By Alyssa Gregory
This post is sponsored by Gusto, but is in my own words and based on my experience with the Gusto HR tool.
When you own a small business, you are usually very accustomed to doing a lot of different things yourself. It’s just easier… being able to wear many different hats can be more efficient and budget-friendly than hiring an employee or paying a consultant to tackle every job that pops up.
But, what happens when you simply don’t have the knowledge or experience to do a certain job on your own? This is a very common challenge for small business owners when it comes to Human Resources functions. If you have employees or plan to hire, you undoubtedly have HR tasks that need to be completed. And if you don’t know what you’re doing, you will likely be wasting a lot of time trying to figure it all out.
This is where the Gusto HR tool comes in. This free tool streamlines some of the biggest pieces of the HR process in an intuitive and easy to use tool. I recently had a chance to test it out and saw first-hand how Gusto HR can help you tackle three of biggest HR tasks without any special knowledge or training. Read on for more.
Hiring and Onboarding
Hiring a new employee takes multiple steps and each one is important to laying the foundation for your new team member to have a successful start at your company. Gusto HR Basics simplifies the process by pulling all of the tasks online, into your Gusto account.
With your Gusto HR Basics account, you can:
- Add new employees and all of their pertinent information.
- Send employees the forms they need to complete and e-sign (I-9, W-4, etc.).
- Track what documents they have reviewed through their online acknowledgement.
- Enable new employees to initiate self-paced onboarding through documents you’ve uploaded.
Tracking Vacation and Sick Time
Another important task generally relegated to a company’s HR department is tracking and managing employee time off. If you have two or more employees, keeping track of paid time off, sick days and vacation requests can be a nightmare without a system to manage it.
Gusto HR Basics manages the entire process for you by helping you create your vacation and sick policies, allowing employees to request and log their time off, and giving you an easy way to track time-off balances automatically.
Managing Employee Information
Gusto HR Basics also allows you to keep all of your “people data” in one secure place — addresses, emergency contacts, time off reports, etc. This creates an employee directory and org chart that is automatically updated when you make changes to your staff.
One really useful feature when it comes to employee info is the ability to add custom fields to your employee profiles. Do you have a monthly pizza party or breakfast meeting? Keep track of your employees’ favorite foods right on their profiles. Do you have yearly company-wide game days? Collect employee t-shirt sizes in your custom field. It’s a great way to track a lot of different information.
And More
As I was poking around in Gusto HR Basics, I found a few other features that are especially useful for small business owners and worth mentioning:
- Online document storage that includes a system for tracking employee acknowledgement of the document after they read it, as well as digitally sign secure documents.
- Time-off reporting — annually, for a specific pay period, or a custom range — and employee summary.
- Task notifications on your Dashboard when you log in, plus email notifications so nothing falls through the cracks.
If you have a small business without an HR department, you should definitely take advantage of this time-saving (and headache-preventing) tool. Sign up for the beta program and get your free HR tools from Gusto.
Photo credit: Human resources concept from Stokkete/Shutterstock
