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HRwisdom Support

At HRwisdom we regularly draw upon the collective wisdom of many staff management experts and smart Human Resources practitioners.

In our last blog posting we heard from our friends at Hunter People Solutions. They’ve been busy helping businesses with the workplace impacts that have occurred as a result of the final pieces of the Fair Work Act coming into effect.

In part one, we asked guest expert Colette Simon to ask some key questions to help you consider your workplace situation and to then give you some practical staff management answers.

Last time Colette explained that if and when you receive a flexible work request, the new laws require you to do a number of things:

• You have to respond in writing within 21 days, advising the employee if their request has been approved or not.
• If you’ve refused the request, you have to provide the reasons for your refusal.
• You may only refuse if you have ‘reasonable business grounds’ for doing so.

Now let’s hear from Colette as she outlines the ‘reasonable business grounds’ component.

Colette:

While not being specific, the new laws suggest such grounds might include:

• the effect on your business of approving such a request, including the financial impact of doing so and the impact of efficiency, productivity and customer service;
• the inability to organise work amongst your existing staff; and
• the inability to recruit a replacement, or the practicality or otherwise of the arrangements that may need to be put in place to accommodate the employee’s request.

Clearly, the reasonableness of any refusal will depend on the particular circumstances of the situation.
 
Most importantly in this new workplace relations area, it is imperative that you understand and adhere to your obligations as an employer when faced with requests for flexible work arrangements. If you don’t, for example, because you forgot to appropriately respond to a request within 21 days, you may face a claim for breaching the NES.  And a maximum penalty of $33,000 applies (ouch!).

Our HR advice? 
 
‘Winging it’ is probably not the best option. 

Understand your obligations so you can be on the front foot with your employees.  We suspect this new right will soon be as commonly understood as the existing right to 12 months unpaid maternity leave that we all take for granted.

Ask for help if you need it.  An independent ear and some professional advice can really make the difference to making a solid robust decision or something a little more risky.

For more HR policies and procedure and staff management resources, remember to visit the HRwisdom Library.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

At HRwisdom we regularly draw upon the collective wisdom of many staff management experts and smart Human Resources practitioners.

Our friends at Hunter People Solutions are looking forward to a great year – a year of new adventures and bigger challenges with a good dose of change management thrown in to the mix.  They’ve been busy helping businesses with the workplace impacts that have occurred as a result of the final pieces of the Fair Work Act coming into effect.

In part one of this blog post, we have asked guest expert Colette Simon to ask some key questions to help you consider your workplace situation. Colette will then give you some practical staff management answers.

Colette:

Do you know if your business is sufficiently prepared for the Fair Work changes?  Or are you thinking you are just going to ‘wing it’?

You’re no doubt aware that a big component of the new laws is the introduction of the National Employment Standard (NES). 

There are 10 standards and they form part of the safety net that applies to all employees who are covered in the federal system. 

The piece of the NES that we believe has the most potential to impact businesses is the right for employees to request a change in their working arrangements.   

The right is available only to employees who are parents of, or have responsibility for the care of a child who is under school age (or, if the child is under 18 years of age, who has a disability). And the change in working arrangements must be for the purpose of assisting the employee to care for the child.

So, what sort of flexible ‘changes in arrangements’ are we talking about here?

While not being specific, the new laws suggest this might include changes in hours of work, in patterns of work or in working location.  So the sort of requests that should be expected will probably include switching to part time work by working fewer days per week or fewer hours across each day as well as requests to work from home or moving to another more convenient office location.

To be eligible to make such a request under the NES, employees must have completed at least 12 months continuous service. They have to put their request in writing and set out the details and reason for the change.

If and when you receive such a request, the new laws require you to do a number of things:

• You have to respond in writing within 21 days, advising the employee if their request has been approved or not.
• If you’ve refused the request, you have to provide the reasons for your refusal.
• You may only refuse if you have ‘reasonable business grounds’ for doing so.

See Flexible Work Arrangements – Part 2 for information on the ‘reasonable business grounds’ component.

For more HR policies and procedure and staff management resources, remember to visit the HRwisdom Library.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

The recent debacle at Toyota which has seen the company lose a reported $155 million per week has been widely reported. With continuing product recalls around the world, the losses are estimated to have caused an astonishing $30 billion loss in Toyota’s valuation on the stock market.

