Your company culture helps you attract and retain top talent, improves productivity, and helps your business become and stay profitable.
So, what is company culture? It's the attitudes and behaviors of a company and its employees. It centers around values and interaction. For example, you may have a team-based culture or a hierarchical one.
Company culture affects who might choose to work for you. The stronger your company culture, the more everyone is on the same page and working together. Meanwhile, a weak company culture results in absenteeism, presenteeism, and turnover. It increases conflict in the office that can cause further problems. Building a strong company culture can be intentional or organic, or a mixture of both.
There are things you can do that improve company culture. One of them is outsourcing HR.
How does Outsourcing HR Support Company Culture?
There are several ways in which an outsourced HR solution supports company culture. One key thing to realize is that these solutions do not replace in-house HR, but rather support and complement it. The purpose of outsourcing HR is to take administrative burdens off your team's plate, while giving them access to the outsourcing partner's expertise and experience. This can help you improve your company culture in multiple ways:
HR Can Focus on the What Matters
The key aspect here is that HR can focus much more on important things, including taking steps to develop a strong company culture. Because they are not spending chunks of time on entering payroll or administering benefits, they can spend that time supporting employees. When employees get what they need, company culture strengthens. HR can also worry about hiring the right people and establishing the structures that support your culture.
When not overworked, your HR professionals can steer your company culture in a positive direction. Negative company cultures do indeed exist; and they can cost you a lot in turnover and absenteeism/presenteeism. At its worst, this can result in a toxic work environment full of dysfunction, drama, and stress, which then leads to mass departures and potentially the collapse of your business. With your HR team able to concentrate fully on the situation in your company, you can spot the warning signs early and deal with them before they become an issue, whether it is a mismatch of values, a supervisor who is micromanaging, or holes in employee training.
Payroll and Compliance Problems are Eliminated
Unhappy employees weaken company culture, and nothing makes people unhappy faster than issues getting paid. Outsourced HR solutions ensure more accurate payroll by using their expertise and choosing the right tools. Payroll errors can even drive employees to quit, damaging company culture and institutional memory.
HR outsourcing partners also eliminate many compliance problems that can have a negative impact on morale. Suing one's boss never makes for a good experience.
This also allows you to make sure that you are not committing labor offenses that affect people's work/life balance, which can also drive employees to quit and result in other negative impacts such as low morale and fatigue. You can make sure that you are not overworking people, that your pay rates are competitive, and that you are in compliance with important legal matters.
Benefits are Improved
Using an outsourced HR solution allows small employers to offer better benefits for a more affordable price. Employers no longer have to offer the bare minimum because that is all they can afford. This leads to attracting a higher quality of employee, the kind of person who puts an effort into strengthening company culture and who wants to make sure your office is a great place to work.
It becomes a positive spiral where good benefits strengthen the culture, and the culture then continues to attract good people until you barely have to think about it. Your best advertisement for any new position becomes your existing employees, who then bring people they already have a connection with, strengthening your culture further. You can also look towards offering the kind of benefits that positively affect company culture.
HR outsourcing can, indeed, improve your company culture. This will then make you an employer of choice, which then helps even more with attracting and retaining top talent. Turnover drops, productivity and profitability increase, and everyone is happier around the office, at all levels.
