3 Most Common HR Questions: ANSWERED with Ben Pickard

Hello, my friends on today’s episode, I’m talking with Ben Pickard and we are talking about our three most commonly asked HR questions and giving you our answers and listen, I know HR is not the sexiest topic for all of you, but it’s one of those parts of your business that if you don’t get it right, you can get in some real trouble legally.

So I think it’s an important episode for all of you, especially those of you who maybe don’t love the HR function of owning a business, keep on listening and take some notes. Let’s dive in.

Welcome to the business for unicorns podcast, where we help gym owners unleash the full potential of their business. I’m your host, Michael Keeler. Join me each week for actionable advice, expert insights, and the inside scoop on what it really takes to level up your gym, get ready to unlock your potential and become a real unicorn in the fitness industry.

Let’s begin.

Hello, fitness, business nerds. What’s up. Welcome to another episode of the business unicorns podcast. Before we jump into today’s episode, I got a question for you. Listeners. Do you want to spend the weekend learning with like minded gym owners and the business unicorns team, including me and Mark and Ben and Pete?

You can between now and Monday, December 16th, we’re offering our super early bird pricing of 199 per ticket, which For our 2025 unicorn society retreats. So you can join us in Toronto in March for our marketing and sales focus, or in Denver in September for our people and systems focus. For more details about those retreats, send us a DM on Instagram link is below in our show notes.

We’d love to see you there. I also want to point out that I pronounced Toronto correctly and didn’t pronounce the T. So Ben won’t be mad at me, which brings me to today’s episode. Welcome to the podcast, Mr. Pickard. How are you? Good. How are you? Did I make Canadians happy by not saying Toronto? I hope so.

Yeah. It’s nobody in Canada. Dear listeners says Toronto. I know it’s, it’s Toronto. I know it’s so strange, but I’m doing it. I’m honoring your culture. Let’s dive into today’s topic, which is maybe not the sexiest topic ever. Cause we’re talking about HR stuff, but I think it’s a really important one is because so many of our listeners and Jimenos out there didn’t get into the gym business cause you want to be the director of HR.

For your business. And so often as business coaches, we get asked a lot of these HR kind of questions because no one ever teaches us this stuff and sometimes it’s hard to find good information out there. So what we wanted to do today is go over just three. There are many more, but three of our most common HR questions.

So that, and I can give you all some straight answers. How’s that sound, Ben? That’s perfect. Yeah. And just plus one, you said of, we got into this cause we like helping people or fitness or we didn’t like her boss. I thought we could do a better, whatever. And if nothing else, you want to keep yourself out of legal trouble.

So making sure you nail this stuff is absolutely critical to the longterm success of your job. Yeah, 100%. And I’ll start off with a little disclaimer, and I’m sure I’ll put this in the show notes as well, that we’re not lawyers. We’re not legal professionals. Hell, we’re not even like certified HR professionals.

So, uh, this is not legal advice. We’re not giving you legal advice, but we’ve been doing this for a while. And what we’re going to do is share our experience of what we’ve done and what we’ve seen hundreds of other gym owners do when it comes to answering these three most common questions. So the first question we get is usually about right up front when it comes to hiring a new employee, we often get the question about, do I need to.

What do I need to get them to sign when they first joined? Do I need to have them sign a contract, a compensation agreement? If someone’s a contractor versus part time versus full time, what I need them to sign as a condition of their employment when they first join. And I have thoughts on this with Ben.

Do you want to take it away? What has your experience been in terms of what you think people need to get their employees assigned when they first joined the team? Yeah, they absolutely need to sign stuff. Yeah. I’m pretty confident I’m wrong about that, despite my lack of a law degree. I think the first piece to say is you should check with what you need to get people to sign as an employee in your country, your state or government jurisdiction, because everything’s going to be a little bit different.

But I think people should generally, in broad strokes, sign some sort of employment agreement that outlines what are you actually hiring them for. For what does compensation look like? Cause that’s a topic of affriction. If you don’t get that out of the way, like what are the expectations of the job? You don’t have to have it perfectly nailed.

