A guide on keeping your workforce connected, engaged, and supported.

1. W H I T E P A P E R
HR for small
businesses
A guide on keeping your workforce
connected, engaged, and supported

2. Contents
Ready for the HR challenge? 3
What is HR? 4
Managing HR processes 5
How a HR solution can make life easier 6
The employee journey 7
Step 1: Finding the right employees for your business 8
Step 2: Getting new starters up and running 9
Step 3: Getting better visibility of your employees to 10
manage and engage them
Step 4: Managing general HR processes 11
Step 5: Managing employee performance and development 12
Step 6: Communicating with your employees and 13
offering recognition
Step 7: Saying goodbye to your employees 14
How Sage HR can help your business 14

3. 3HR for small businesses
Employees are the life force of any organisation. They bring the company’s vision
to life by using their talent and skills to keep the business moving.
1
Robert Walters—The Value of Promoting Employee Health and Wellbeing
2
Harter et al, 2012/ACAS—Building Productivity in the UK (June 2015)
“Colleague engagement strategies have a big impact
on productivity levels…my turnover is up, my
profitability has doubled in the past couple of years,
the number of people I have in the business has
gone down by 30%. Interestingly, at the same time,
my colleague engagement has gone up.”
Steve Cooper, Group CEO at C Hoare & Co
Sourcing, attracting, and retaining the best talent
is more challenging now than ever. Business
growth aspirations add pressure to hire the best in
the market. And small businesses don’t have the
resources to compete with the higher salaries that
bigger companies can offer.
Companies are also becoming more creative with
the perks they offer. Free or subsidised lunches and
flexible schedules are common tactics to attract and
retain hires.
Expectations from the workforce have changed
too, as people now have more demands about
how they work. Today, there are five—soon to
be six—working generations. And there’s an
increasingly contingent workforce including
contractors and gig workers. Employers must
embrace an evolving mix of expectations that come
with managing such a workforce.
Meanwhile, remote working has become an
essential element of business continuity and
crisis management. It can offer many benefits
(such as lower turnover rates and higher
employee engagement), while digital technology
is empowering businesses to deliver on it, but
managing employees remotely has its challenges.
Wellbeing is also important. Factors such as
mental health, job satisfaction, and inclusion are
high priorities as employees decide to stay with or
leave a business. Meanwhile, 87% of professionals
say a wellness policy is essential to them when
considering new opportunities1
.
So how can your business keep up with these
numerous challenges? The solution is a well-
planned human resources (HR) strategy. By creating
a plan that optimises the employee experience,
you can keep your employees happy, engaged and
invested in their roles. Experts claim successful
engagement can lead to people being as much as
18% more productive2
.
This guide will explain the fundamentals of HR
and help you navigate the challenges that small
businesses face.
Ready for the
HR challenge?

4. 4HR for small businesses
HR includes all the processes involved with sourcing, hiring, and retaining
employees. It covers everything that has to do with managing your employees
across the end-to-end employee journey—from the hiring stage to the point
when they leave your company.
There are many processes in between these two stages that fall under the HR umbrella, such as:
Managing absence
and holidays
Dealing with expenses
Scheduling shifts
Managing timesheets
Tracking performance
What is HR?

5. 5HR for small businesses
Managing HR processes
There are lots of complexities to juggle when managing HR processes,
with communication, collaboration, and engagement being some of the
top challenges. Looking after every step in each HR process is an involved
responsibility that’s prone to time traps and errors, including:
• Onboarding and managing employees at multiple locations.
• Spending too much time on admin and not enough focus on the business.
• Mismanaging data and using outdated systems, such as paper and spreadsheets.
• Complexities with compliance.
• Managing and balancing timesheets, absences, shifts, expenses, and payroll.
• Losing valuable employees and time backfilling positions.

6. 6HR for small businesses
How a HR
solution
can make
life easier
Given all these responsibilities,
it’s almost impossible to manage
everything effectively without HR
software. As well as helping you
manage these HR processes, a cloud
solution allows you to:
• Create more automated ways of working
across the employee journey, so you can
focus on your business and achieve better
productivity with what you have.
• Streamline HR tasks with smart data, so you’re
using your time more efficiently.
• Reduce time taken on manual data entry.
You can allow your employees to self-serve
and add additional data to the system rather
than you having to do it for them. You can also
customise rules as needed for annual leave
and other company policies.
• Create meaningful and amazing experiences
for your employees at work, whilst easing the
burden of managing your people processes.
In addition, using a cloud solution means you can
access your HR data from virtually any internet-
capable device. As a result, you will:
• Be more efficient and productive by reducing
admin and working smarter.
• Improve engagement and retention with better
employee experiences.
• Make better decisions with better insights
from one single source of truth.
• Maintain compliance, another complex
HR process.

