Being a part of a franchise network in Australia can be an incredibly rewarding line of work in more ways than one. A successful franchise business with multiple locations can be a license to print money if you get it right. You have brand name recognition, trust, and repeat business. With the help of your staff, who keep the doors open and the business humming, you can reap the rewards. But staffing your business, keeping staff happy and retaining them are all challenges.
Human Resource (HR) management is a critical element of any medium to large-scale enterprise, which is why people obtain a Master in Human Resources. Hiring, firing, performance management, and other HR processes are all essential to keeping your franchise network running smoothly. This informative article is the ultimate guide to HR for your franchise network business, so read this valuable resource to learn all you need to know about this topic.
Hiring and Onboarding Processes
Even though when you pay your franchisee fee, you buy the name, system and market share of an existing brand, you still have to pull up your sleeves and work. Part of any successful business is ensuring that you hire the right staff and that their onboarding process is smooth, easy and user-friendly. This means that team members join your business with the right foot forward and have a favourable impression coming into your business. This translates to happy and content staff, and this translates to revenue for your business.
One way you can do this is to create detailed position descriptions when advertising roles for the business. If you have a firm understanding of the role duties, experience and qualifications required, you can tailor your recruitment to this. Designing good job interview questions that help you separate the wheat from the chaff is also critical to this process.
The next step, once you’ve hired someone, is ensuring that they fit into the business well and get the proper training. Part of the HR process is designing efficient and custom orientation and training systems to get the new folks up to speed with your business aims, objectives and ways of working.
Staff Retention
The next step of the HR systems for your franchise network business is retaining your staff. It’s all well and good to have excellent hiring and onboarding systems, but if you can’t get staff to hang around you’ll waste time, money and stress on a continual recruitment cycle.
Labour turnover is making things tough for Australian businesses right now with 9.5% of workers switching jobs or employers in the last 18 months (the highest since February 2012). Ideally, you want your team members engaged, happy and fulfilled at work, and there are a few things you can do to achieve this.
To start with, you can pay competitive wages within the confines of your budget. Paying slightly above award rates is an excellent way to keep staff happy, as everyone needs to earn a living. If they can jump ship to find better pay, they will so mitigate this from the beginning with a living wage.
The next step in retaining staff is by offering ongoing educational, professional development and performance management reviews, with feedback built into this process. Also, career progression opportunities are an excellent retention tool. If someone is exceptionally dedicated, hard-working and skilled, offer them a pathway to management or a specialist senior role within the business.
Stay Compliant with the Law
Part of HR’s job in any business is to ensure the business remains compliant with all relevant workplace legislation and guidelines. Failure to do this can result in costly and stressful workplace claims such as WorkCover or Fair Work hearings and claims, which no business owner wants.
Part of this is ensuring that your employment contracts are legal and airtight and cover things like award rates, hours of work, leave entitlements, leave loading, superannuation, performance management processes and dispute resolution clauses.
Another aspect of this is ensuring that your occupational health and safety policies are all currently compliant and enforced within the workplace. As an employer, you hold a duty of care to your staff to provide a healthy, safe and secure workplace that reduces risks and hazards to staff health and safety. It may be worth completing a risk management tool that identifies risks and hazards at your premises and has mitigation steps built in.
Automate HR Processes
A large amount of time for most franchise owners is spent on employment and staffing paperwork. This admin eats up time that can be used more effectively, such as by focusing on developing strategy, marketing, growth and culture development within your business – all of which will generate more revenue and profit.
By implementing and utilising an effective HR platform or software tool, you can streamline staffing and other HR processes and reduce the administrative burden on you, the business owner. For instance, you can automate job advertisement listing, application filtering and interview scheduling from a good HR platform. It can also manage contracts, onboarding, policy management, position descriptions and performance review and management plans. This can free up hours a week of your time, allowing you to focus on the important stuff for your franchise network.
Performance Management and Terminations
On the other side of the human resource remit within a franchise network is performance management. Unfortunately, the fact that humans need to perform roles in a business leaves room for human error, poor performance, mistakes, accidents and sometimes gross misconduct. People can engage in all types of behaviour, including but not limited to slacking off, working other jobs while on the clock, not hitting targets and misbehaving.
If required, HR can implement performance management plans for staff who aren’t living up to their agreement. Often, this will motivate staff to perform better and improve their performance, but in some cases, they can’t meet the goals of the performance management plan, which means they need to be terminated. Terminations are the HR process of ending someone’s employment, and either occur due to someone being fired, retiring or resigning.
A HR Summary
This informative article has shared the ultimate guide to HR processes and work for your franchise network. By now, you’re an expert on this topic.