At HRwisdom we always focus on ideas and practices that can actively improve or protect a business. Today, we refer you to an excellent analysis of how poor HR policies and staff management practices potentially led to the $30 billion loss at Toyota.

The Eight Bad Staff Management Practices

In his excellent analysis, John Sullivan lists the eight bad staff management practices that contributed to Toyota’s massive downfall.

1. Rewards and recognition — The purpose of any corporate reward process is to encourage and incentivise the right behaviors and to discourage the negative ones. It’s important for the reward process to incentivise the gathering of information about problems. It’s equally important to reward employees who are successful in getting executives to take immediate action on negative information. Key questions — Were rapid growth (sales have nearly doubled recently) and “lean” cost-cutting recognized and rewarded so heavily that no one was willing to put the brakes on growth in order to focus on safety? Were the rewards for demonstrating error-free results so high that obvious errors were swept under the table?
2. Training — The purpose of training is to make sure that employees have the right skills and capabilities to identify and handle all situations they may encounter. Toyota is famous for its four-step cycle — plan/do/check/act — but clearly the training among managers now needs to focus more on the last two. In addition, in an environment where safety is paramount, everyone should have been trained on the symptoms of “groupthink” and how to avoid the excess discounting or ignoring of negative external safety information. Key question — If Toyota’s training was more effective, would the managers involved have been more successful in convincing executives to act on the negative information received?
3. Hiring — The purpose of great hiring is to bring on board top-performing individuals with the high level of skills and capabilities that are required to handle the most complex problems. Poorly designed recruiting and assessment elements can result in the hiring of individuals who sweep problems under the rug and who are not willing to stand up to management. Key questions — Did Toyota have a poorly designed hiring process that allowed it to hire individuals who were not experienced in the required constructive confrontation technique? Were their hires poor learners that did not change as a result of company training?
4. The performance management process — The purpose of a performance management process is to periodically monitor or appraise performance, in order to identify problem behaviors before they get out of hand. If the performance measurement system included performance factors to measure responsiveness to negative information, Toyota wouldn’t be in turmoil today. Key questions — Was the performance appraisal and performance monitoring process so poorly designed that they did not identify and report groupthink type errors? Did Toyota’s famous high level of trust of its employees go too far without reasonable metrics, checks, and balances? Did HR develop sophisticated metrics that produced alerts to warn senior managers before minor problems got out of control?
5. The corporate culture — The role of a corporate culture is to informally drive employee behaviors so that it closely adheres to the company’s core values. Because these errors occurred under difficult driving conditions, it’s hard to blame the production group, which has a well-known reputation for Six Sigma quality in its construction. The negative reports came to functions like government, risk analysis, corporate and customer satisfaction. As a result, it is the culture within the corporate offices that need to be more closely monitored rather than assuming that the culture was aligned. It appears that the corporate culture created leaders so concerned with “saving face” and so adverse to negative publicity, that they for years postponed making the announcement of a massive recall. Key questions — Did HR’s failure to measure or monitor the corporate culture contribute to its misalignment? Was the corporate culture (the Toyota Way) so biased toward positive information that employees learned not to make waves, in spite of their professional responsibility to be heard on safety issues?
6. Leadership development and succession planning — The purpose of leadership development and succession planning processes are to ensure that a sufficient number of leaders with the right skills and decision-making ability are placed into key leadership positions. It is likely that the leadership development and the promotion process both failed to create and promote leaders who were capable of confronting problems and making difficult decisions. Key question — Was the leadership process at Toyota so outdated that it produced the wrong kind of leaders with outdated competencies, who could not successfully operate in the rapidly changing automotive industry?
7. Employee Retention — The purpose of a retention program is to identify and keep top performers and individuals with mission-critical skills. Key question — Did the retention program ignore people that brought up problems and as a result, did these whistleblowers often leave out of frustration?
8. Risk assessment — Most HR departments don’t even have a risk assessment team whose purpose is to both identify and calculate risks caused by weak employee processes. Clearly HR should have worked with corporate risk management at Toyota in order to ensure that employees were capable of calculating the long-term actual costs of ignoring product failure information. Key question — Should HR work with risk-assessment experts and build the capability of identifying and quantifying the revenue impacts of major HR errors, including a high hiring failure rate, a high turnover rate among top performers, and the cost of keeping a bad manager or employee?

