Hiring staff and managing them should be rather easy. As long as you’re paying a fair wage for the work there will always be someone willing to do it, while the behavioral expectations and terms of working for you are fairly clearly laid out in the contract. Moreover, many of the standards of employment law are pretty clear about the provisions you should give to each staff member.

Yet of course, we all know that people are by far the most complex entities we have to deal with in life, let alone professional life. For this reason, managing them is not always as predictable as first thought. Anything can happen in our personal lives to affect our work, and we can all make mistakes if we’re not careful.

That’s why it’s worth asking, especially for new businesses - is it possible to manage staff more simply? What might that look like? In this post, we’ll help you get to grips with such a possibility:

Consider Outsourcing Your HR

Outsourcing your HR is often considered one of the easiest ways to simplify managing your staff, because when you rely on an external team to handle recruitment, payroll, and even certain day-to-day concerns, it frees you up time, and energy, and limits your inconsistency. Services that offer HR support for small businesses especially understand employment law and can handle somewhat fragile issues that may come up, and you can learn from how they operate on top of that.

Allow For Remote Work Opportunities

If an employee is at home, often they can dictate more of their own working experience. They also generally report higher satisfaction levels, because that flexibility can reduce stress. This also saves everyone commuting time, so if you can’t offer regular parking or lunchroom facilities, that in itself can be a bonus. Just be sure to set up clear guidelines for remote work, like communication expectations or defined working hours, as they can help you retain productivity while giving your team a little extra autonomy. It’s helpful for a small team to grow from this if you expand, but for now, remote is slowly becoming a default.

Allow For Confidential Meetings, But Grant Autonomy Also

Of course, it’s necessary to be available for one-on-one discussions when staff need to raise personal or professional concerns, but constantly micromanaging isn’t ideal. A balance between open-door policies and allowing autonomy can be a hard balance to strike, but if you work on it now you save so much more stress later on down the line. If you’re known for confidential meetings that can give employees a chance to air concerns then customers will trust you, but balancing this with providing autonomy will show you trust them. As you can see, often getting the best out of people is about trusting on both sides. This can help soothe many issues or elements of friction you could have otherwise experienced.

With this advice, you’ll be sure to have managed staff more capably, and yes, simply too.