You are the HR department

I don't think anyone at a small UK company is ever formally made the HR department. It just happens. Someone seems to know how things work, so the questions start landing on them, and a year later they're doing HR with no title, no training and no time set aside for it.

If you're the founder, the owner or the office manager, that's probably you. Right?

I mean, you didn't apply for it. But you're the one who gets asked, and at this size that's really all "HR" means. It isn't a department. It's a set of questions, and they find whoever looks most likely to answer.

The same five questions

Holiday. Pay dates. Expenses. Sick pay. And the sneaky fifth one, which is just "who do I ask about...?"

Those come round again and again, and each time the answer costs you the same few minutes, plus the interruption, which is honestly the bigger cost. You were in the middle of something. Now you're digging out the same information you dug out last month.

And then there's where the answer goes. You type it in a chat, or say it in passing by the kettle, and it vanishes. The next person asks anyway, because nothing was ever left behind for them to find.

More policy isn't the fix

The instinct is to write more policy. I get it. But a long manual nobody can search doesn't solve anything. It just moves the question back to you with a PDF attached.

I've come round to thinking a repeated question is a symptom. It means the answer is missing, or it's there but nobody can find it. Either way, the page is broken, not the person asking.

So fix the page.

Write it once, give it an owner, put a date on it

Here's what I think actually works, and it's boring, which is sort of the point. Write each answer down once. Put it where people will look. Give each topic an owner, meaning the person to ask and also the person who keeps it right. And put a review date on it.

The date matters more than it sounds. Rules change, and an answer that was correct when you wrote it can quietly go stale. Statutory sick pay is a good example: since 6 April 2026 it's paid from the first day of illness, instead of the fourth day. A sick pay page written before then and not looked at since could still be telling people the old rule, and nobody would know until someone acted on it.

An owner and a date turn a document into something that gets looked after. Without them it's just a file.

Make it findable

One place. One version that counts. That's the whole trick, really, and it's harder than it sounds, because it's so easy for an answer to end up split between email, a shared drive and somebody's memory.

If your written statement refers to other documents, Acas says it's important to state what they are and where to find them. Which quietly forces you to give those documents a proper home. You can't point someone at "the sick pay procedure" if you don't know where it lives.

There's a longer piece on keeping an internal knowledge base people actually use if you want the detail. The short version is that the format matters less than being able to find the thing straight away.

Where to start

Start with what already has to exist in writing, because then you're not creating extra work, you're just making it useful.

The employer must provide the principal statement on the first day of employment, and the wider written statement within 2 months. The principal statement has to cover pay (how much and how often) and holiday entitlement. On day one you also have to give information about sick pay and procedures, other paid leave and notice periods, and that can sit in a separate document as long as the person has reasonable access to it, an intranet for example. The wider statement has to include disciplinary and grievance procedures. And if the written statement changes, you have to tell staff within one month of making the change.

Look at that list again. Pay, holiday and sick pay are three of your five questions, already sitting on a legal to-do list. So the answers you keep retyping are mostly ones you're obliged to write down anyway.

That's the bit I find oddly reassuring. You're not being asked to invent a big HR function. You're being asked to write down what you already know, once, put a name and a date on it, and put it somewhere people can find it. If you want a starting map, the small business policy checklist is a reasonable place to tick things off, and the guides on HR policies for small businesses, employee handbooks and UK law and the written statement of employment particulars cover the rest.

I'm building Forematter, onboarding software for UK companies, partly because of all this. But honestly, the idea works fine with a shared document and a bit of discipline.

Anyway. Next time the same question lands on you, don't just answer it. Write it down, and see whether it ever lands on you again.