Final Thoughts from John Sullivan

Toyota’s problems are not the result of a single individual making an isolated mistake, but rather due to a companywide series of mistakes that are all related to each other. So many corporate functions were involved, including customer service, government relations, vendor management and PR, that one cannot help but attribute the crash of Toyota to systemic management failure. Unfortunately, in this case, the famous Japanese saying is true. “The nail that stands out” was not encouraged to be different, but instead it was “pounded down” to conform.

The key lesson that others should learn from Toyota’s mistakes is that HR needs to periodically test or audit each of the processes that could allow this type of billion-dollar error to occur.

For more staff management advice and HR ideas you can join our mailing list or get your HR templates and Employee Retention information now.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

In today’s HRwisdom blog post, we’re taking at slightly different look at the issue of social media policy used in the workplace.

The term ’social media’ refers to the internet-driven communication tools such as blogging, Facebook, Linked In, and so on.

Whilst many businesses face difficult decisions when managing the use of social media in the workplace, today we bring you an interesting story from a more positive perspective. This perspective comes from Casey Hibbard in her blog post which examines a bold use of social media at IBM.

In her report, Casey presents the following IBM social media statistics:

• There is no IBM corporate blog or Twitter account
• There are 17,000 internal blogs
• 100,000 employees use internal blogs
• 53,000 members of SocialBlue (like Facebook for employees)
• A few thousand “IBMers” on Twitter
• Thousands of external bloggers
• Almost 200,000 on LinkedIn
• As many as 500,000 participants in company crowd-sourcing “jams”
• 50,000 in alumni networks on Facebook and LinkedIn

Casey notes that rather than being a cost to the business in employee time, this mass employee social interaction apparently helped identify the 10 Best Incubator Businesses, which IBM then funded with $100 million.

Casey Hibbard interviewed an IBM representative who described the ‘crowd-sourcing jams’ which are three-day online employee forums:

“It was a big, online collaborative experiment. The first 8 to 10 hours, it was very negative. Over the next 12 hours, the conversation completely changed to being very constructive.

By the way, there was no intervention by corporate to say, ‘Hey guys, let’s be more constructive.’ It was completely employee-led.

We realized we could trust employees to engage. Employees realized, ‘if we’re within reason, we’re going to be trusted’.”

It will be interested to track IBM’s progress in the world of employee-led social media policy innovation.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

In today’s HRwisdom blog post, we share some interesting staff management ideas on how to maximise the output of your team. The ideas come from Gill Corkindale who is an expert contributor to the Harvard Business Review online service.

As always, remember that you can instantly access various staff management resources by clicking on the following code: staff management.

Gill offers some thoughts about what individuals, teams, and organisations can do to keep their plans on track:

Individuals

• Keep a journal to hold yourself accountable to your plan. This might cover how you use your time, small steps you have taken, feedback from others, what worked and what didn’t work, and changes you can see. Try to enter a few lines each day and review the journal each week for signs of progress or slippage.
• Find a coach, mentor, manager, or buddy to support you in your action plan. Ask for help or advice in getting your plan back on track if it lapses. And don’t forget to talk about your successes to keep motivated.

Team

• If you are managing a team — or you are part of a team — it’s important to share the responsibility and accountability for the plan.
• Ensure that notes are taken at meetings and distributed afterwards, appoint project managers and allocate key responsibilities.
• Hold team members to real deadlines and schedule regular meetings to give updates and monitor progress
• Tie individual accountability into appraisals
• Regular team offsite days will help the team review the wider progress.

Click for Staff Management resources.

Organisations

• Ensure you have backing at the highest levels for change initiatives and appoint change champions across the organisation
• Set aside time for top team offsite meetings to discuss strategy, assess progress, refine plans and change direction if necessary.
• Remind people that day-to-day business must not marginalise or overwhelm change initiatives
• Bring in external consultants and external stakeholders to provide new perspectives and energy when plans are flagging

Keep your plan alive and working for you as long as it serves you, whatever challenges the opposing forces may bring. The reward will be personal and organisational change, growth, and even transformation.

