Reasons Why a Focus on People is Required Regardless of the Size of Your Business

So, does size really matter? Not when it comes to business it doesn’t.   It doesn’t matter what size the business is when you are talking about maximising performance and productivity of your team.

I think there is a perception that you don’t have to worry about your people-related matters when your business is small.  The perception is less people, less problems and therefore people management isn’t such an issue, nor is, for example, workplace health and safety or industrial workplace legislation.  However, I hate to say it but it doesn’t matter how many employees you have or how well you get on, people management is important to your business.  Complying with workplace health and safety, industrial relations and other workplace legislation is important, creating a culture that supports your business goals, ensuring your team works well together towards common goals, the structure of the organisation and even future workforce planning are all important, regardless of the size of the business.  All businesses should be concerning themselves with maximising performance and productivity of employees regardless of their size!

To discuss some of these in a little more detail.  When it comes to workplace health and safety, industrial relations and other workplace legislation when you consider the risks and penalties involved such as; $54,000 for corporations for breaches of the Fair Work Actor on the spot fines for failing to comply with various workplace health and safety requirements, or up to $3,000,000 for corporations for Category 1 offences under the Work Health and Safety Act, the consequences can be the same, regardless of the size of the business.  When you also factor in personal liability for directors under workplace legislation with penalties including imprisonment, compliance can actually be more important the smaller the business as they don’t generally have available funds to throw at a problem to make it go away.  And remember, there is so much more to compliance than mitigating risks and we believe that starting small is actually key.

When it comes to organisational culture, there has been so much research done and examples of larger businesses having success because of their organisational culture.  A Columbian University study showed an organisation with a strong culture had employee turnover of 13.9% as opposed to 48.4% for a poor culture.  And in 1992, Kotter & Keskett did some research which indicated that those with a positive performance culture had significantly higher revenue, employment, stock price and net income growth over an 11 year period than those that didn’t have a performance culture.  So make sure culture is on your business agenda regardless of the size of your business.    Studies on leadership have shown that poor leaders lose money, good leaders make profit and extraordinary leaders more than double the company’s profits!  And teamwork improves productivity … so you get the picture.

Smaller businesses need to stop thinking that they need to be bigger before they invest in their people.  In fact, these things are easier to get under control and maintain when you are smaller rather than waiting until you think you are big enough to worry about it.  And larger businesses would not invest in Human Resources Initiatives such as; complying with legislation, ensuring a safety culture, safety leadership, organisational culture, leadership, high performing teams or workforce planning and others if they were not confident that they were going to get a return on investment from it and there is plenty of evidence in the form of literature and studies to prove that they have financially benefited from those initiatives.

At the end of the day, efforts to maximise performance and productivity of your team increases your profits.  If you can increase performance and productivity by even 5%, why wouldn’t you, no matter what size business you have?

At HR Business Direction we can help small, medium and large businesses to maximise performance and productivity through their people. Contact us here.

Leisa Messer BBus(HRM); GradDipIR; CAHRI; IRSQ
Managing Director | HR Strategist
leisa.messer@hrbd.com.au
07 3890 2066
www.hrbd.com.au