How to retain employees and enhance job enrichment

The Insync Surveys 2012 Retention Review into why employees resign surveyed more than 11,000 employees from 40 Australian organisations over a four and a half year period, focusing on those who left their job between January 2011 and April 2012. It found that lack of job enrichment is the leading cause of staff turnover.

The research found that employees leave an organization or business:

• primarily due to the job itself, and not because of pay or relationships with managers or peers, or
• because of one or more factors, such as job enrichment, interpersonal, structural, home life, & environmental.

                               

The average Australian turnover rate of 18 per cent costs organisations with 100 employees around $1 million every year but they could save around $280,000 annually, by reducing turnover by just five per cent.

To improve your chances of retaining your employees and enhance job enrichment, employers can:

• Provide adequate resources for each employee to perform well. ie IT, communication technology, and personnel training and development.
• Create a supportive corporate culture. This includes peer support networks, supportive management, have a culture that fosters the ability for people to openly share their knowledge
• Ensure a free flow of information, and try to eliminate secrecy.
• Provide enough freedom to facilitate job excellence. Encourage and reward employee initiative by providing adequate recognition, appreciation, and other motivators.
• Provide professional development and skill improvement opportunities. This could include paid education at universities or on the job training.
• Provide job variety. This can be done by job sharing or job rotation programmes.
• Offer meaningful work as part of each role and link each role to the success of the organisation
• Be flexible in how, when and where people can complete their work.
• Have career development plans for your staff
• Ensure that new employees are offered sufficient training and do not overload them with a full workload the minute they walk in the door.

There are also other steps an organisation can take to boost retention and reduce staff turnover such as:

• Ensure that you are measuring turnover, and understanding whether it is the high performers who are departing, or the poor performers.   
• Create enriching and meaningful jobs – this allows organisations to match staff with the right job for their skills and interests, thus reducing turnover
• Be flexible – be accommodating of changing life circumstances - This is the second biggest contributor to staff turnover. Be creative in the use of both short and long-term flexible work arrangements.
• Put a value on transparency – trust and honesty are important in a team.
• Impartiality is also essential to employee retention. Everyone must believe they all have the same chance and every decision must be unbiased.
• Recognise performance – and offer rewards that are not just contingent on a behaviour or result. Think outside the square and consider other types of rewards – access rewards such as discounted insurance or mobile phone packages.
• Where possible, empower staff members to make decisions and take ownership of what they do.
• Conducting exit interviews and regular staff surveys, seeking informal feedback from managers and establishing a retention strategy.

 Reducing staff turnover should not be considered solely a HR issue, all areas and levels of management should give this attention in order to boost employee retention and ultimately help the bottom line of your business. Giving due attention to all areas of the hiring & training process,  actively working to maintain and improve staff morale and having an effective employee retention will go a long way in preventing a high employee turnover.

For help with retention programs, performance reviews, or any staffing issues, please contact Annette at End2End Business Solutions for a customised solution.

Changes to Fair Work Act

On Wednesday 28 November 2012, Federal Parliament passed the Fair Work Amendment Act 2012 (Cth) (Amendment Act) which implements a number of recommendations of the Fair Work Act Review Panel.

The changes to the Fair Work Act 2009 implemented by the Amendment Act are mostly administrative and technical in nature, and to that extent will not make a major difference to employers’ workplace arrangements.

However, there are some significant changes to the FW Act provisions dealing with unfair dismissal and general protections claims, certain aspects of agreement-making, and ballots for protected industrial action that employers need to be aware of. Changes have also been made to the structure and operation of Fair Work Australia (FWA), and the tribunal has been given new functions in relation to default superannuation funds in modern awards.

The Government’s intention in changing the unfair dismissal provisions of the FW Act is “to ensure the right of an employee to bring an unfair dismissal claim is better balanced against the right [of] an employer to ensure they are required to respond to applications that are genuine, and to ensure that [FWA] has the power to deal with unreasonable conduct in relation to a claim”. Whilst on the face of them, these changes appear beneficial to employers, the strong likelihood is that they will, in practice, provide little relief to employers from the challenges of the unfair dismissal regime.