- Gill Corkindale -

As always, remember that you can instantly access various staff management resources by clicking on the following code: staff management.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

At HRwisdom, we regularly recommend to our free subscribers that they actively plan ahead to improve employee retention and today’s blog post is some further food for thought. By actively planning ahead you’ll not only decrease staff turnover, you also:

• Recruit better quality people who actually do what they say they will do.
• Expand your pipeline of good employee candidates.
• Improve employee morale.
• Boost management confidence.
• Increase in business efficiency and profitability.
• Raise your reputation in the marketplace.

So today we draw your attention to some interesting thoughts from Kevin Wheeler’s online comments (part 3) where he discusses the need to expand the labor pool.

Remember, for instantly downloadable employee retention support, click on the following toolkit code: retention employee.

Kevin Wheeler: We Need to Expand the Labor Pool

Many available people are older or retired and have skills that have become obsolete or are not needed right now. However, these people could be retrained for some of the open positions if we took a different attitude. Unfortunately most of us, or most of our employers anyway, would rather spend money on search fees, agency fees, administrative overhead, and advertising rather than on intensively training people with decent basic skills. Granted, we cannot train people for every job because many of them do require experience, or time in the saddle, as they say, in order to be successful. However, I think we could significantly lessen the labor shortage if we were willing to be a bit wider in our job expectations and definitions.

This is why I constantly argue for integrated staffing and development because I believe their functions are inextricably intertwined. It is very difficult to do one without doing the other. If we are to look at recruiting as a process, we are going to have to incorporate development into our staffing thinking and staffing into our training thinking.

Access Code: Retention Employee

Whether this is done through merging departments or whether it is done simply through good collaboration doesn’t really matter. What is critical is that there is a dialogue between the two functions. If you work in a small company where there are no separate training and recruiting functions, then this becomes even easier for you to do.

You need to always think whether an open position is better trained for or hired for. Is it a job that would be impossible to train someone for in a reasonable period of time, or is it a job that someone could be trained to do fairly quickly?

When management and recruiters both develop a broader understanding of the issues and step up to the fact that in many cases skilled people are just not available at a reasonable cost, then developing people becomes sensible and cost effective.

There are no labor shortages or surpluses — there are just shortages of imagination and an unwillingness to accept responsibility for filling our own needs.

- Kevin Wheeler -

Toolkit Code: Retention Employee

As always, HRwisdom has world class support instantly available to you to help you retain employees. To retain good employees, click on the following access code: retention employee.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

At HRwisdom, we regularly recommend to our free subscribers that they actively plan ahead to improve employee retention and today’s blog post is some further food for thought. By actively planning ahead you’ll not only decrease staff turnover, you also:

• Recruit better quality people who actually do what they say they will do.
• Expand your pipeline of good employee candidates.
• Improve employee morale.
• Boost management confidence.
• Increase in business efficiency and profitability.
• Raise your reputation in the marketplace.

So today we draw your attention to some interesting thoughts from Kevin Wheeler’s online comments (part 2) where he discusses the importance of developing people as a requirement for success.

Remember, for instantly downloadable employee retention support, click on the following toolkit code: retention employee.

Kevin Wheeler: Developing People is a Requirement for Success

I spent many years working in the semiconductor industry when it faced a labor shortage of skilled process engineers and equipment operators. We eventually devised training programs that took basic electrical engineers and developed them into capable process engineers quickly. IBM trained thousands of programmers throughout the 1960s and 1970s to meet its own huge needs. At the same time, IBM and other companies quietly worked with academic institutions to develop today’s academic computer curricula.

This training and development does not have to be of the same type that a person would receive at an ordinary academic institution. In most every case, corporate training can concentrate on skills that are needed right now and forego the theoretical, the basics, and the nice-to-have-but-not-critical things. Whether or not a person goes back at some point to get those basics remains a question, but I believe that efficient training can address the labor shortage issue quickly.

Access Code: Retention Employee

In both world wars, the U.S. Armed Forces reverted to intensive training programs to fill critical positions. They have learned that this can be as efficient a process as having a huge standing army.

The trick is in accepting that there is a responsibility on the part of employers to develop the people they need. Employers should be willing to provide the training and development for the jobs they have a need to get done. Waiting for the school system or the government to do your job for you has never been a very good strategy.

