Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) face unique challenges when it comes to managing their employees. With limited in-house expertise and resources combined with often rapid growth, many owners, managers and leaders are turning to managed HR services to handle tasks from employee onboarding to compliance management.
Our blog explores the top 10 managed HR services that are in high demand among SMBs, with 1 being the most sought-after service. Specifically, we’ll look at their unique benefits for you as the business owner, leader or manager, and what they may involve when sourcing an HR provider who offers the service/s. Whether you’re looking to deal with ongoing performance and/or behavioural issues or work ‘on the business’ rather than ‘in it’, this list will help you understand the HR services your business might need.
10 – On-Call HR Consultants
HR on-call services provide immediate advice on performance concerns, misconduct, and staff conflicts. These managed HR services are like having a lifeline for immediate HR issues. For instance, if a manager encounters a behavioural issue with an employee, they can quickly get guidance via phone or email on how to handle the situation before it becomes a larger problem. Another example is when there’s an ongoing underperformance concern from one employee —HR on-call can provide real-time advice on steps to address the issue effectively.
For owners and managers, having access to an on-call HR professional not only reduces stress at work but also saves time in the future when dealing with these staff issues. Having an available outside perspective to advise can prevent the issue in question from festering into a long-term matter, allowing you and management to focus on higher-value activities without getting bogged down by persistent staff concerns.
Also, small businesses are realising that HR on-call helps with more than just providing an outside viewpoint. For example, this service can help to reduce the managers’ risk of breaching compliance guidelines, uncovering what they can and can’t do with an on-call HR professional advising that they can’t terminate someone who’s at the business for longer than 6 months without warning as one example. In addition, HR on-call builds a personal relationship and trust with the HR service provider, offering a more human touch that’s lost through online forms and email chains alone.
9 – Employee Behaviour Mediation Services
Employee behaviour mediation services focus on conflict resolution and managing employee relations. These managed HR services are important for resolving conflicts and maintaining a harmonious workplace, as disgruntled and dissatisfied employees can increase the likelihood of staff churn – hurting long-term profitability and stability for the owner. Common examples of these services could be where a managed HR provider meets with management to resolve ongoing employee disputes over toxic behaviour in the office or where they come into a workplace to do a mediation. In the latter instance, the situation with toxic behaviours may’ve become quite bad and a managed HR professional stepping in may help you and management navigate and move forward from the situation. Also, providers may offer training to guide managers on how to navigate & mediate these sensitive situations, ensuring that conflicts are resolved professionally and with minimal disruption.
Having a managed HR service provider who can help mediate and guide leaders through behavioural issues not only helps maintain a positive work environment, but it’s also allowing small business owners and management to better handle these matters internally in the future. These employee behaviour mediation services can allow your leaders to avoid spending unnecessary extra valuable time on dealing with staff issues in the future which distract from long-term stability, and force leaders to re-focus away from higher-value activities such as profitably expanding the SMB’s operations.
8 – Leadership Development Managed HR
As your small business grows, leadership development services may be helpful – where existing employees identified as having leadership potential can have the chance to develop the required skills. In addition, you may find that your team doesn’t take accountability, they’re coming back to you with the same questions, or you’re doing their job for them. Whilst many people move into leadership based on their technical understanding, leading a team requires a whole different set of skills and knowledge, that can empower them to take charge of people and offload your lower-value responsibilities.
These services help develop these required skills and often include interactive workshops and real-life case studies that help managers develop them. For example, a practical interactive workshop might focus on decision-making processes, while a case study could illustrate how to manage a team during a crisis or a scenario with negative client feedback.
Investing in leadership development helps retain valuable employees and reduces staff turnover, as these employees will be less motivated to look elsewhere for competitor opportunities if they’re being shown attention in your business. Also, it ensures that employees are getting the right support as their leader is equipped with the right skills. By investing in these development opportunities, small business owners can better equip their employees to take over their ‘lower-value’ responsibilities, helping them to either free up their time or step back to hone in on higher-value activities such as winning new clients and expanding the business.