And you can like, ours actually say like responsibilities will change over time. But here’s the general list. It’s not the minutes that they’re spending each thing, but it’s like, you’re doing coaching and programming and some cleaning and attending meetings, like the broad stuff. We also need to have people sign like tax forms and things so that they can get paid if you do direct deposit.

And there’s things to, at least in Canada, you have to set up with the government that shows that. Michael Keeler is an employee of lean, strong fitness. And that’s like a thing that is happening now for tax purposes. I will say this is something that at least in my experience is worth hiring a HR professional for.

You could go to a lawyer for this. My gym, we actually went to an HR company and there was some things that they told us, the example in Canada, Canadian listeners, here’s a tidbit for you, you have to include. The employment standards acts poster as the final page or a page. I’m not sure in their employment agreement.

I didn’t know that. So for the first little bit, I had employees. I didn’t give them that thing. Yup. I’m legally required to give them. So paying a thousand dollars or so to an HR professional to have a templated agreement that I can just like, Plot people’s names into was absolutely worth the money. Yeah, 100%.

I think that you’re on the right track. I think the two buckets I would put this in is there are things you get them to sign to clarify what their job is and what their compensation is just clarity of your relationship and what their role is. And there are things you get them to sign for your government.

And the U. S., we typically have federal, state, and local requirements in some cases, especially if you’re in a big city like New York, there are three levels of federal requirements. And in the U. S., I’ll just speak to our U. S. folks for a second because I know those well. Those are things like your I 9, which is basically an employee eligibility form.

The W 4, basically, is for people who are going to withhold income tax through the employee, like full time employee and part time employees. There’s state specific stuff about what taxes you’re withholding from them. And so, I think Those are the two buckets of things. And as Ben said, we’re not gonna be able to speak to all of your needs out there, but most I can speak to the U S and I think most countries, they have online free resources for these things.

Hopefully we’re paying our taxes. So our government can teach us how to obey the law in some ways. So go Google these things, but don’t go to the miscellaneous website. Go to your actual National, federal, state, local websites and see what resources and tools they have for small businesses. They will tell you, often they’ll give you a checklist for things they want you to do with brand new employees.

And you’ll find fun things like Ben found out, which is a crap. I need to have this poster be part of my onboarding packet. I had no idea. And so I think you go do your due diligence, but I think when it comes to contracts, that’s part I want to zoom in on the first bucket of. Clarifying their role and responsibility.

There’s, I will say there’s two thoughts about this. I think Pete’s been on this podcast before and actually talks about having term limit contracts with his employees. And he really likes the idea that everyone’s committing to. I think it’s two years. If when you’re on the podcast next Pete, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think his employees are committed to about two years and then he, they have to renegotiate and talk about whether or not they’re going to stay.

And he likes that cycle of having kind of term limit actual contracts for most of you. Most of the time, you’re probably not going to do anything like that with term limits or a fancy long contract. You’re going to need like a page or two document that just says, what’s your job? When are you starting?

How do you get paid? What are the perks and benefits do you get? And you both sign it. The other thing that’s most common on there is some signature that they’ve also received a handbook, which actually is going to go to our question number two here in a second. And so that’s just a way to think about that first bucket of the way you clarify their role, responsibility and compensation.

The most simple terms can be like a one or two page document that you both sign. If you want to make it more complicated, you can have a longer, more legalese driven document that maybe has term limits and things like that. And then the other bucket of things is all the stuff your government wants you to do when you hire a new employee.

Anything else we’re missing there, Ben? No, I thought it was pretty comprehensive. I just want to say that feels like a lot. And if this is something you don’t have right now, it is going to feel like a lot getting it all going. But once you have it in place, these are things that like you just check off when you bring somebody on board, because your agreement is a.

