Small teams often form close ties during the start-up period. The shared purpose, pride and excitement bind people in surprising ways and ensure they (mostly) pull in the same direction.

But success brings growth, and with growth comes recruitment and, ultimately, a larger team. New people bring new perspectives, which can be fantastic, but it also means that your personal ability to connect with each team member on a personal level – to instil that pride and purpose – becomes diluted.

Hopefully you’ll spot these growing pains before they become a significant problem. And while researching possible solutions, small business owners usually identify that they need a solid HR foundation to help them negotiate the many tricky elements of growth.

Employing people takes time and can distract you from running your business. Small business owners like yourselves need tools and strategies to manage, support and engage people as effectively and efficiently as possible. This is where HR software helps you improve business performance.

Get value from your people data

There’s a famous quote, often attributed to the business management guru Peter Drucker, which goes, ‘what gets measured, gets managed’. This should ring true to anyone concerned with improving their business performance. You measure your customer service, your product or service, and you have us on hand to measure and manage the financial elements of your business. But what about performance?

To improve performance, you need to work out what needs the most urgent attention and target your efforts where they can make a difference. How will you measure the impact of your ideas when you put them into action? There’s little point continuing to spend time and energy on performance improving plans that don’t have the desired effect.

If you’re looking at measuring and managing your team in this way, you’re going to need a tool that allows you to collect data, unlock the useful insights it contains, and track how your important measures of success change over time. This is where HR software comes in.

In fact, we’ve found that this is one of the biggest benefits of HR software. People data is a rich source of insight on the health of your business and the happiness of your workforce. Tools like citrus HR, who we have recommended to many of our clients, come out of the box with reports, analytics, and instant snapshot dashboards designed to make unearthing these nuggets a task of seconds.

Plan smarter

Having all your people data at your fingertips can help you become more operationally effective too. For instance, using citrus HR, it’s easy to manage the minefield of holiday requests.

Not only are large parts of the process automated, the system’s self-service interface means you’re not endlessly fielding questions about holiday – but the system makes it straightforward to ensure you’re covered during busy holiday periods if you’re a seasonal business or you know there’s a big order coming in.

Manage engagement

In HR, that ‘all pulling in the same direction’ feeling is better known as engagement. Experts define employee engagement as ‘the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace’. It might sound fluffy, but engagement is a tangible thing and has a very real impact on business performance. And it can be managed and measured.

It’s about understanding people’s needs and ensuring you do your best to fulfil them. Giving people opportunities to excel. Making sure they know exactly where they fit in, understand precisely what’s expected, and receive praise for a job well done.

When it comes to measurement, the best way to find out if your people are engaged is to ask them. Do they like their job? Their colleagues? Do they feel fairly paid? You want honest answers, so you need a way to collect this information in a way that lets people tell you what they really feel. HR software can make this process simple and easy for everyone. Pulse surveys enable you to track sentiment over time as you try different ways to improve engagement.

Spot problems early

When you’ve got a small team as so many of us do, it’s immediately noticeable when someone’s productivity dips. But as your team grows, it becomes more difficult to spot the signs quickly.

HR software enables you to collect data on lots of key indicators like performance, absence or learning and development. And because all that data lives in the same system, it’s relatively simple to get a real time view, or to set up alerts that will notify you, for instance, when an individual repeatedly clocks in late, or if their unplanned absence suddenly spikes.

As an employer you have a duty of care to the individual involved. HR software can warn you of potential problems early. Maybe they’ve decided they don’t like their job. Fair enough. But maybe they’ve got a serious personal issue. Either way, you need to have a confidential conversation so you can get to the bottom of it and offer the right support.

Make sure talent sticks around

Losing good people is always a threat to small businesses, and we understand that you don’t start up as an entrepreneur for the HR admin. But so much of your employees’ experience is tied up in the administrative details of HR and getting it right can mean the difference between hanging on to good people or not.

Without HR software, little HR admin mistakes are inevitable – a missed performance review, a payroll error, a holiday-booking mix up – and best-case scenario is they chip away at the confidence people place in you as an employer. And without confidence, without trust, good people will have their heads turned.

By using HR software, every element of an employee journey can be managed easily, so your people can feel confident you’ve got the details under control. Employees can log in from anywhere to manage their own personal information or view their most recent performance feedback. Repetitive tasks are automated, like onboarding checks or holiday entitlement calculations, ensuring nothing slips through the cracks.

If you’re concerned HR growing pains are impacting your business performance, why not chat to us about our experiences and how some of our other clients have seen great success with HR software.