7 – Learning & Development Services
For small businesses, learning and development (L&D) services commonly involve ongoing or customised training to equip employees with new skills, strengthen weaker existing ones, or align your team with your and management’s ways of working. L&D training services might include the managed HR provider consultants constructing customised career development programmes for employees, hosting workshops or creating tailored training modules. For example, a managed HR service provider may capture the knowledge of your high-performers and implement that into a training program.
Training and development / L&D services not only safeguard management from having to reinvest in recruitment but also retain and develop valuable talent. Also, they can help provide clarity on the key KPIs and goals expected of employees in a supported training setting where they can get to fully understand and then be prepared to apply their work towards them. Instead of tasking new and probationary employees with unclear objectives (which can lead to costly mistakes and unnecessary time spent on management’s part correcting them), a provider with L&D services will come in, identify the key objectives of the owner/management and translate them into tailored services that work.
6 – Talent Acquisition / “Recruitment and Hiring” Managed HR
For small business owners and leaders, hiring can be a game of Russian roulette where sometimes the wrong person (in over their heads) might be brought into the business. Given the size of the business and therefore the value of each employee in it, any recruitment mistakes in an unfit employee may seriously slow progress towards key business objectives such as the owner stepping away from the ‘day-to-day’ activities or growing their business operations. Effective talent acquisition services, otherwise known as “recruitment and hiring” services, avoid this, with the provider attracting and selecting appropriate candidates that closely fit the business’s cultural and talent needs.
They might include a managed HR provider developing and implementing strategies such as a rigorous selection process involving setting up behavioural interviews between the owners and the candidate that determine a personality fit or organising psychometric testing through platforms to gauge technical work ethics. For example, if the provider is hiring sales roles for your business and the online psychometric test notes that interpersonal skills aren’t their strongest point and they’re more lenient towards methodical ‘heads-down’ solo work, then they may not be the best fit.
Also, these talent acquisition services small business owners are searching for also support them, as they might not have the time to conduct hiring, importantly freeing them up to focus on higher-value activities such as connecting with new leads for business development and profitable growth.
5 – Compliance and Risk Management Services
Common to what most business owners think of when they think of ‘HR’, compliance and risk management services are there to help businesses adhere to legal standards and minimise potential risks. Owners or internal sole HR admin common in many small business structures might be worried about doing the wrong thing with Fair Work, with the owner having to deal with the costs if they do misstep. Managed HR providers might conduct compliance audits and take action if anything’s found to protect the SMB from any legal breaches, or conduct regular presentations on the latest legal changes (including how they impact the business and practical steps you need to take to address the change). They may also help to implement risk management strategies, such as implementing workplace policies, auditing your employment contracts to ensure they are aligned with the appropriate Modern Award clauses and more.
For small business owners and leaders, staying compliant with legal standards is important to avoid costly penalties and legal disputes. Compliance and risk management services provide peace of mind here, making sure that the business operates smoothly without the fear of legal action. Also, addressing risk and compliance helps avoid costly long-term reputation damage amongst customers, suppliers, own employees and the general public, protecting both short-term and long-term profitability from unnecessary fallout, putting you and management’s minds at ease.
4 – Onboarding and Offboarding Managed HR Services
Having onboarding and offboarding taken care of can help you and management save time when new starters join, enabling you to keep moving and working on the business without being bogged down by paperwork. Onboarding and offboarding services from a managed HR team help smooth transitions for employees entering or leaving the business. Apart from the initial contract paperwork and letters, the external HR provider may provide custom onboarding plans including scheduled check-ins at 30, 60, and 90 days for a smooth transition into your business. For offboarding, they might offer exit interviews and knowledge transfer sessions to retain valuable insights from departing employees.