Your agreement is a templated your forms that Michael mentioned, or once you can like use again or get the updated one from the government. So it’s really just like, here’s the six things we need them to do when they join. And it’s straightforward. Once you get rolling, that’s it. Yeah. I think there’s a very kind of not fun and unsexy to make for the first time, but once you have these things, you never have to really make them again, there’s become your standard templates and your standard process, but I think not getting it right.

Actually is pretty dangerous, right? I think not getting right can get you in some real hot water. So I’d say spend a little time if you haven’t on this and just get these systems tight to make sure that you’re really abiding by, you know, rules. I think the downside to not hiring someone well is pretty much opening yourself up to some litigation.

So if you really want to, you really want to dial it in. Do find, I think Ben, this was a great recommendation. Do you find that local lawyer, HR professional who can just overlook, look over your stuff. Even if you pay them for an hour or two of their time, just to look over and give you some feedback, that could be a really good use of your funds if you got them.

Yeah. All right. Let’s move on to question number two. Question number two we get is really about the, when people are onboarding new employees, they ask a little bit about whether or not they need, I mentioned this a second ago, an employee handbook. We’re like, I know we recommended it business unicorns, but To all of our unicorn signing members, but people often ask us, is this really necessary?

I’m a small team. I got like two employees. Do I really need an employee handbook? What would you say to them, Ben? Yes. Or do you at least need like a version of an employee handbook and correct me if I’m wrong. Cause you’re more in the HR department than I am with your past experiences. Yeah. You have a contract that talks about the, like, what are we legally agreeing to do together?

The handbook is more about like, how do we do those things together? Yeah. It’s got cultural standards. It’s got customer service expectations. It might have like response times for Standards for your staff so that nothing gets missed. It has dress code. It has hygiene. It has, it has all the hows. So even if you don’t want to make like a beautifully formatted PDF and print it out and put it in a binder and keep it up to date, which like I completely understand.

You still need to make sure you cover these are the standards that we’re agreeing and how we’re choosing to operate together and the values that we’re going to embody to believe and continue to agree that this is a good fit. Yeah, I think that’s it, Ben. I think you really nailed the description I would give as well, which is that your offer letter says, okay, this is what my job is and how I get paid.

Now, if you put yourself in a new employee shoes, what are all the questions they’re going to have next? Those are the questions you want to answer in the employee handbook. Okay, how do I get paid? When do I get paid? When does direct deposit work? Do I get days off? How does that work? How many do I get? Do I get reimbursed for anything that I’m spending?

What about continuing education? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Any questions you think or knew you might have as a new employee, you really want to try to address in this handbook. In part, so you don’t have to spend your time repeating yourself over and over again explaining these things. Just putting them all in one place.

I also say that employee handbook is a legal document, right? It, it actually should include some things like, like some of you might need a non compete non solicitation agreement in your employee handbook. Some of you might need to have a policy for how people interact on social media. Some of you might want an NDA.

If you have a sense of information, you want employees to keep confidential United States. There are some things that we are required to have, like non discrimination policies, sexual harassment policies, right? So again, I’m listing off a lot of things and I know this could sound daunting, but truly, if you just Google what should be in an employee handbook in the United States, this is the list of stuff that’s going to come out, right?

This is the list of stuff. And so the most easy way of thinking about. What is an employee handbook is that it answers all of the most basic questions a brand new employee has about how you do things around here and how their employment works. The second bucket of things in the, in there is stuff. Again, this goes back to this and we’re answering the same way is the legal stuff you have to have in there to make sure that you’re abiding the laws of wherever you live.

Yeah. Anything you would add to that, Ben? Just my experience is that the handbook and the agreement can have a little bit of blurred lines like using the examples that you had, and the reason I share this isn’t to make it more complicated to say that, like, at mine, we have our non solicitation in our employment agreement, not in our handbook, stuff that an HR professional will be able to help you get clear on, like, How exactly does that all fit?

But the real point is like you saying what you’re doing and the handbook is saying like how that all happens. Yeah, 100%. And these documents can be fluid. In many cases, you want your employees to sign every year and re acknowledge that they’ve gotten the new version of the handbook. And what it does is it really protects you to make sure that employees know this is how my employment works.

