Essential HR Disciplines for Salesforce Effectiveness

Often, when HR professionals are asked why they aren't more involved, common responses include, a common response is that “Sales kind of does its own thing." Sales leadership does carry the main responsibility for sales effectiveness, however, Human Resources need to increase their involvement in salesforce effectiveness. Why? Basically, companies that do not involve HR in salesforce effectiveness stall their growth.

Here are three of the core Human Resources disciplines that help to drive salesforce effectiveness;

Talent

HR partners will often be requested to help Sales Management with recruiting specific job roles. Sometimes, the Sales team accuses the HR team of not understanding the skill set required for those jobs. The Sales & Human Resources teams need to work together and be able to strategise together. One key strategy would be to focus on talent, this includes; managing poor performance and providing better training for the sales team.

Motivation

The next core element of Human Resources that is vital to maintaining a high-performing sales team is motivation. Sales employees often have a different perspective from the rest of the employee population and are usually more motivated by product quality, marketing influence and achievable goals than their non-sales colleagues, and less motivated by performance management and equity rewards.

Compensation ranks high on their list of concerns, but are these organizations more productive because they pay more, or are they paying more because they're more productive? Paying at or above the market doesn't mean performance will follow. Pay and performance are vital components of salesforce engagement and motivation.

Productivity

There is a strong relationship between sales force effectiveness and time allocation. Companies who spend more time on sales, and less on other duties, such as administration, often have greater sales productivity.

Within any sales organization there is opportunity for productivity to increase and can directly translate to the company's growth. Sales organizations need HR disciplines to align talent with strategy, assess opportunities for increased motivation, and identify barriers of productivity. HR has a very relevant, hands-on role in contributing to sales force effectiveness.

Managing Out of Hours Risks by Adjusting Existing Policies

Adding some basic clauses to already existing workplace contracts and policies can be more effective and less time consuming than drafting dedicated documents to help manage risks presented by workers out of hours conduct.

As far as employment contracts go, some broad clauses about workers duties and obligations may be all that is needed to sufficiently cover out of hours conduct.

Some clauses that might be useful to add include:

• Any behaviour that may negatively affect the company's reputation, business, employer's interests
• Breaching of the laws or policies using company property
• Taking on secondary employment without the consent of the company.

When it comes to work place policies it does not make sense to write a policy that is only related to out of hours conduct as it would have to be too generalised and would be hard to define exactly what employees are not supposed to do. The best approach is to examine your existing policies and determine how they might apply to out of hours conduct. Where it is appropriate you can add any relevant stipulations into those policies that make it clear what is suitable to extend to out of hours conduct.

Depending on what industry you are employed in there is a variety of policies that may be relevant to out of hours conduct.

Some amendments that could be made to existing policies to cover out of hours conduct include those relating to drug and alcohol use and private use of company property for example, vehicles and IT communications.

A lot of policies regarding company vehicles do not actually go into how people should be driving the vehicle, complying with the law and generally using them in their personal time.

Regarding computer use, policies should be simply updated to say that they apply to both work and private use.

Some other policy areas that may need to be considered include behaviour at work functions, travelling for work related business, social media and wearing work uniforms off duty.

Employees wearing their uniforms when they are not at work can pose a problem because they are easily identifiable as working within your business. There behaviour can easily fall back on you.

Discrimination and harassment policies should be updated to make it clear that they can apply to any out of hour’s interactions between employees.

These simple clauses can be extremely effective and they can also come in useful if you have to enforce policies for out of hours conduct breaches.

How much notice must you give before Dismissing an Employee?

When an employee is being dismissed, notice must be given. The notice starts when the employer tells the employee that they want to terminate the employment. Notice ends on the last day of employment.

The length of notice an employee must be given is determined by how long they have worked for you and their type of employment. If someone has worked for you continuously for over one year but less than three you must provide a minimum of two weeks’ notice.

An employer must give the following notice periods when terminating an employee;

• Less than 1 year’s employment - 1 weeks’ notice.
• 1-3 years employment - 2 weeks’ notice
• 3-5 years employment - 3 weeks’ notice
• Over 5 year’s employment – 4 weeks’ notice.

An employee is entitled to receive an extra week of notice if they are over 45 years old and have worked for the employer for a minimum of 2 years.

Sometimes an award, registered agreement or employment contract can specify longer minimum notice periods.

If a registered agreement has been put in place, check the terms of the agreement for the correct amount of due notice.

The minimum amount of notice an employer must provide is determined by the length of the employees continued service with them. Continuous service is the length of time an employee is employed by a business. Service does not include unpaid leave, with the exception of unpaid parental leave which does count as service towards notice of termination.

An employer may provide more notice than they are obligated to in the award, registered agreement or contract. The employee is only required to work out the minimum notice period although they are able to work out the extra notice if they choose to do so.