7. 7HR for small businesses
The employee journey
Step 1:
Finding the right
employees for your
business
Step 2:
Getting new joiners
up and running
Step 3:
Getting better
visibility of your
employees to manage
and engage them
Step 4:
Managing general
HR processes
Step 5:
Managing employee
performance and
development
Step 6:
Communicating with
your employees and
offering recognition
Step 7:
Saying goodbye to
your employees

8. 8HR for small businesses
Recruiting can be tough for employers, due to:
• Employment rate: When the employment rate is low, the talent pool is smaller. Candidates with the
qualifications you need will likely be scarce. You’ll need to lure ‘passive’ talent—those not actively
seeking employment—away from their current employer.
• Candidate reach: Competition for the best talent is stiff, so you’ll want to cast a wide net by setting up
multiple recruiting channels.
• Inefficient talent sourcing: You can spend hours combing through credentials of unqualified
candidates before you find someone who fits your criteria.
To recruit efficiently, you need clear job requirements, descriptions, and advertisements. You need to
find, evaluate, and organise top job candidates quickly to keep talent, and must offer a positive experience
for the candidates.
HR software helps you do this by using smart data to filter through CV data that doesn’t match the job
criteria. It will also help you attract passive talent.
Step 1: Finding the right employees
for your business

9. 9HR for small businesses
Congratulations, you’ve taken on your new employees. Now you need to
get them up to speed with your business and what they’ll be doing. This is the
onboarding stage. Challenges you may face at this point, according to
HR worldwide, are:
• Good monitoring of new employees.
• An inconsistent approach to onboarding across the organisation.
• Lack of clarity about who is responsible for what portion of the process within the company.
• Measuring the success and effectiveness of the onboarding process.
Using technology such as HR software to involve your new joiners in the onboarding process can help you
overcome these challenges - something 52% of HR practitioners worldwide are doing, according to the HR
worldwide research.
Saving time with HR software
Results also revealed technology was the solution to save time during onboarding (38%), for effective
communication (28%), to reduce admin (27%), and to gather data to improve the process (15%). By following
suit, you’ll be able to make your onboarding process a smooth one for all involved.
Step 2: Getting new starters up
and running
38%
During onboarding
Reduced admin
27%
Effective communication
28%
Improving processes
15%

10. 10HR for small businesses
People management involves engaging with and retaining employees.
Employee engagement is a workplace approach for motivating employees and
driving their passion, commitment, and effort at work. Engaged employees have
a clear understanding of how the business is fulfilling its purpose and how they
can contribute to it. Essentially, the more you know about your employees, the
more you can enable them to do their best work.
This isn’t an easy task, though. Engaging your workforce can be difficult for the following reasons:
• You don’t have data, so you rely on gut feeling.
• You don’t collect feedback from your workforce to gauge how satisfied they are with working for the
company.
• You don’t have the data you need to support managers in providing seamless work experiences.
Advances in cloud and work-based technology enable you to create a data-driven approach to improve
the visibility you have of your workforce. The data will inform how you manage and engage your people—
allowing you to understand their behaviour better with actionable insights.
Step 3: Getting better visibility of
your employees to manage and
engage them

11. 11HR for small businesses
Step 4: Managing general
HR processes
Absence and leave management, payroll, expenses, timesheets, and scheduling
are just some of the general HR processes you need to deal with. There’s a
lot to manage and no room for mistakes without jeopardising the employee
experience. Common roadblocks are:
• Data inaccuracies.
• Too much time spent on admin.
• No high-level view of employee schedule availability.
• Errors transferring data for different purposes, such as using timesheet data to calculate leave and
payroll reporting.
Instead of having to manually key in employee data, you can use HR software to automate these tasks.
This reduces inaccuracies and mistakes that negatively impact the employee experience.

