating tasks. But with hundreds of PEO providers in the US, how can you identify the best match for your business? We can help!
Paramount PEO is a leading PEO service broker, with over 20 years of experience helping small and medium-sized businesses find the best solution according to their needs. Contact us and we’ll source the right PEO for your business so you can focus on the most strategic side of your HR best practices!
