Many Australian businesses still face uncertain times.

An recent article in The Australian newspaper described the potential threat of a GFC 2 resulting from the debt-ridden economies of Europe.

At HRwisdom we are very much focussed on being proactive and taking positive planning steps (and we’ll talk more soon about some excellent employee retention tools you can use).

However, for those businesses in Australia which may be suffering or trying to manage their costs very closely, we have put together an excellent free HR resource which explains:

How To Manage Redundancies Without Destroying All Employee Goodwill

In this HRwisdom resource, we have turned to industry expert Jacqui Alder to offer practical advice to businesses facing this difficult issue.

In this redundancy information we look at:

• What are the advantages and disadvantages of offering voluntary redundancies versus conducting forced redundancies/involuntary redundancies?
• What are the steps involved in the redundancy process?
• How to select people for involuntary redundancy?
• How to communicate throughout the redundancy process?
• Should you march someone out immediately when making them redundant?
• How can you implement redundancies without destroying all employee goodwill?
• A case study.

You can access the information via the home page sign-up:  redundancy information

Kind regards,

HRwisdom

The Fair Work Act has led to many headaches and concerns in businesses all over Australia. The clock is ticking and the countdown has begun for the major changes to employment law which will directly affect you and your employees.

As part of our ongoing commitment to helping Australian employers manage their staff even better during these challenging times, we recently provided our free subscribers with the opportunity to ask your own specific Fair Work Act questions to our guest expert, Ron Jones.

As a very experienced and knowledgeable management consultant, Ron is heavily involved in resolving IR and HR issues for organisations struggling to cope with the ambiguities of the Fair Work Act changes.

Ron has studied the changes and believes there are two major areas of concern: a new set of National Employment Standards and the award modernisation process.

Specific Fair Work Questions Answered

You may want to know:

• Does the Fair Work Act apply to us?
• We already have an employment agreement in place – can’t we just keep using this?
• Does this mean that our letters of offer and employment contracts no longer apply?
• What exactly do we need to do before 1 January 2010?

What Were The Questions Answered?

To see the Fair Work Act questions answered by Ron, all you need to do is to scroll down to the Comments section of this specific blog posting (if you can’t see the Comments section at the bottom, you may need to click on the top title of this post first).

Share Learnings With Colleagues

Do let your friends and colleagues know about this set of questions and answers. They’ll benefit from Ron’s insights and the whole HRwisdom community can learn from the online HR discussion. The link is:

http://blog.hrwisdom.com.au/2009/10/fair-work-act-questions-ask-an-expert/

Remember that there have been many additions and updates made to the HRwisdom HR documents for the Fair Work Act. You can access the documents now here: HR Advice.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

Browse the HRwisdom Library for redundancy letters, redundancy forms and redundancy templates.

In a recent HRwisdom blog posting on practical advice on how to terminate employees, we examined some of the legal aspects of termination and making staff redundant.

Thanks to our partnership with Business Essentials, we can bring you a free short, sharp audio interview with a legal expert on how to avoid staff retrenchments.

In this free interview, you’ll hear plenty of ideas and legal advice about how to avoid out-and-out staff retrenchments during tough economic times.

Part-time roles or job-sharing, for example, are more palatable than laying off staff members altogether but they’re not without risk.

You’ll learn about the benefits and the legal traps of some of the ways of avoiding staff retrenchments.

To hear the interview, just click on redundancy interview and scroll through the Human Resources section.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support
Browse the HRwisdom Library for redundancy letters, redundancy forms and redundancy templates.

Click to browse the HRwisdom Library

Recently the team at HRwisdom were enjoying a laugh about some of the HR (Human Resources) horror stories that can happen when businesses have the wrong type of person in their organisation.

One HR horror story came from a manufacturing plant in the Acacia Ridge area of Brisbane where a sales person at the sales counter had accidentally bumped the silent security alarm (the alarm button was under the desk).

Within minutes, police cars with sirens wailing came screeching into the factory car park with the police expecting to encounter an armed robbery in full flight.

The poor sales person was a little red-faced as she explained to the police officers what she had done.

In the meantime, however, a number of “highly valued” employees had heard the police sirens and, thinking the police had finally caught up with them, jumped the back fence and took off, never to be seen again . . .

Click here for: Recruitment Tool

Also, a comment with an HR horror story was left on one of our other blog postings (see: making staff redundant). The comment included an HR horror story involving a drunk employee and the CEO – never a good combination.

The moral of the story is, of course, that it is far easier to manage a business when you have the right people in the right roles.

A little effort in the recruitment phase can save you from a great number of headaches later (although you may not have as many funny HR horror stories to laugh about in years to come).

Do you have a funny HR Horror Story to share?

Share your funny HR horror story with the rest of the HRwisdom community now.

Simply leave a comment (use any username of your choice – the password gets instantly emailed to you) with your favourite HR Horror story of an underperforming employee, difficult employees, or perhaps some disciplinary indiscretion.

As we often do here at HRwisdom, we will send you another great HRwisdom resource to thank you for being an active member of the HRwisdom community.

One thing, it is probably wise to leave out the names of companies or people in your HR horror story…

We look forward to reading your HR Horror story below!

HRwisdom Support

Click to browse the HRwisdom Library

HRwisdom.com.au is a free HR resource site dedicated to helping you find good staff, hire good staff, manage good staff, and keep good staff.

When you click on any of the individual blog posting titles, you’ll see a number of options to share the HRwisdom article with your friends and colleagues.

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

Enjoy your free resources.

HRwisdom