Making the decision when to hire an employee or additional employees can be difficult. There are many questions you need to answer before hiring someone. Can you afford an employee? It can be challenging to decide the skills you need to give you the biggest return on your investment. You also need to determine if you need a full-time or part-time employee. Sometimes it is as simple as hiring an assistant or virtual assistant to help with administrative duties. Other skilled employees or contractors can help with accounting, social media, website development, copywriting, marketing, social media, etc. The attached Operations Jobs Log Form can help you make the choices of who and when to hire.
How do you know what type of employee to add?
The easiest way to determine the type of help you need is to record the activities necessary to run your business. Start by recording regular business operations tasks that keep you from money making activities. These can be items like writing a blog, sending out communications, bookkeeping, etc. Usually, they are the tasks you do not like, you procrastinate on or are more administrative. Write a brief description of each task and record how much time it takes you to complete it in the log. Keep the log going for 2-3 weeks. Then review the description of the tasks and lump them together into categories like administrative, accounting, marketing. Based on the categories on the log, you can decide if it would save you more time to hire an employee to do bookkeeping, marketing, website development or another function. This will help you determine the skills you need the most.
Do I hire an employee full-time or part-time?
Using the log, add up the time it takes you to complete each category of tasks. This will tell you how many hours of work you have per category. For example, if administrative activities take 20 hours a week, you should hire a part-time assistant. Discovering you spend 15 hours on bookkeeping and 10 hours on other administrative tasks, will help you in finding the right person. In this example, I would recommend you hire an assistant with bookkeeping skills. The timekeeping part of the log is also valuable in showing you how your time is spent.
If you have any questions about using the log, please feel free to contact me at 972-365-0255.
(The first version of this article was written in June 2017)
Sara Genrich is an Organization and Productivity Consultant, an Evernote Certified Consultant, and the creator of the Organizing @ Work for Success Workshop series.