Resumo

Organizations faced several environmental challenges during the last years, such as technological disruptions, shifting economics, political uncertainties, and even a global healthcare crisis. Startup companies, at least comparing to their more established counterparts, different contexts and demands may require specific human resources configurations in instances such as employee profiles and roles. This study focuses on scaled startups that developed HRM policies and practices. As these grow, they become more complex and require a workforce more diverse and specialized in their skill sets.

The central question of this text is "How do startups implement human resources management policies and practices?". Based on this research question, the general objective desribes as: "Analyze how scaled-up startup companies implement their human resources management areas". In addition to the general objective, there are two specific research objectives: 1) "Describe how startups decide to implement HRM policies and practices"; and 2) "Verify if and how startups adapt their strategies to handle contextual factors toward implementing HR policies and practices".

Implementing HR policies has a shared responsibility to succeed, where each actor has its duties and responsibilities. HR staff interpret, communicate, guide, and support policies while convincing managers of the importance of those policies (Armstrong & Taylor, 2014). For companies, organizational learning (OL) is an intangible resource essential to react to changes, acquire knowledge, improve and optimize the usage of organizational resources, and capturing value available from the market (Liu, 2018). Startup companies create innovative solutions in a context of uncertainty (Ries, 2011).

This study is describable as exploratory and qualitative to acknowledge the mechanisms behind how startup companies develop and structure their HRM departments, models, policies, and practices as they grow more complex and engage a scalable business model, with triggering factors and learning points. It employed a case study approach (Creswell & Creswell, 2018) under a processual way to study 5 companies with at least a hundred people each, and a total of 15 interviews, with semistructured interviews as the main data collection proceeding to understand how and why HRM developed over time.

Content analysis from public documents and the recorded interviews indicated three main findings: 1) These companies started their HR areas usually between 50 and 60 employees. 2) HR may act to enhance, reinforce, and share the organizational culture. 3) The Covid-19 pandemic was a significant challenge that triggered profound and immediate changes in all participating companies. Culture has played an essential role in engaging people to find and implement solutions that allowed their organizations to survive the crises.

Startups start structuring its HR by hiring the first employee, usually when the company is around 50 people, but that may vary depending on context and the skillsets of the founders. At some point, the HR tasks demand too much from a structure that is not HR-specific. The triggering event for implementation is usually some difficulty that people in the company noticed and decided to take action. Startups monitor what happens in the market to implement or improve a policy or practice, reacting to unexpected events as the pandemic or to the shortage of tech talent, tailoring specific solutions.

Armstrong, M., & Taylor, S. (2014). Armstrong’s handbook of human resource management practice. London: Kogan Page. Creswell, J. W., & Creswell, J. D. (2018). Research design : qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. Los Angeles: SAGE. Liu, C.-H. S. (2018). Examining social capital, organizational learning and knowledge transfer in cultural and creative industries of practice. Tourism Management, 64, 258-270. Ries, E. (2011). The Lean Startup : How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Business. New York, NY: Crown Business.