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EP #1 | How to Handle HR in a Small Business Without a Team

grounded hr podcast grounded hr youtube channel Sep 11, 2025

 Listen to the episode here

Managing HR in small business can feel overwhelming — especially when you don’t have an internal HR person to guide you. Between compliance, contracts, and employee questions, it’s easy to feel stretched too thin. In this episode of The HR Link: People-First Conversations, Amy Christopherson explains how to approach HR in small business with confidence, clarity, and care.

Amy shares practical strategies for busy business owners who are juggling HR on top of everything else. She unpacks the difference between minimum compliance and best practice, the systems that make HR smoother, and why finding the right support matters. If you’ve ever wondered how to handle HR without a dedicated team, this episode offers reassurance and practical steps to get you started.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • Why most small businesses don’t have an internal HR team — and how to manage without one
  • The difference between compliance requirements and people-first best practices
  • How to set up simple systems that save time and reduce stress
  • Why reliable HR advice is essential (and how to find the right support)
  • The importance of balancing compliance with culture to build engaged teams

 

You don’t need to hire a full-time HR manager to get HR right in your business. With clear systems, trusted advice, and a people-first approach, you can lead with confidence and peace of mind. As a people-focused HR leader, Amy is here to help you transform HR from overwhelming into empowering.

 

Resources & Links

Explore The HR Link: ā https://www.groundedhr.com.au/the-hr-linkā 

Free HR resources for small business owners:

 

šŸ‘‰ Follow The HR Link on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and subscribe on YouTube, so you never miss an episode.

 

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to today's episode. Today I wanna talk to you about how do you handle HR in a small business when you don't have a dedicated internal resource. Now, I totally get it. If you're running a small business without an internal HR person, you are not alone.

[00:01:00] Actually the bulk of small businesses in Australia do not have an internal HR resource but it's still absolutely possible to get it right and lead well and you know, tick all the boxes.

When it comes to compliance, I know what it's like to run a small business. I run one of my own and you are always wearing all the hats. I have clients who are. Business managers. So they might manage it for a trades business, for example. And as that person, she gets thrown the HR portion of the business.

She has no idea how to do contracts, how to interpret awards and she's always juggling all the issues. So she's juggling accounts and inquiries and employee questions and you know, questions from the business owner themselves. And it can get really, really overwhelming. And I get it. We are all stretched in small business.

[00:02:00] And so it's my aim to make sure that when you are doing hr, when you are making decisions, when you are hiring a new person, that you know where to go. Who to talk to and how to get the support you need. I don't want you to feel overwhelmed. I don't want you to feel stretched. I want you to feel calm and confident about your decisions and the people that you're bringing into your team.

You also have the risk there, right? Of the legal compliance. Now, I, so many businesses that I've spoken to have had run-ins with fair work and. It's my aim to provide great HR advice to as many Australian businesses as possible, especially in the small business field. You guys hold my heart.

[00:03:00] I have so many friends who run small businesses, and it's so important to me that you know how to do this stuff well and where to go to get the information.

There's two things I wanna distinguish here. There's the compliance piece, so this is like the minimum requirements. This is the things you're legally bound to comply with, but then there's this portion called best practice. Best practice is how you actually build a really culturally and values aligned team who are really engaged in your business and who want to be at work every day, who want to wake up on a Monday morning and come to work with enthusiasm and excitement for what the impact that they're making these two businesses, the one who's just doing the minimum compliance and the one who is following best practice. They feel very, very different.

[00:04:00] And I encourage you to be that best practice business compliance is important, and I guess that's probably the corporate view of what HR is, and I wanna step so far away from that. We need to lead with heart. We need to be really encouraging. We need to engage our employees so that they hang around with us for, for a long period, and that they're invested in the mission of, of what your business is.

So I encourage you to, you know, head in that direction of the best practice rather than just ticking the boxes and being, and doing the bare minimum. So I wanna give you a couple of key tips on how to start this really well. The first part is that compliance piece. So that it has to be, it has to be one of the important parts of what you do.

[00:05:00] You need to understand where you fit under fair work. You need to understand what a award applies to your employees. And the key thing here is. All your employees may not be under the same award. It really does depend on the industry and the job that that person does. So you need to know your basic key compliance obligations.

My second tip here is to put systems in place early. Now, systems don't necessarily mean policies and procedures, although they are part of the system, but a system is actually there to take the headaches away from you. The system is there. To support you so that you don't have to answer the same questions a million times.

Your employees know where to get the right information that their employee onboarding, offboarding signing contracts is a really simple and smooth process. This might come with a [00:06:00] piece of technology. This might come with just a really well thought out checklist, uh, and, and storage system that makes sure that your business knows where all your paperwork is at all times.

But I encourage you to put a system in place. Don't let it be willy-nilly and things end up. Uh, God knows where, uh, stored in various different locations because your employees are actually entitled to request where their information is. And if you can't find a copy of their documentation or their, and you're not meeting the confidentiality and privacy rules that are legislated in Australia, you can actually be in, in a lot of trouble.
So. I encourage you to really think about what is gonna work for your business and what system you want to put in place to make your own life easier. The third part is have a really good source of advice.

[00:07:00] Now it's my aim to make sure that small businesses can get affordable access to HR advice from day dot of when you decide to either hire a contractor team or an employee team.

This should be part of what is given to us from the government or provided to us when we start a small business, but it's not. So I wanna encourage you to find who that person is. Find your local HR consultant. Find someone like myself who can provide advice remotely and find the person who's gonna work with you.
Now, I know I'm not the HR person for everybody. You've gotta find the right person with the right personality and the right style for your business. So I encourage you to find that person, find that source of advice so that they are pointing you in the right direction and that they are being helpful to you.

[00:08:00] Now this person I, I do wanna make one distinguishing difference here. HR specialists are not lawyers and lawyers are not HR specialists. We sit in very different lanes. Yes, there are overlapping parts, but sometimes I have found in my experience that the advice that a lawyer provides may not be the correct interpretation of the fair work, uh, legislation and how it works in a payroll sense.

So I do encourage you to, find the right person for you in the right profession for your business. So, in recap, you don't need a full-time HR manager to feel confident in your business. You need to. Search that person.

[00:09:00] You need to find that person and you need to be feeling confident with the support that you've got and the systems that you have put in place within the business.

Here at Grounded HR, we want to be the supportive partner for small teams. We have created The HR Link so that it is really supportive, affordable, accessible for busy, small business owners. So if you are looking for support that is tailored, that is affordable, that is accessible and you wanna, you know, lead with heart and have a really engaged team, then I really encourage you to check out the HR link.

I hope the tips I've shared with you today have resonated and that you have enjoyed this episode. We'll catch you next time.

 

About The HR Link: People-First Conversations

The HR Link: People-First Conversations is the podcast for Australian business owners who want to manage their teams with clarity, care, and confidence. Hosted by Amy Christopherson, founder of Grounded HR, each episode brings you short, practical conversations that simplify HR and centre the humans inside your business.

Whether you’re hiring your first employee, navigating team challenges, or just want to make sure you’re “doing it right,” this podcast will give you the tools and reassurance you need.

New episodes are released fortnightly on Tuesdays at 7am. Subscribe now so you don’t miss an episode.

 

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Disclaimer

The HR Link: People-First Conversations is here to share people-first insights and education, not legal advice. Every business is unique, so we encourage you to seek tailored guidance for your own circumstances.

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