A proactive approach to onboarding and offboarding through a managed HR consultant meeting with you and management to pinpoint the above onboarding and offboarding processes at the start of engagement also helps your SMB maintain continuity and minimise disruptions. By double-checking that employees are brought into the business efficiently through a defined set of paperwork and a tailored onboarding program (while adhering to Fair Work) management can save time in future recruitment rounds to focus on higher-value growth activities rather than being stuck on contracts. Likewise, for offboarding, having exit interviews can help owners and managers understand where their employees might be dissatisfied (especially important if they’re already leaving), and minimise staff retention and further disruption to their higher-value activities by enacting these insights moving forward.
3 – Salary Management Services
As business leaders with competing priorities (where every minute of their day is valuable) want to escape the lower-value activities, it makes sense that pay / salary management services are the third most sought-after HR services. This managed HR service includes providers meeting with you and managers early on to set clear salary bands, aligning compensation with both individual employee learning and development plans and national benchmark standards to prevent any legal disputes. For example, a provider offering salary management services in this area may help you and management avoid uncomfortable pay disputes where an employee may feel they deserve a raise, where you feel you have to give a pay rise to them just to prevent a resignation.
Proactively setting and clearly communicating employee salary band benchmarks at the start with an outsourced HR provider’s help on initial engagement can help avoid this. Also, following through with pay discussions safeguards owners and management from staff disputes and disruptions – which can leave you on the back foot of your business and out-of-pocket if the employee decides to leave due to feeling they’re not been paid correctly. Considering this, not only do these services help owners escape the menial tasks of the business, but they can safeguard from unnecessary and avoidable staff churn.
2 – HR Software / Platforms
HR software platforms are another popular service among small business owners, helping to streamline HR processes, from payroll management to compliance tracking. Well-known HR software platforms include Employment Hero, UKG Pro, Workday, and Namely, which are known for automating various HR tasks, from payroll to performance reviews. For instance, Employment Hero as a cloud-based platform manages everything from paperless employee onboarding to employee learning and compliance, making it easier for small-business owners and leaders to manage their core HR management functions in one place.
Not only is this type of platform more efficient for SMB management and the internal HR person in their day-to-day, but it also saves the owners’ time which can be reverted to working ‘on’ the business and its core objectives of profitable growth or expansion, rather than ‘in’ it. So given this, the need for extensive in-house HR teams is removed, making them a cost-friendly solution for smaller businesses where the owner, manager and internal HR person may be the same person wearing different hats.
1 – Performance Management Services
It’s no surprise that small businesses often find it difficult to monitor their staff’s performance, especially when they’re rapidly growing. In this light, performance management services offered by HR providers are the most commonly sought-after services, focusing on aligning employee performance with the business goals.
Typically, these managed HR services may involve the external HR professional hosting goal-setting sessions with management to understand what the business is looking to achieve and aligning employee performance and KPIs with that. They may help map out what success looks like in the early stages for new starters or even develop individual career development plans for existing employees looking to get to the next level that have clear KPI and goal benchmarks. In addition, these managed HR providers might conduct staff engagement surveys to gauge morale and employee sentiment (i.e. burnout) and make necessary adjustments and reccomendations to management about how performance reviews can be handled in future.
Not only do these performance management services help realign your team with your KPIs as the business’s leader (helping to avoid unnecessary time wasted and staff exhaustion), but they also free up the owners’ time. In the employees focusing and being made aware of the key performance measures expected of them, you and management can load off more of your responsibilities to your team, creating more time to step back from the ‘day to day’ or focus on existing new opportunities for expanding operations.
Choosing the Right Managed HR Provider
Choosing the right managed HR services can impact your business’s ability to build and maintain a high-performing team. From commonly sought-after managed HR services including hr on-call that alleviates the stress of day-to-day staff issues for owners, to performance management services so that owners can focus on strategic higher-value activities like profitably growing their small business, each offers unique benefits.
At Inject, we specialise in providing customised managed HR solutions that align with your small-medium business goals, ensuring that your team is not just compliant but also engaged and performing at their best.
If you’re looking to explore managed HR services that can help your business thrive, contact Inject today for a consultation. Let us help you create and maintain a high-performing team that meets your business aspirations.
