Hiring Employees: Risk Versus Opportunity

Investing in an employee: the risk versus the opportunity

As a self employed person who works alone, with a business resting almost entirely on you, you have probably at some stage wrestled with the question: should I hire employees for my business, or give it up and keep working independently?

The main concern is the risks involved in hiring: the employee leaving after you invested in their training, becoming a potential competitor in the future, or the financial burden they represent.
Hiring has many implications, but you cannot ignore the positive effects employees have on a business's growth, management and prosperity.
If you are wrestling with whether to hire an employee, you should know what it involves, what to watch out for, how to deal with employees, and how to think correctly about cost versus benefit.

Drawing on our experience inorganizational consulting, we have gathered the main considerations in hiring employees, so you know the potential and also understand the dangers.

The opportunity: The employee can take load off the office owner. An employee who knows the procedures and the customers and knows the work can contribute to running the business and help the owners focus on other areas while he or she takes over some of the roles they handled until now.

The risk: The employee's deep familiarity with the office and the transfer of knowledge to them exposes a sensitive side: the employee will know the work and may later spread their wings, open an independent office and become a potential competitor, or customers may like them more, or they may be better at the work than the office owners.
What to do: If you take on an employee, you surely want them to know the work well so that they are a good employee. There is always a chance the employee will aspire to independence, but for now they serve as an employee and you cannot avoid fully training them or giving them partial information only out of this fear. You can cover the risk with a legal agreement that forbids them from taking customers from the company or revealing sensitive, classified information.

The opportunity: The employee will choose to stay in the company for a long time.
The risk: The employee goes through the handover and we invest many resources in their training, such as professional courses, seminars and workshops, and then, within a short time, they decide not to stay in the company, all our effort goes to waste and we have to invest again in a new employee.
What to do: It is very important to shorten the handover period as much as possible and to check whether the job meets the employee's expectations and whether they meet ours. It is recommended to sign an agreement stating that the training obligates them to work for a defined period of time.

The opportunity: The employee will increase income.
The risk: The employee does not work as we thought, does not free up extra time for us to win customers, and their work only costs us money, and we see no return on our investment.
What to do: It is very important to work with aligned expectations and a defined work schedule, in order to test whether the employee meets the defined goals and whether we manage to maximize their work and profit from it. Pay attention to the cost versus benefit element. If the aim of taking an employee was to earn more, check that this is indeed happening within a realistic time, and check whether the problem is that the employee does not work as they should, fast or efficiently enough, or whether the problem is yours: you are not using the time freed up for marketing the business, winning customers or developing additional profit channels.

The opportunity: The employee will manage themselves and be independent in the field.
The risk: The employee is dependent, consults us often, cannot carry out tasks alone, waits for the next task and is a burden on the company owners instead of being a help to them.
What to do: Try to make the employee's work more efficient through aligned expectations, goal setting and checking the employee's working time, or replace them with an employee who is good at self management and takes more initiative than the previous one.