12. 12HR for small businesses
Step 5: Managing employee
performance and development
Employee engagement doesn’t just involve recognising people for their efforts.
It also includes constructive feedback to build on their strengths and identify
opportunities for improvement. Most organisations start with an annual review,
which usually corresponds with the employee’s start date.
However, managers often criticise this method because it:
• Interrupts the workflow.
• Is difficult to coordinate as new joiners start at different times of the year.
• Delays identification and resolution of performance problems.
• Doesn’t support an open dialogue between employee and manager.
HR software automates scheduling and offers better-organised preparation for all involved because
everyone is aware of the review date in advance. You can customise your settings to use the same metrics to
evaluate all employees, so you can manage expectations sooner. And performance problems are more easily
addressed because you’ve communicated the performance metrics up front.

13. 13HR for small businesses
Step 6: Communicating with your
employees and offering recognition
Communication and recognition are crucial for engagement and retention.
Employees want to feel appreciated for the jobs they do, even above
compensation in some cases. They want to feel their role directly connects to
the success of the business. That’s why communication must be timely and
clear to show the company respects and values each employee’s presence.
It’s challenging to communicate and give recognition effectively if:
• You don’t have a way to measure how employees perceive your communication and
recognition tactics.
• Your recognition and rewards efforts are infrequent or too frequent to hold value.
• Employees are unclear about how their role fits into the bigger picture of the business.
Pulse surveys are a great way of running a quick check on what’s working and what isn’t.
A lot of cloud-based reward and recognition tools offer smart solutions to managers to streamline their
efforts. From instant recognition and robust internal communication to flexible reward options, cloud
technology has made the act of recognition and appreciation effortless.
Your rewards and recognition tools should have well-defined criteria, maintain fairness and timeliness, and
have variety. Keeping a check on these criteria becomes easier when you leverage technology to transform
your business.

14. 14HR for small businesses
Step 7: Saying goodbye to
your employees
In the final stage of the employee life cycle, the employee leaves the business as
a result of resignation, dismissal or retirement.
Known as offboarding, this stage can be tricky because if it’s not managed correctly, it can expose your
business to a number of risks, including:
• Litigation from the former employee.
• Continued access to confidential company information.
• No compliance checks to close the gap.
• Company equipment not returned to the business.
• No structured handoff plan.
The process of offboarding employees can be as smooth and effective as onboarding. Developing strong
procedures while having a clear workflow in place to join up functions such as HR, IT and payroll, in addition
to evaluating what works and what doesn’t, can make all the difference to the departing employees’ leaving
experience.
And by leveraging the benefits of an HR system to automate aspects of leaver processing, comfort can be
achieved in knowing the factors that can go wrong are being handled at the right time, in the right way.

15. 15HR for small businesses
How Sage HR can help
your business
Learn more about how Sage HR makes
HR management simple by visiting our
website: sage.com/uk/sagehr
Managing your employees via a digital platform not only allows you to do the
job much faster, it can also reduce costs, enable greater collaboration, and
streamline information access with a single database.
Sage HR is an all-in-one solution for supporting and managing a remote workforce. You can carry out all of
your business’ HR functions from one secure platform:
• General HR requirements: Create a central online employee database and manage onboarding
and offboarding. Get a complete picture of your workforce without the hassles of paperwork and
spreadsheets.
• Leave management: Receive and manage requests for time off from a mobile app. Approve requests
directly from Slack, create unlimited time-off policies, and assign them to specific employees.
• Scheduling: Get easy, drag-and-drop shift management. Save pre-defined shift templates and control
permissions with access groups.
• Timesheets: Configure work patterns, prefill data with automation, and take advantage of a simple
interface.
It’s everything you need to provide great remote workforce experiences, plus:
• Compliance within all required jurisdictions.
• Accessibility for employee self-service.
• Reporting on workforce productivity.
• Integration with your payroll system, Slack, Zapier, Microsoft Outlook, and G Suite.
Sage HR empowers you to take control of your HR processes. Use it to create amazing experiences for your
employees, while keeping everyone connected, engaged, and supported.

16. 12pt DB Intro Copy
Address Line 1
Address Line 2
Address Line 3
XXXX XXXX
www.xxxxxxx.xxx
©2017 The Sage Group plc or its licensors. Sage, Sage logos,
Sage product and service names mentioned herein are the
trademarks of The Sage Group plc or its licensors. All other
trademarks are the property of their respective owners. NA/
WF 183498.
How else can you and your
people benefit from Sage HR?
Find out more at
sage.com/uk/sagehr
©2020 The Sage Group plc or its licensors. Sage, Sage
logos, Sage product and service names mentioned
herein are the trademarks of The Sage Group plc or its
licensors. All other trademarks are the property of their
respective owners. WF814773