Toolkit Code: Retention Employee

As always, HRwisdom has world class support instantly available to you to help you retain employees. To retain good employees, click on the following access code: retention employee.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

At HRwisdom, we regularly recommend to our free subscribers that they actively plan ahead to improve employee retention and today’s blog post is some further food for thought. By actively planning ahead you’ll not only decrease staff turnover, you also:

• Recruit better quality people who actually do what they say they will do.
• Expand your pipeline of good employee candidates.
• Improve employee morale.
• Boost management confidence.
• Increase in business efficiency and profitability.
• Raise your reputation in the marketplace.

So today we draw your attention to some interesting thoughts from Kevin Wheeler’s  online comments (part 1) where he asks the question: Does Our Own Mindset Cause the Talent Shortage?

Remember, for instantly downloadable employee retention support, click on the following toolkit code: retention employee.

Kevin Wheeler: Does Our Own Mindset Cause the Talent Shortage?

Even in this recession, everyone I speak with is moaning about not being able to find the quality candidates they think they need. Maybe they have caused their own problem by narrowly defining jobs, by using yesterday’s criteria to solve today’s problems, and by a lack of imagination.

We (hiring managers, executives, HR folks, and recruiters) set up expectations and define jobs based on what is traditional. We work from habit and past experience. This is not necessarily bad, but may not match our current needs or the available supply.

Some of us say that we cannot find qualified C# programmers, for example, when we all know that there are very few people with good skills in this area. We are left with choices: hunt like crazy on the Internet and elsewhere to find someone we can influence to leave their current position, wait to find a disgruntled one, or decide to do something different. Something different might be to rethink the job entirely so that it more closely matches someone we already know is available. It might be to increase the supply by developing training programs or taking on apprentices. It might be to merge the job with another one. There are lots of possibilities beyond just doing what we have always done.

Access Code: Retention Employee

Many emerging jobs require a new perspective, rather than an entirely new skill set. An interior designer could easily do the new job of home stager — someone who decorates your house prior to selling it — but for a much lower price. Many skills for jobs in the healthcare arena can be learned quickly, but are all based on a common set of skills around patient care, communication, and appreciation for and understanding of technology. The real challenge is perspective, attitude, and sometimes the willingness to work for less.

Toolkit Code: Retention Employee

As always, HRwisdom has world class support instantly available to you to help you retain employees. To retain good employees, click on the following access code: retention employee.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

In today’s HRwisdom blog post, we share some staff management advice from Susan Cramm, a regular writer for the Harvard Business Review’s online service.

In her latest article, Susan shares some excellent ideas on how to lead people by not making assumptions about our people.

The article draws on IT examples but the information is applicable across all businesses and industries…

Susan Cramm:

Question: When working with IT, how can you tell the difference between an introvert and an extrovert?

Answer: The extrovert looks at your shoes.

We label people. Everyone does it.

Labels are convenient. And they are dangerous.

Labeling people puts them into little boxes and constrains the possibilities that might arise from the relationship.

As a case in point, consider our smallest boxes — those each of us squeeze into when we are with our parents and siblings. For a moment, imagine that our father is “fun,” our mother “selfish,” our sister “talkative,” and we are “smart.” No matter what age, when with our family, we settle into our assigned roles. Consequently, unless we work to consciously redefine the relationships, we will never understand what is behind our father’s laugh, why our mother is constantly looking for what she doesn’t have, and why our sister needs more attention.

Seeing others for who they really are, in their splendor as well as their shortcomings, requires conscious effort. And it is work that is well worth doing — from a personal and professional perspective. As you renew your leadership agenda, be sure you renew the working relationships necessary to make it happen. To do so, put the following in action:

• Assume the best in others. Everyone comes to work to do the very best job they can. Beyond what you see at work, they are someone’s son, daughter, sister, brother, mom and dad. They pay taxes, coach their kid’s soccer team, and cook meals for neighbors in need. If someone wants to turn right when you want to turn left, it isn’t that they “don’t see the big picture,” “are unmotivated,” or “disorganized.” Most likely, they have goals, pressures, and experiences that differ from yours.
• Understand what makes them tick. It constantly amazes how we live in the world of “me” and try to collaborate and influence people we hardly know. If you want to develop strong working relationships, you need to humanize others by understanding their background, dreams, job objectives and obstacles (email Susan to get a copy of a stakeholder analysis worksheet that she uses with her clients).
• Serve their needs. You have to help others before you can ever expect that they will help you. Go the extra mile and do the unexpected extras. Help them, praise them, share with them, and introduce them. Make sure they see their reflection in your leadership agenda by incorporating “what makes them tick” in shaping the “how” and “what” of your plans and approaches.
• Accept responsibility. When problems arise, look in the mirror rather than out the window. Since this self-examination threatens even the most secure egos, make it easier by soliciting feedback early and often. This will allow you to make small, relatively private adjustments rather than large, public apologies.
• Assume the best intentions. Reinforce this behavior (for yourself and your team) by describing the behavior and motives of others in the most positive way possible. For example, replace, “The IT folks are ignoring our needs!” with, “The IT folks are obviously busy, so we need to help them by making sure our initiative delivers value.” Complaining about others reduces your power and turns you into a victim. Positive framing focuses on what can be done rather than who is to blame.