An employee is entitled to take annual leave during a notice period if the employer consents to the leave.

An employee may also take sick leave during a notice period if they provide notice of the leave as soon as possible and evidence (medical certificate ) if required.

If an employee has used up all of their sick leave they may take unpaid sick leave. They will still have to provide notice and evidence if required.

An employee cannot be forced to take leave as part of their notice period.

An employer can also provide payment as a replacement for notice, which can be equal to or exceed the total amount the individual would have been paid for the required amount of notice.

Proposed changes to the Fair Work Act

The proposed changes to the fair work act the federal government has introduced to parliament could have a significant impact on the existing fair work act if implemented.

To outline how these changes could affect your business, here are some of the main points within the bill and how they could affect your business.

• Extending a period of unpaid parental leave – An employee taking unpaid parental leave under the fair work act, may request to increase their leave for a period up until 12 months. The amendment would require the employer to give the employee the opportunity to discuss the request in person or over the phone before refusing it. The discussion cannot be had by email or sms.

• Payment for unused annual leave – under the Government’s proposed amendment, payment for unused annual leave is to be made at the employee‘s base rate of pay for ordinary hours as applicable immediately before dismissal (unless an applicable modern award, enterprise agreement or employment contract expressly provides for a more beneficial entitlement).  Base rate of pay does not include penalties, loadings, allowances or any other separately identifiable amounts.

• Taking or accruing leave while receiving workers’ compensation - An employee who is absent from work due to workers compensation is unable to take or accrue leave under FW act during the compensation period.

• Transfer of Business -The transfer of business provisions will not apply to the transfer of an employee between associated entities where the employee sought the transfer at their own initiative. The proposed amendments would “switch off” the FW act transfer of business rules when an employee becomes employed by an associated entity of his or her former employer if the employment was sought on the workers own initiative before termination of employment with the old employer.
  
  For example if an employee is looking to progress their career or change their lifestyle and pursues a career opportunity within their own company or affiliated company this would be considered seeking his or her own initiative. If an employee who was made redundant accepted alternative employment this would not be considered his or her own initiative.
  
  Note that this change would only apply to transfer of enterprise agreements and not to continuity of service-based entitlements. The automatic continuity (subject to exceptions) provided in the FW Act when employees transfer between associated entities would continue to apply.

• Fair Work Commission (FWC) hearings and conferences - The proposed amendment would allow the FWD to dismiss an unfair dismissal claim on certain grounds without a hearing. The FWC will be able to do this if the applicant has failed to attend a conference or hearing, comply with a FWC order or discontinue an application after a settlement agreement.
  
  This would also apply where the FWC found the application to be frivolous or had no reasonable chance of being successful. The FWC must invite all parties to provide further information to the FWC to show its use is warranted before exercising this power.

• Individual Flexibility Arrangements - All employees party to an IFA made under a modern award flexibility term would need to sign a 'genuine needs' statement.
  
  Employees entering an independent flexibility arrangement are required to give a written statement indicating why they believe an independent flexibility agreement under a modern award or enterprise agreement meets their needs and leaves them better off.
  
  Individual flexibility arrangements allow for unilateral termination only upon 13 weeks of notice, as opposed to the current 28 days of notice.
  
  The proposed amendments improve the utility of individual flexibility arrangements by requiring enterprise flexibility terms to permit individual flexibility about all five minimum matters listed in the model flexibility term; namely arrangements about when work is performed, overtime rates, penalty rates, allowances and leave loading.

• Greenfields Agreements –The FWA amendment proposes many changes to the Greenfields agreement process intended to avoid employers being convinced to agree to inflated wages and conditions and employment preference to avoid delays in a project. Under the proposed changes, an agreement would provide for pay and conditions consistent with the prevailing standards and conditions within the relevant industry for equivalent work. The FWC may take into account the prevailing pay and conditions in the relevant geographical area.  These changes include the extension of good faith bargaining requirements to single enterprise Greenfields agreements. They also include provisions for an employer to apply to the FWC for an agreement to be approved where the parties are unable to reach agreement in a reasonable period following a three month negotiation period notified by the employer.

• Protected action ballot orders - The Amendment Bill proposes that an application for a protected action ballot order will not be able to made until the employer is obliged to give employees notice of representational rights in bargaining.

• Right of Entry - The amendment bill introduced changes to the right of entry rules regarding the rights of union officials who hold entry permits. The employer will no longer be required to organise transport and accommodation arrangements for permit holders in remote areas.
  
  Interviews with employees by union officials or permit holders must be held in an area agreed between the business and the permit holder or in the place the business employees take lunch breaks. The FWC will also be able to deal with disputes regarding the frequency of visits by permit holders.