AlphaDog HR

September starts tomorrow. Which means if open enrollment is still sitting on your someday list, this is the week it moves to the top of it. Most small businesses treat open enrollment as a November event. Send the packet, collect the forms, done. That timeline works right up until it does not: a rate increase you did not budget for, a notice deadline you blew past, or an employee who signs up for something they did not understand and comes back angry in February. Here is the actual timeline,...

Nobody writes it down. It never shows up in a hiring rubric or an email. But it gets said out loud in small business back rooms more often than most people would admit. "She just got married, so she'll probably be out on leave within a year." "She's got three kids at home. Can she really commit to this?" "We just don't want to be short-staffed again." We want to be clear about the spirit of this post. Most employers who think this way are not bad people, and they are usually not trying to...

This is one of the most common questions we get from business owners, usually phrased something like: "We're only at nine people, we don't really need HR yet, right?" The honest answer is that you have needed HR since you hired your first employee. What changes as you grow is not whether HR applies to you. It is how much of it applies, and how expensive it gets to be wrong. Here is the actual breakdown. At 1 Employee The moment you have one W2 employee, a long list of obligations kicks in....