How Entrepreneurs Can Manage Their First Employees

Starting a business is no easy feat: it takes a lot of time, energy and skill. So when your business is ready to expand from outside your home office or small one-person office, it can seem like you’re on the road to success. While this may be the case, it is no time to become complacent. As a solo entrepreneur who has never had their own business before, you’re about to become an employer for the first time, which can be an odd role for you to assume.

Managing a team takes skill and dedication. There will be ups and downs, and although this will be a strange experience for you, it is crucial that you manage your employees well so that they remain and are happy within your company.

Be Transparent

As a first-time business owner, where your business is still in the beginning stages, you need to be transparent about your business’s current standing. While you’re doing well enough to bring people on board, it is a big risk for people to join your company, and so you may have to offer so reassurance. In the interview stage, let them know where the business is heading; although you don’t have to divulge in all the details, letting them know that in the next year you want to bring more people on, can offer a clear future for them as much as you.

Once you’ve hired your first few employees, keep being transparent. Let them know if any massive changes are happening, whether there’s been a big breakthrough and you’ve hit the target number, or whether numbers have slightly dropped. Transparency and honesty build trust between you and your employees and can help with morale and productivity.

Track Employee Work

While you don’t want to micro-manage, you will want to keep tabs on what is happening within your business. Check that employees from different departments are communicating with one another properly, track deadlines and whether they are being met, and how efficient each employee is working. While you should let them choose how they work, monitoring their outputs can help you see whether they are working to the best of their ability.

To help your employees keep projects in order, and so you can also review what is being worked on, what has been completed and what is still needed to be done, there are many project management tools, such as Trello, which can help keep your business organized.

Overview Employee Security Measures

Bringing on employees can be a nerve-racking experience for the most confident of entrepreneurs. Those who you bring on to work for you are being trusted with sensitive data and company information. While there are certain elements of the business you will want to keep private, such as the area of HR, you need to ensure employees are following security protocol.

To assess whether your business is compliant to certain security regulations, the International Standards Organization (ISO) has established ISO 27001, a specification for an Information Security Management System (ISMS). In brief, an ISMS is a framework of policies, including physical, technical and legal controls that are involved in a business’s information risk management processes. An organization’s ISMS discusses technology, data and employee behavior. With the latter, you should offer employee security awareness and password protection awareness, and have a company culture that understands the responsibility of data protection.

To build on your company’s security efforts, you need a business strategy that helps move your business towards better, safer practices. SOC 2 and ISO 27001 complement one another by providing you with a strategy, but you need to determine how each one can help your company.

Invest in a Cloud-based HR System

Certain areas of HR will need to be dealt with head-on, however, you can invest in a Cloud-based HR system so that employees can monitor their own holiday time and know when their next appraisal is. HR systems work seamlessly, where you as the employer can sign-on and accept or decline holiday requests, see an employee’s attendance, and know their contact information. This will free up your time so that it can be better spent.