Labeling people puts them into ugly little boxes and constrains the possibilities that might arise from the relationship. At the end of the day, casting negative attributions on the behavior and character of others only serve to limit you.

Break through labels by shifting your mindset. Substitute humility for hubris. Replace conviction with curiosity.

Looking For More Information?

To keep up to date with excellent staff management advice and the latest HR advice and tools, be sure to join our mailing list via our home page and keep checking back to this blog for updates.

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HRwisdom Support

HRwisdom members should note that the employment landscape has changed and this affects how you manage staff.

As always, you can find various staff management ideas, employment documents, and HR templates in the HRwisdom Library.

Australian Employment Law Changes

Much of the new Federal workplace relations law called the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) took effect from 1 July 2009. The remaining provisions of the Act, which contain the National Employment Standards, commenced this year on 1 January 2010.
 
Thanks to our legal support experts, a number of important changes have occurred in the HRwisdom Library as a result of the employment law changes.
 
Use of new documents
 
Since 1 January 2010, members of the HRwisdom Library can now use the following new documents:

• Individual Flexibility Agreement (Award Covered)
• Request to Cash Out Leave
• Flexibility Policy

Discontinued documents
 
The following documents have now been removed from the HRwisdom Library as they cannot be used from 1 January 2010:

• Individual Transitional Employment Agreement – ITEA
• Letter To Employee enc ITEA and Info Statement
• Statutory Declaration – Adoption Leave
• Statutory Declaration – Long Paternity Leave
• Statutory Declaration – Ordinary Maternity Leave
• Statutory Declaration – Special Maternity Leave 

Modern awards
 
Modern awards also became operational from 1 January 2010. Modern awards replace existing federal awards and notional agreements preserving state awards (NAPSAs).
 
Copies of the modern awards can be obtained from the Australian Industrial Relations Commission’s website.
http://www.airc.gov.au/awardmod/fullbench/awards.htm
 
Fair Work Information Statement
 
From 1 January 2010, all employers covered by the national workplace relations system have an obligation to give each new employee a Fair Work Information Statement (the Statement) before, or as soon as possible after, the employee starts employment. You can download the form here:
http://www.fairwork.gov.au/Pay-leave-and-conditions/Conditions-of-employment/Pages/Fair-Work-Information-Statement.aspx?role=employees
 
The Statement may be given to an employee by:

• giving it personally to the employee
• sending it by pre-paid post to the employee’s residential address or a postal address nominated by the employee
• sending it to the employee’s email address at work or to another email address nominated by the employee
• sending by email to the employee’s email address at work (or to another email address nominated by the employee), an electronic link to the page on the Fair Work Ombudsman’s website where the Statement is located, or an electronic link that takes the employee directly to a copy of the Statement on the employer’s intranet
• faxing it to the employee’s fax number at work, fax number at home, or another fax number nominated by the employee
• another method (an employer will need to ensure this meets the requirement to give the Statement to the employee, eg by courier where there is a signed acceptance by the employee of receipt of the Statement).

You can obtain a copy of the Statement here:
http://www.fairwork.gov.au/Pay-leave-and-conditions/Conditions-of-employment/Pages/Fair-Work-Information-Statement.aspx?role=employees
 
HRwisdom members should seek advice if they are unaware of whether they are covered by the national workplace relations system. Importantly, all states and territories except Western Australia have referred their powers regarding workplace relations for private enterprises to the Federal Government and as a consequence, most employers who were not previously covered by the system will now be covered.

As always, you can find various staff management ideas, employment documents, and HR templates in the HRwisdom Library.

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