The key changes that will be implemented are summarized as follows:

Contracts and Enterprise Agreements

1.  Individual union officials will not be able to act as bargaining representatives for employees not covered by the official’s union.
2.  Employees will not be able to opt out of an enterprise agreement.
3.  Employers will be prohibited from making enterprise agreements with only one employee.

Unfair Dismissal

4.  Aligning the timeframes for making unfair dismissal claims and general protections dismissal claims at 21 days.  The time limit for lodging an unfair dismissal claim has been extended from 14 to 21 days from the date that the dismissal takes effect. The time limit for lodging a general protections claim based on dismissal has also been changed from 60 days to 21 days. This should be welcomed by employers, as employees will now need to decide whether to lodge an unfair dismissal or a general protections claim (rather than one, followed by the other; or the pursuit of a general protections claim that should properly have been brought as an unfair dismissal claim).

5.  Under certain circumstances Fair work Australia will be capable of dismissing unfair dismissal applications at their discretion. This will apply where the parties have concluded a settlement agreement, when an applicant fails to attend a proceeding relating to the application or where the application fails to comply with Fair Work Australia directions or orders relating to the application.

6.  Fair Work Australia will be able to demand a party pay costs if through an unreasonable act or omission they have caused the other party to incur a cost. This recommendation reflects concerns that unscrupulous lawyers or agents are encouraging dismissed employees to pursue unfair dismissal claims without merit on a no-win, no-fee basis. They can also demand a party pay a cost order if they fail to agree to a settlement that is deemed reasonable.

Change of Name

7.  It was proposed that the name of Fair Work Australia would be changed to a new title containing the word ‘Commission’ and no longer containing the words ‘Fair Work’ due to the considerable confusion caused by having a number of agencies with similar names (e.g. FWA, the Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO), and more recently Fair Work Building and Construction (FWBC).

The Amendment Act has made several important changes to the structure and operation of FWA, and has re-named  the tribunal as the Fair Work Commission (FWC). The Government opted for FWC, indicating that the word “Commission” more accurately reflects the tribunal’s functions.

Superannuation

8. The establishment of an ‘Expert Panel’ to deal with minimum wage decisions and default superannuation funds for employees who do not nominate their own superannuation fund and are covered by a modern award.

The commencement date of the changes introduced by the Amendment Act is currently unclear.

As an employer, you should obtain advice about how these changes affect your contracts, Enterprise Agreements and HR policies and procedures.

Be aware what the pending changes to unfair dismissal could mean for you as an employer:

• check the date of unfair dismissals applications and general protection claims relating to a termination of employment complies with the new time limits; 
• seek advice on whether the applicant's initial documentation lodged with the Fair Work Commission provides sufficient information about the alleged circumstances of their dismissal;
• seek advice on whether there are grounds to apply for a cost order; and
• seek advice on whether there is scope to apply to the Fair Work Commission for an unfair dismissal application to be dismissed.

To minimize your risk as an employer, you should consider contacting Annette at End2End Business Solutions on (02) 8977 4002 for advice on employee dismissals for your business. 

Looking beyond the Performance Review for your next leaders

A mistake that many businesses make is to ignore or dismiss an employee’s leadership potential based on their current job performance, and focus instead on the perceived highest performers who may not actually have the ability to manage and lead a team or implement and deliver on strategy. Employees with skills such as the ability to work well under pressure, great communications skills, motivation and a real passion to progress further should be identified as they may be the future leaders of your organization.

To identify employees with genuine leadership potential, managers will need to look beyond what their current results may indicate, and assess their real performance potential in a future role. Some important factors to consider are:

• Assessing the employee’s motivation– a simple but often overlooked measure is to ask if the individual is actually interested in moving into a leadership role. Does the employee want career progression and leadership development – if they don’t actually want it, and would rather be comfortable and high performing in their current role, then there is no point in promoting them. Sometimes they may be best left in their current role.
• Behaviour– exhibiting the desired corporate behaviours for your industry/business, having good communication skills, maturity and an ability to motivate others are all important.
• Potential– not all high performers have high potential!

So take the time to really know your employees, not just from their current performance review, but from their potential performance review.