Hiring, employment agreements, workplace policies and performance reviews — HR built for businesses without an HR department.
Employment obligations in Ontario start at your first hire, not at your tenth. From the day someone joins, you are responsible for written terms, compliant pay and overtime, statutory leaves, workplace policies and — in most industries — WSIB coverage. None of that scales with headcount, which is why a business with four employees carries nearly the same compliance load as one with forty, and usually has nobody whose job it is to carry it.
What we see most often is not negligence. It is a founder who hired quickly, used a contract template found online, and has been improvising since. That works until the first difficult moment — a termination, a leave request, a complaint, an inspection — and then it does not, because the paperwork that would have settled it in an afternoon was never there.
Our HR support is fractional by design: the foundations set up properly once, then someone to call when a situation comes up. For most clients that is a handful of hours a month rather than a salaried HR manager, which is a cost most small employers cannot justify and do not need.
No — small teams are where the risk is highest, because obligations under the Employment Standards Act apply from your first employee and there is nobody in-house tracking them. Most of our HR clients have between one and fifteen staff.
Written employment terms, compliant pay and overtime handling, statutory leaves, a health and safety policy once you pass five employees, workplace violence and harassment policies, and WSIB coverage unless your industry is exempt. Several of these apply from day one, not at some later size threshold.
Either. Some clients want the foundations set up once — contracts, offer letters, a handbook — and then run it themselves. Others keep us on for hiring, terminations and the questions that come up in between.
Yes, and it is worth talking before you act rather than after. Termination handled badly is where small employers get into genuine difficulty, and notice, severance and record-keeping all have rules that are easy to miss.
Payroll processing sits with our bookkeeping service, and the two work together. We can register your CRA payroll account, set up the process and run it monthly.