People and HR

Hiring is where a business stops being one person and starts being an organisation, and it is also where the most expensive, avoidable mistakes happen: a bad hire kept too long, a contract never written, a termination handled informally that becomes a legal claim. None of the nine areas below need a full HR department to get right. They need to be done deliberately, once, rather than improvised each time.

Recruitment

Most small businesses hire reactively, only once the workload is already unmanageable, which produces rushed decisions. A short, written job description, even five lines (what the role does, what “good” looks like, what it pays) filters out mismatched applicants before an interview wastes anyone’s time. Referrals from people you already trust consistently outperform open posting for small teams, ask your network before advertising publicly.

Interviews

An interview without a plan mostly measures who interviews well, not who does the job well. Prepare three or four questions tied directly to the actual work (a real scenario from the role, not a generic “tell me about yourself”), and ask every candidate the same core questions so you can compare answers fairly rather than by gut feeling alone.

Contracts

Kenyan law requires the terms of employment to be documented, and a probationary contract specifically must say in writing that it is probationary. Skipping this is one of the most common and most easily fixed compliance gaps in small businesses. A contract template checked once by a professional and reused for every hire costs far less than one dispute over undocumented terms.

Performance management

Most small businesses have no performance process at all until a problem is already serious enough to consider firing someone, at which point there is no documented history to support the decision. A simple habit, a short written note after any significant feedback conversation, even informal, protects both the employee (clear expectations) and the business (a record, if it comes to that).

Training

Training does not need to be formal to be effective. The highest-return version for a small team is usually documenting how your best-performing person actually does the job, then using that as the onboarding material for the next hire, rather than re-explaining it from memory each time someone new joins.

Labour law

The legal minimums that catch small employers most often: probation cannot exceed twelve months total (an initial period up to six months, extendable once by a further six months with the employee’s consent), termination during probation requires at least seven days’ notice or pay in lieu, and termination generally, probation or not, must be procedurally fair and for a legitimate reason. “We just let them go” without documented reasons and process is where most wrongful termination claims start.

Remote work

Kenyan labour law does not yet have detailed remote-work-specific rules the way some jurisdictions do, which means the general employment obligations (a written contract, statutory deductions, fair treatment) still apply in full to remote and hybrid staff. Don’t treat “they work from home” as a reason to skip the same documentation you would use for anyone in the office.

Freelancers

The line between an employee and an independent contractor matters legally, not just semantically. Someone who works set hours, uses your equipment, and answers only to you likely functions as an employee regardless of what the contract calls them, and misclassifying that relationship to avoid statutory obligations is a real compliance risk, not a clever workaround.

Payroll

Every employee triggers statutory deductions: PAYE, NSSF, SHIF, and the Affordable Housing Levy, on top of the salary itself. Work out the full real cost of a hire, not just the headline salary, with the employee cost calculator before you make an offer, and see the Tax and KRA topic for how those deductions are actually calculated.