Small (Business) is Beautiful

Welcome to Discuss HR, the HR blog written by Human Resources UK. 

Sheena McLullich may have not switched off yet (see her last post!) which fortunately for us means she has taken the time to write this post about why HR is so important in small business.  (Ed Scrivener)

Small (Business) is Beautiful

It wasn’t intentional, but I seem to have spent almost all of my career working for SMEs.  Small  to Medium Enterprises with anything up to 250 employees are an established part of the British economy with over 4.8 million small businesses employing almost 24 million people, according to the Federation of Small Businesses. 

Perhaps the seeds of my destiny were sown when I worked as a Training Consultant for a local Chamber of Commerce.  I worked with many businesses in the local area offering bespoke training advice and solutions.  From there it was almost a natural progression to running my own HR and Training Consultancy and focussing more on the needs of smaller organisations who didn’t have their own specialist advisors.  Eventually I started working full-time for one of my clients and, although this led me to working with several major household names, it was always as an external consultant and I was never directly on the payroll of one of these titans.

It angers me when I see articles in the HR press which advocate HR best practice as being the province of big businesses only.  Some recruitment consultants are equally guilty of such misconceptions.  I was actually turned down for a job with a small company a couple of years ago because they wanted someone with experience of large organisations who ‘knew what best practice looked like’.  Oh, come on!  The inference seems very much that small businesses are second class and not the ideal environment in which to pursue a valid HR career.

I would argue that my role as HR Director in each of the SME businesses I’ve worked for has been far more demanding and challenging than a cushy number as nominal Head of HR in a huge, impersonal monolith.   I work very closely with senior leaders at the heart of the business – and the HR buck stops with me.  I don’t have a team of expert advisors around me and I don’t have the means to buy in such expertise (except in very extreme cases).  That means that if it needs to be known, then I need to know it – or at least know where to find out about it.  I don’t have long to do any research into unfamiliar issues either.  In my experience, smaller organisations move much more quickly than larger ones and the CEO’s idea can become reality in hours rather than months of Board ratification, shareholder approval etc.

Admittedly I don’t have a multi-million pound training or recruitment budget (I wish!) to be responsible for.   It is, however, much more difficult to spend £50k wisely and to get real value for money from suppliers than knowing that you have an almost limitless supply of money to throw at a problem.  I don’t have responsibility for thousands of anonymous, distant employees.  I can count our workforce in hundreds and they all know who I am.  There’s nowhere to hide in a small business. 

My role is certainly varied and my caseload can move from ER issues to strategic organisational development to sorting out why we’ve run out of coffee in the blink of an eye.  I have to be hands-on.  Resource constraints exist in all sizes of organisation but in a small one, there often isn’t anyone else available to deal with a problem and I can’t cite ‘not in my job description’ as a reason to delegate something that I don’t see as important. 

I wouldn’t have it any other way.  Although it is sometimes frustrating to have my strategic planning activities interrupted by a request for ‘how much holiday do I have left?’ this surely is the ‘raison d’etre’ of HR – a function that provides a valid, and valued, service to all its employees. 

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Discuss HR is the HR blog written by members of Human Resources UK, the 10,000 member strong LinkedIn group dedicated to the HR professionals in the UK.  Discuss HR is published twice weekly and looks to take an insightful, informative and sometimes irreverent view on the world of HR – all with the purpose of generating a discussion.

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