Trakstar Hire Blog / Human Resources

Turnover is costly, turnover is expensive. We hear it over and over. We look for solutions: hire smarter, not faster. Onboard new hires to ensure they stay with the company. Some of these strategies work, others do not. To reduce employee turnover, you need executive-level buy-in to mitigate the human losses that translate into losses in production,…

Employee onboarding is one of the hottest topics in the HR community, and for good reason. Hiring staff is costly and time consuming. There’s nothing more satisfying to an HR pro than filling that spot and creating a brand spanking new employee file. There’s nothing more frustrating than having to do it all over again,…

Bureaucracy. It’s a one-word response to many workplace frustrations. The top-down, hierarchical organization dates back to the Industrial Revolution. It was a method of organizing labor to more efficiently execute repeated tasks with highly predictable outcomes. While the workplace has changed significantly from the assembly line era to the information era, bureaucracy has proved resilient. But is…

No one should ever be surprised to be fired. Unless your company has fallen victim to a pirate-worthy hostile takeover, or a 60 Minutes exposé that brings the villagers with torches and pitchforks, getting fired should never come out of the blue for any employee. Every employee who is terminated should know it’s coming and…

You run a growing company. New customers come through the door every day. Revenue is rising. To meet the demand, you need more people. When you think about adding people, you think about the challenges of a bigger workforce. You start thinking about building an HR department. Two things come to mind: The words “Human…

Let’s break the wall of silence and talk about salaries. How much employees are paid is vitally important to a company’s bottom line. Pay employees too much, the company might not be profitable enough to stay financially viable. Pay employees too little, the company may have a hard time retaining employees. Determining the right level…

Over the last decade the gig economy has transformed the way we work and do business in America. Access to remote work has changed the definition of work and workplace dramatically. More and more people are working from home or off-site, and more and more people are working as consultants or contractors. A recent study…

The benefits of paid family leave are numerous, as shown by a wide range of studies. Yet the United States lags behind every other developed country when it comes to providing paid family leave. Only about 13 percent of the workforce has access to it; the rest must resort to unpaid leave, putting them in a vicious cycle…

HR trends come and go. Some are fleeting and some are keepers. We’ve stopped calling everything a “paradigm” and quit trying to create “synergy” (thankfully), but there are a lot of trends that come down the pike worth keeping. As the year progresses, here are some of the top HR trends in 2016 for small businesses to…

So you’ve decided it’s time to build a human resources department. What do you do first? Strategize. Be clear about the HR department responsibilities from the get-go. Human resources can be a powerful tool for furthering the culture of your business, which is invaluable for a growing small company or startup. Gather all of your…