Oasis HR | Leading an HR function within any small business or start-up can be an isolated place. Often you are writing policies from scratch and attempting to build an effective HR infrastructure when there is very little evidence to support heading in one direction from another. Hiring the right staff, promoting good team management, creating a great working environment and building solid engagement levels are all challenges to be considered; whilst juggling the pressures of operating within a highly fluent and changing environment.

So how can we effectively manage these change challenges whilst sustaining high engagement, creating a distinguishable culture and maintaining the ‘feel’ of an exciting and dynamic environment?

The Changing Face of Company Culture

Maintaining your company culture during periods of fast growth and change is challenging, especially when coupled to the grass-roots inception of a start-up. Often businesses face a battle between the founders’ perception of the culture and people joining later down the line. For employees who have helped build the foundations of a company, seeing new recruits ‘dilute’ the culture they’re used to can be a distressing and demotivating experience. From an HR perspective, it’s essential to be sensitive to this and work with the business in the early stages to identify your culture and define the values of the business; ensuring the recruitment process captures the right talent.

Defining and Living your Values

The cultural environment within a business and its internal values are separate considerations, but ones that should absolutely should be linked. You’re culture should reflect a set of clearly defined values that your business intrinsically lives by; remembering that the values supporting your company brand aren’t the same as your internal people values.

Often businesses make a mistake by leaving it solely to the leadership team to decide upon a suitable set of values and will overlook the views of the remaining workforce. When defining your values, endeavour to involve the wider business. Start-ups have the luxury of operating with relatively small headcounts (fast-growing, but small). Why not hold breakout sessions with staff to understand what they think is great about the business or what their defining moment of employment has been? You might uncover some fantastic and unique company attributes that you would have otherwise overlooked.

Recruiting your ‘Gems’

So, you’ve developed a great set of distinguishable values which are positively enhancing and strengthening your company culture – what next? Make sure your recruitment process promotes and incorporates these values at every stage possible. During the interview, you could pose some tactical questions to unleash more of your candidate’s personality or perhaps create a tailor-made psychometric assessment to evaluate an applicant’s values, motivations and behaviours. Try asking a couple of simple but effective questions to help uncover the person behind the interviewee:

•  If I were to ask your friend what they find most annoying about you, what would they say?
• If I were to put you on a soap-box for two minutes to talk about anything you like, what would you talk about? – You’ve got two minutes, go…

It’s all well and good talking about cultural fit during the recruitment process, but that’s assuming that you’ve got candidates longing to work for you. Often the real challenge lies with sustaining the ‘buzz’ that existed when you were viewed as that sexy start-up. What’s going to differentiate you from the other fast-growth exciting tech business two streets down the road? This is where you have to think carefully about the marketing collateral you use to promote your business as an employer; make sure it reflects your values and tells your story – do you go for beers on a Friday, have quarterly team socials or sponsor the local cat refuge? Find out what captured the attention or engaged your current staff and use these golden bullets to find your stars of tomorrow.

The chances are that like many start-ups you’re not quite ready to offer shiny benefits packages, so it’s crucial to play your ‘personality card’ and offer candidates an opportunity they wouldn’t likely receive if they joined a large corporate. Sell the business and the journey, not just the role.

On-boarding and Inducting New-joiners

Regardless of where you believe the on-boarding process starts and ends, effectively enrolling employees into your business can make an enormous difference to engagement, retention and productivity levels. When managing the on-boarding process, it’s important to introduce the new-recruit to their full responsibilities, your differing business units, your leaders and of course your corporate values as soon as possible. It’s down to the individual culture of the business to decide whether this is more of a ‘self-service’ process or one which is solely lead by HR or the line-manager. If your culture is more ‘self-service’, you can be quite creative with the process; for example ‘business card sticker book’ exercises or treasure map journeys requiring the employee to take ownership for completing each stage.

Whichever model you use, it’s crucial to be clear about what is expected from both the business and the employee in terms of successfully working through the on-boarding process. Transparency is paramount and line-managers are much more receptive to complying with procedures if they can see what needs to be done and by when. Questioning the expectations of both the employee and line-manager at the start of the process provides an invaluable reflection point when it comes to assessing performance at the end of the probation period.

Selling the Benefit of HR and the Processes

When looking at implementing HR processes into a start-up business it’s worth remembering that for the founders and existing employees, it will be an alien experience. Keep processes as simple as possible and focus your communication on stressing that they are being introduced to make everybody’s life easier. Where possible avoid HR jargon and use plain language to simply explain what’s being introduced and why.

Based on the speed at which start-up businesses grow, often fairly inexperienced but high-performing individuals will be promoted to management positions very quickly. This poses a challenge for HR as often these professionals won’t have had the previous experience to enable them to become successful people managers; potentially leading to performance issues further down the line. Introducing bite-sized compulsory workshops for these managers can really help with preventing any internal problems from escalating and will positively impact on their own professional development. Running internal workshops like ‘HR for non HR Managers’ is a great way of passing on some of HR’s expertise in a digestible manor, covering items from on-boarding and performance management to exit interviews and preventing grievances.

In particular, performance management is a process which needs to be supported by HR but ultimately followed through by line-managers. Often this terminology triggers negative perceptions and becomes a difficult process to successfully conduct for both employees and line-managers. During your internal HR training, up-skill managers on holding difficult conversations, delivering bad news and importantly, remind them that ensuring their staff are performing is ultimately part of their job. Why not set up a ‘Managers’ Community’ to encourage them to share experiences of dealing with taxing problems to help them overcome their own people challenges?

Entering Multi-market Territory

For fast growth businesses expansion is inevitable and maintaining your culture across a whole multitude of counties is very challenging. Naturally, dependent on the region you’re operating in, culture will vary but it’s important to maintain a global stance on your vision and values. It’s ultimately down to people to live and spread the culture. Secondments can work really well for creating a global culture, and when expanding to new markets, try to incorporate a blend of local talent and high performing advocates from within your existing workforce. Holding ‘world meetings’ on a consistent basis is an effective way of sharing best practice amongst regional counterparts, increasing engagement and sustaining the vision of a culturally-aligned global business.