In some cases, it also has things in there, which we’re going to get to in our next question. I keep teasing things. About our next question. I don’t even mean to, it’s just happening, but your employee handbook might also talk about like, what is your disciplinary process? How will I know if I’m about to be fired?

Right. That’s really useful to get on the same page about right. And so the handbook protects you and the employee to make sure you’re really on the same page, literally about how employment functions and it can change over time. So don’t be afraid to change your handbook. If things are updated or outdated or not working for you, which brings me to our third question, which I was just teasing, but so you don’t, you.

You might already be guessing what it is, but the third most common question we get is really about the end of employment. It’s like, how do you fire someone? Which sucks. Let me just start this conversation by saying it’s no one’s favorite part of the job. I’ve sadly been part of terminating many people’s employments over the years, not just at Markfish Refinance, but my past jobs, and it sucks every time.

There’s no one’s having fun. If you have to fire an employee, it’s not a good time. And it’s also, I think one of the number one, I think it’s top three reasons why, why businesses get sued is for wrongful termination, at least in the U S I don’t know stats elsewhere. It might’ve be the number one. I’m not sure I have to look it up, but I think it’s because people handle firing so poorly.

That it makes that employee just your company’s worst enemy. And so I think the reason this stuff matters so much is because no one wants to spend any time in court and no one wants a past employee out there in the world, shit talking your gym or you personally. Right. It’s not good vibes for anybody.

Right. And not good for your reputation, not good for your mental health. So if you can avoid it by having real clarity about how people get fired is so worth your time, my friend. So Ben, you want to just talk through what are some big principles here for. The first one that comes to mind is something you told me, I don’t know, at some point.

Which was, hard conversations don’t get easier, you just get better at them. So I think there’s something to be said for acknowledging, yeah, it’s gonna be, feel awkward, and you’re not looking forward to it, and yeah, it’s gonna suck for them, especially. Sometimes you almost wish that it was clear cut, that they like stole money from your gym, and you’d be like, alright.

This is easy. So if everyone just were little thieves, it would be so easy to fire people. It’s harder when it’s someone you’ve worked with for any period of time and maybe have a relationship outside the gym with and they got relationship with other staff or team members and clients. So it’s heavy.

Things are heavy and it’s just leveling with yourself. That’s that’s okay. Yeah. The second piece of that is making sure that you’re crystal clear. So if you’re not good with hard conversations, which is completely understandable, we all were terrible at one point. Maybe so are. Like, this is a perfect thing to like document and role play, like, even if it’s just in front of the mirror, what do you want to say?

And at least in my experience, sometimes a hard conversation, the waters get muddy because I’m trying not to hurt their feelings. And the nicest thing I could have done is actually been really crystal clear and direct and like, Hey, Michael, this isn’t working out anymore. Let’s talk about what the end dates can all look like.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s a scary thing to say. Yeah. I think that’s such a, such great tips because I think oftentimes we keep employees too long just because we’re afraid of this conversation. And I think the more we can prepare ourselves for it, get ready for it, practice it, make notes. It makes these difficult conversations a little bit easier.

Never fun. Maybe. Maybe not. But a little bit easier, I’ll say this is probably a longer topic than I think maybe even we’ll have time for in this podcast, maybe at some point we’ll do just a more formal one about an actual SOP for terminating someone. But I’ll just say this for now, which is. The number one, most important thing about terminating an employee is that it shouldn’t be a surprise to them.

Right. Let me just say that again, because it’s the most important part. No matter what your process looks like, you should not get to this final conversation where someone’s being fired and it’s a complete and utter surprise to them that they were even, this was even a possibility. And the reason that matters so much is because the research shows that when people are surprised by their termination, they’re more likely to sue.

Right. They’re more likely to retaliate in some way, but if you’ve had, if you’ve done a good job of managing them over time and giving them continuous performance feedback and having those difficult conversations and giving them some coaching and correction and helping them improve, maybe finally even putting them on a performance improvement plan.

