The best use of an external HR professional is to help ownership or managers brainstorm to develop HR strategy, tactics, policies, and training. The external HR professional can be an honest third party that privately helps and advises owners and managers. It may be helpful to allow owners and managers to learn in private so they don’t get called out or humiliated in front of the rest of the employees.

When you hire or contract your first HR professional, the first things you need to get them to do is create or update your pay grid, create or update your HR policies, have one-on-one needs assessments with all managers, have one-on-one needs assessments with all employees, develop training plans for all managers and employees, conduct an employee engagement survey, and create a simple employee evaluation process.

Getting feedback from owners and managers means creating the right brainstorming environment, asking the right brainstorming questions, and getting owners and managers to be honest. Human Resources must become the facilitator for getting feedback from owners and managers. We all concentrate on getting employee feedback, but getting feedback from owners and managers is equally challenging.

Supervisors may need to learn their hard-skills training responsibilities in this busy corporate world. Supervisors must give employees basic, advanced, and continued hard skills training for all employee’s assigned tasks. Human Resources supports the supervisors in this training.

The HR department’s training responsibilities are to identify training needs and then research training options before creating, conducting, or outsourcing training courses for employees.

Owners and managers need HR support because they may not be experts in people, corporate culture, work environment, and the laws of the land. These typically are all skills that have nothing to do with the actual “work” of the organization.

If your employee has tested positive for COVID-19 or is suspected of being in close contact with a positive person, then you need to do the following. First, you need to understand and follow all local or national COVID-19 health regulations. Second, you need to support your confirmed sick employee. Third, you need to protect the rest of your healthy employees.

When an employee you supervise is also a friend it can be difficult to manage that close connection professionally. For a friend to understand your situation as a supervisor of them you must communicate regularly, discuss work roles, and avoid nepotism or bias.