Nick Ellingson, Startup Ambassador at WTIA recently had the opportunity to virtually connect with HR professionals Mikaela Kiner, CEO of Reverb, and Microsoft Executive and startup veteran, Erika Berndt. 

Nick posed questions sourced from the WTIA Founder Cohort to get the scoop on startup HR and best practices for the current situation.  Below is Part 2 of the conversation. Click here to read Part 1.

How do you embrace HR without Could you list what you think should be a HR department checklist for a startup & why?

Erika Berndt: 

Well, you could look at it from a couple of different perspectives, you could look at it from a tactical perspective or bigger picture, so I decided to go with a bigger picture…

1) Have a good solid payroll system number one. Make sure people get paid on time and correctly.  That goes almost without saying. 

2) Building a strong culture that’s reinforced through the mission, vision, and values is something that companies might look at as the task that comes later, but I think the earlier you can define that and integrate it into your day to day operations, how you do business, and how you run the company is going to serve you well. 

3) Hiring and onboarding is also huge. I think it’s something that often gets overlooked by companies, especially startups when they just need bodies in the door. My recommendation would be to get an applicant tracking system or some sort of HRIS that combines hiring and onboarding into one tool. On top of that, have a robust onboarding plan for new hires. I have seen onboarding go right, and I have seen onboarding go wrong. It can be hard to recover from a rocky onboarding experience. 

4) In terms of benefits, get them the most competitive offering you can, that you can afford. Thankfully, high deductible health plans with HSA’s are really popular in tech right now and they tend to be more affordable, so that’s something to consider. In terms of compensation, Washington state passed the Equal Pay and Opportunities Act, which has resulted in more stringent requirements around equal pay. Not to mention it’s the right thing to do. So, it’s important to have a compensation program that allows you to price jobs on the market and then implementing a pay philosophy to say here’s how we generally want to pay against the market. Number one, it will keep you competitive. Number two, keep you out of some hot water from a legal standpoint, and that’s just a good practice to have in place. When employees feel like they’re fairly compensated, they can focus on other things that are more important. 

5) And then an employee handbook and workplace policies are always important. This again gets back to the first question, where you question how to keep the culture because handbooks and policies are something that can be viewed as, you know, it’s HR and why do we really need this? But again it comes back to putting some structure and framework in place that allows your company to grow while being able to point to how you operate structurally as a company. 

Mikaela Kiner: 

I love the focus on those really sound operations and systems from early on. Those things can feel very transactional, but it’s so important and it’s that much easier to get it right when you’re first starting out. You may think about a payroll system as not a big deal, but think about paying people incorrectly. You want to avoid it at all costs right? 

The kind of things I would add to what Erika said are that:

1) As soon as you’re big enough to have managers, be attentive to the skills and capabilities of the managers, both how do you select who’s going to be in a people management role and how are you training them and teaching them to ensure they have the tools they need to be successful and effective managers. I think it’s something like 69% of managers never get any training whatsoever on how to manage people and then we see all the bad outcomes of that. Like when people don’t have clear goals, or they don’t behave in the way they’re expected to, or they don’t communicate well, and it’s often due to the management. 

2) There are two things I like companies to think about. One is, what are the behaviors that you expect at work? That definitely goes along with culture and values. Often it takes people time to really codify the culture and values, but you shouldn’t let that stop you from telling people what it means to be a professional in this organization. There are some really simple behaviors that you probably do and don’t want, and the earlier you communicate those the better you can adhere to them. We also see that most humans are just not good at dealing with conflict or having difficult conversations, and you know we all need to have them, especially if you’re founder and cofounder. You’ll need to have some tough conversations amongst yourselves. Just making sure to talk about that. Ask yourself “What does healthy disagreement look like?” Whatever you believe in, make sure that you understand your own philosophy so that you can share that throughout the team. 

Could you comment about different HR Tools that you would recommend for growing companies for streamlining recruitment, performance management, training & learning, and consolidating administration?

Streamlining Recruitment

Mikaela Kiner: 

Greenhouse.io is one of the most popular applicant tracking systems (ATS) across the startups we’ve worked with.  Bamboo HR is also a good option and is pretty affordable for startups.  In addition to the applicant tracking, onboarding, etc., it just really acts as an HR information system, so that’s a goal source of record for all your employees information.

Erika Berndt: I’ve used Jobvite at a couple companies, and I really like it because it enables both hiring and onboarding in one place.  It also integrates really well with LinkedIn and some other hiring websites. That way you can cross post and get your jobs out there. You can have paperless onboarding, obviously with the exception of I-9’s. It also integrates really well with Outlook and some other calendar systems so that you can set everything up so when you’re trying to schedule interviews, it’s really easy and user friendly. 

Performance Management

Erika Berndt: 

I implemented Lattice at my last company, and I implemented it because it gave us a high degree of transparency so that leaders could see down through the organization in terms of how they were tracking to their goals. They could see all of the different conversions related to performance. It also has a 360 degree feedback feature, is very flexible and customizable, and is reasonably priced.

Mikaela Kiner: 

One that people really like is Reflektive. Some of the benefits are just how it integrates even into your email. So let’s say I gave an employee various pieces of feedback throughout the about his or her great communication skills, but then I can go in and search on #communications and pull up all of that information when I’m ready to give that employee that feedback. Reflektive is also built around quarterly check-ins. We see far more startups leaning towards the quarterly check-ins than the annual review. 

Training and Learning 

Erika Berndt: 

At my last company we had people search for relevant courses on Coursera and Udemy and the company would pay for it. Many of the courses are affordable, and there’s both technical and non-technical content on there.

Mikaela Kiner: 

I agree.  There are a variety of learning management systems (LMS) out there, but they’re probably overkill for startups. Even a lot of larger companies haven’t implemented software like that. The ones that I know and have used tend to be a little bit clunky and are more necessary for big enterprise companies. 

Consolidating Administration

Mikaela Kiner: 

I think one good Human Resources Information System (HRIS) is Bamboo, which we mentioned earlier. Another one is Namely. Purely on the payroll side, the tip that I would have is you can use Gusto if your operations are relatively simple. 

As you get bigger and as you need payroll versus performance versus compensation versus feedback, you’re very likely going to be using multiple tools. I would think about what’s most important to you, what do you need to optimize for to choose the tool that’s best for that and in the future just recognize that you’re probably going to need more than one. 

Erika Berndt: 

Paylocity is another one I’ve heard of that is kind of an all in one system. When I was in the payroll world I actually worked for a company that did payroll, benefits, and administration. A lot of the small clients in particular were just using payroll systems through their bank. Whether it was Bank of America or Wells Fargo, I don’t know if Chase does it, but a lot of banks have add on payroll services. 

Mikaela Kiner:

That’s a great suggestion, and Quickbooks does as well. If you use Quickbooks you might be able to use its automated payroll system as well.