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There are a lot of incredibly exciting things that can happen as your business grows. You can start reaching more customers, you have more money to invest in things like branding, marketing and improving your products, and you can start to become more widely recognized as a successful company.
Of course, all of these exciting developments can often require a lot more hands at the wheel in order to keep things moving forward. This could possibly put you in an unusual position.
In the beginning, you might have just been a solo entrepreneur, doing things your own way and being completely independent. If you have to bring other people into your business, suddenly you’re an employer, and that’s a totally different ball game.
The important question you need to ask yourself is: are you ready? Here are a few things that you need to do in order to make sure that any employees you have are well taken care of.
Make Sure Everything is Documented
One of the biggest mistakes that a small business owner hiring employees for the first time can make is to take something of a lax approach to documentation.
Sure, it can seem as though you don’t need to document everything in a totally formal way if you only have a couple of employees at the start.
But over time, as your employee numbers grow that’s going to become less and less feasible. Make sure that you’re documenting everything, whether that’s through using something like a W2 generator for employee payslips, to formally written contracts when they first start working for you.
Having the right documentation means that there’s no room for any legal, financial, or personal misunderstandings in the workplace.
Focus on Equality
It’s a sad fact that we live in a society of terrible inequality, even in the modern era. However, things are slowly changing, and it’s up to you and your business to be a force for that change.
Make sure that you have clear equality guidelines in place so that every single employee is treated fairly and equally in both a financial sense and in the way that people respond to them on a day to day basis.
Don’t Ask too Much of Them
The reality of your employees is that however enthusiastic and hardworking they may be, they are still just people, and people have their limits.
Make sure that you’re not pushing them too hard and that you’re only ever asking them to work within the realms of what’s reasonable. You might want to push the business forward as hard as possible and want them to work late in order to help them do that.
But if you do then at best you’re just going to make them resent your business, and at worst you could end up behaving in a way that isn’t strictly legal. There’s a big difference between supporting your employees and pushing them too hard.
Of course, it’s important to remember that all of this is a learning curve. You’re not going to be the perfect employer right away, but over time you will learn how to deal with people more effectively and how you can collaborate with others for the good of your business.
If you learned something new as a new employer, let me know in the comment section below!
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