If they’re not improving, these are all signs to someone. That these are all ways that you escalate the conversation. So when you finally might have to let them go, they’re like, yeah, I saw this was coming. I know I’ve been trying to get better. It hasn’t worked out or I keep fucking up. That’s the best kind of termination conversation where they’re not going to be happy.

I’m not suggesting that everyone’s smiling in this conversation, but it’s not a surprise to them. They don’t feel like they’ve been sucker punched, right? Just out of nowhere, just punch the jaw in the dark, right? That’s the last thing we want. So that means. So much of what makes a good firing is all the weeks and months of coaching and professional development work you do with them, performance improvement work you do with them before the firing to try to avoid the firing.

Of course, Ben mentioned this, that in some cases, you don’t get a chance to do all that stuff because something they do just warrants an immediate termination. Someone like who’s had some physical violence or stealing, or I don’t know where the line in the sand is for all of you, but hopefully those two things count, right?

Someone’s physically violent with someone in the gym. They’re probably gone. They steal something. They’re probably gone. But sadly, the most common reason people get fired from their jobs is the most boring reason, which is they’re just always late. So it’s usually sticky. It’s like, who wants to fire someone for being late, but I can tell you, I’ve been part of the vast majority of people I’ve had to fire or because of lateness, including folks at Mark Fisher fitness.

We’ve had to let go for no other reason. They were great employees. They just couldn’t show up on time, which just goes to show that we can do our best to manage that stuff and manage that stuff and try and get them to improve. But at some point, we just have to let them go for something really boring and basic, like you can’t be show up at work on time, which is a bummer.

Yeah. One of my, one of my favorite podcasts from BFU is I think it’s, I mentioned this to you before, it’s either number six or number eight with Dan Emery, music school. And he talks about how he let somebody go for chronic punctuality issues. So if you’re dealing with something like that, go check out that podcast.

Cause it’s an absolute gem of what I just think it’s a masterclass on how to handle it. Yeah. But this is also a really good example of why documenting stuff is so important that if you’ve been working with somebody with, it’s not just having a conversation, like, Hey, don’t be late again. Yeah. And then, Hey, don’t be late again.

And then the third time they’re fired, that’s going to feel like a surprise, but Hey, Michael, I noticed you weren’t on time today. Can we talk about it? Great. Just a friendly reminder that this does not be perfect, but like we do two verbal warnings and then it’s a written warning. So if this happens again in the next six months is your second verbal warning.

Like you’re reminding them that things are escalating. Always. I think the most, or at least in my experience, the place where most gym owners go wrong is that the person is doing stuff that’s driving them absolutely nuts, but they haven’t given them that specific feedback about it. So they’re like a 10 ready to let them go or enraged about it.

And the employee is like, yeah, my boss mentioned that to me once, but I think we’re cool now. Yeah. That’s where people are going to have a surprise. So you need to, they need to be on the same page you are in terms of knowing the severity of their, you Things they’re doing, or at least the severity of the pattern of behavior that could lead determination, right?

That shit down. Even if their file is a Google doc that they don’t have edit access to. That’s better than nothing. Yeah. I think that’s really well said. Yeah. I’ll take this in the interest of time. I know we’ve got to wrap things up. When it comes to the actual day of or moment of firing, I think just a few very quick best practices all throughout.

And Ben, you’re welcome to add a few is one, it’s always best to do it at the end of someone’s week or at the end of their shift. So you can just fire them on that day on the spot. I’m not a big fan of, and nor should all of you be a fan of letting someone now know now they’re fired in a week. Or I’m going to, I’m going to, you’re, you’re done after the end of this month, right?

Like that doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for a lot of reasons that I think should be obvious, but I’ll leave it there. If you’re going to fire someone, let it be right now. The other thing is making sure that you’re prepared for whether or not they’re going to have a final paycheck. You need some severance in some cases, you need to turn off passwords and email access and things like that.

