Prioritizing People in an Ever-Evolving Workplace

As startups grow, founders aren’t just expected to be experts in their vertical– they also have to be financially minded and highly organized. Their responsibilities include setting and executing the strategic vision and mission and finding aligned and skilled team members to help them grow. HR as a discipline is full of complex tasks, from compliance and employee life cycle management to enforcing policies, employee engagement, payroll, benefits, etc. – the list is endless, and every part of it is vital as you start to build your company. Even more, there’s an unspoken urgency behind all HR and People Ops activities that help build a culture that reflects the startup’s brand and achieves the founder’s vision. So how do you get started in building all of that?

Set the Foundation

Establishing your company with a strong people foundation in place properly first is essential as you look to scale. Doing so can be a tedious process involving lots of drafting policies and compliance, but these are essential tasks that cannot be skipped. These actions help polish your company’s identity compliantly for new employees through functional branded templates, engaging onboarding process, establishing a company culture, and an airtight payroll process. We have a couple of guides from the past you can check out in blog posts like Series A Hiring Considerations, airCFO Tax 101: 1099s, and Employee Classification Part 1 and Part 2. These posts contain valuable gems for setting things up in a clear, professional manner for your team. Fixing things later in People Ops and compliance can cost you gravely, whereas doing things right the first time is relatively painless and sets you up for long-term success.

Creating Scalable Processes

As a startup, thinking about creating scalable processes from the start helps minimize future iteration disruptions. Develop a repeatable process with scalability in mind that defines a standard flow for extending offers, hiring, and onboarding current and new employees. Polish your current methods through surveys and feedback questionnaires, and standardize them through documentation. Write up compliant employee handbooks, onboarding processes, hiring roadmaps, employee engagement surveys, and performance appraisal forms – these building blocks are vital to benchmarking your evolving growth!

Cultivating a Company Culture

The little, human touchpoints may create a fun and vibrant company culture, but the groundwork for those touchpoints comes from a set of intentional decisions by leadership. While compliance and templated aspects of People Ops are essential, employee engagement is just as, if not more, critical. It is important to ensure your company culture is reflected in each aspect of the employee life cycle, to help support in driving employee engagement.People Ops helps focus the small actions, like ensuring every compensation package is competitive and up-to-par with industry standards, each role has a career trajectory that moves in parallel with the company’s growth and objectives, planning leadership training sessions to foster leaders from within, that creates a shared vision for internal culture and works in unity to bring it to life.

People Ops with airCFO

All work environments are ever-evolving, and spending the time cultivating an intentional People Ops strategy for your team will pay off greatly. As founder responsibilities grow with each year and round raised, it’s critical to hand off operational activities to experts so that leadership can stay focused. Over the years, we’ve had increasing demand from our over 200 clients to add on a layer of People Ops support with our Accounting, Fractional CFO, and Tax offerings. It has been a natural fit to extend our capabilities; now, we can take on the work of People Ops with airCFO. Ready to work with our team of skilled People Operations professionals? Schedule a call with us to learn more.