You need to return some keys, whether or not you’re going to make a statement to your clients about where they’re going, maybe you’ll make a joint statement. These are all things you want to think about before the conversation. So you’re ready at the point moment of the conversation to do your thing and let them go and be ready for the next steps.

And then obviously the moment of the conversation, Bed said this earlier, practice what you’re going to say. Transcribed Be prepared in advance for how you’re going to navigate the conversation. Oftentimes there’s a letter of termination that goes with this, which again, you should have a template for and, and that is a letter that details all the things you say in the conversation.

So the reason for termination is very clear. Yeah. I’ll also say for all of you out there that are Unicorn Society members, we have a firing checklist with templates for all of this. And for those of you who are not Unicorn Society members, if you want access to all this, come join us in Unicorn Society and we have all this done for you already.

So quick little Unicorn Society shout out, but anything you would add to those logistics, Ben? No, I liked the order that he gave those in. One thing that I just want to add, and it sounds very like controlly, but I do think it’s important. I don’t mean it as big brother as it sounds. Is. Your staff and your clients and other people are going to come up with all sorts of crazy ass stories about what happened.

Even if the person isn’t like, talking shit, they’re ever Humans are really good at being meaning making machines, adding story to everything. So one of the most valuable things that I’ve learned is you want to control the narrative on this. And that doesn’t mean you’re going to throw them under the bus.

If anything, I actually advocate for taking the high road and regardless of the reason they’re leaving, celebrate their success. And you’re excited about whatever their next steps are. Even if you’re mostly just excited, they’re not going to steal from you anymore, but you want to let people know pretty quickly and do it in a high road kind of way.

So it’s not like fire them and then tell your staff two weeks later, it’s you might want to send out a message. Like that message is written and ready to go. So you can hit send on it five minutes after the conversation, the email to clients is. written and ready to go. And if all goes well, it can be a joint statement, but make sure that you’re dictating the story that’s in everybody’s mind.

And for the small percentage of team and clients that are going to have further questions or a problem with it, you can always address those in one on one conversations. It’s unlikely 50 percent of your clients are going to ask you questions if you get the statement out in advance. If you doddle it, you’re going to have to deal with a lot of questions and it’s going to be daunting and stressful.

Yeah, said my friend. I think when we can control the narrative here and push that narrative in a positive direction, I think that’s really valuable. And even though there’s been plenty of people, I’ll just speak about MFF for a second, people who have left under really unfortunate circumstances, who had fired for really unfortunate reasons, almost a hundred percent of the time, the email that goes out, Cause it’s not no one’s business.

It’s really frankly, no one’s business, including other employees, often why the person got fired. So the, the story we choose to tell to everyone else is we want to celebrate all the time that Ben has spent here at Business for Unicorns. You’re not getting fired, Ben, at Business for Unicorns. All the years and great work he’s done.

He’s going to be moving on to something brand new and we’re here to cheer him on and celebrate and hope good things are in his future, right? Because it’s really no one’s business. What the conversation that happened behind closed doors, in some cases, you may, you might find it appropriate to loop your team in the team was involved or impacted by their poor behavior in some way, they might, you might pull back the curtain a little bit for your team, but certainly for clients and your community at large.

I think the best, the most you can do to take the high road and tell the most positive version of the story. I think the better. I think the better read. Yeah. Awesome. Let’s leave it there. This actually ended up being a long podcast for a topic we thought was maybe not that sexy. I know I have a lot to say about this stuff, so I’m the one that probably made it long, but it’s good.

Yeah. So dear listeners, we hope that this gives you a little insight into three of our most common HR challenges and questions, and hopefully it was a little useful to you. Also quick reminder that if you want to join us for our retreats, again, we’re going to be in Toronto in March of 2025, talking about marketing and sales for two whole days in Denver and September, talking about people and systems for two whole days.

So go click the link below in the show notes, which will take you over to Instagram and then DM us. DM us and we’ll send you all the information about our early bird pricing, but you gotta do it before Monday, December 16th. So go do it right now. Thanks, Ben. See you on the next one. Thank you.