At HRwisdom, we always recommend being proactive and having standard employment contracts, employee letters and Human Resources policies and procedures ready so that you can manage your staff properly in the eyes of the law.

We also know that managing staff can take up so much of your time.

So, HRwisdom has done three things to make things a little easier for you:

We have found for you a free employment probation letter template for an unsatisfactory employee.

You can download the unsatisfactory probation letter template instantly for free and without any registration required. More on this below.

We have discovered an excellent service which gives you all the staff management policy and procedure templates you need. To learn more, click here.

Looking for an unsuccessful probation letter template to use for an employee within your business?

Just visit the following page on the main HRwisdom site to get the download link (no registration required) for a probation letter template produced by the Australian Government, click here.

HRwisdom

Businesses across Australia are facing many different challenges.

Some companies are struggling with the decline of the manufacturing sector and related job losses.

Organisations in the resources-rich states are facing rising labour costs and skills shortage issues.

Businesses in the retail sector are trying to protect tight profit margins and decreasing sales volumes against the flight to online shopping.

No matter what the economic environment or challenges, all organisations need to maximise the efficiency and effectiveness of their workforce.

Maximising this efficiency and effectiveness can be done in all sorts of ways such as:  

• Employee Value Propositions (EVP)
• Process improvement programmes
• Training and development
• Employee engagement initiatives
• Employee retention systems
• Performance improvement plans  

There are all sorts of ways to successfully manage your workforce and many of these good ideas are discussed in the free HRwisdom Employee Attraction & Retention Guide.

One way that is NOT RECOMMENDED is to give employees $10 if they can successfully guess which of their colleagues is the next to be fired.

In a post on the Legal Blog Network by FindLaw, Stephanie Rabiner shared details of a recent court case in the United States in which an employer found himself in hot water for trying to motivate his staff by running a “firing contest.”

As Rabiner points out, the employer sent a company-wide memo telling staff they could win if they successfully guessed which of their colleagues would be fired next. Once the winner had been chosen, the contest started all over again.

Unfortunately for the business, a number of staff resigned after they realised the whole thing was not actually a joke as they first thought.

Some might call this an “interesting” approach to employee engagement and employee retention.

The judge called it “egregious and deplorable.”

Either way, this employer won’t be winning any Employer of Choice awards anytime soon.

And in case you’re wondering, yes there were penalties involved.

The employer was required to pay large fines for issues relating to what we in Australia might refer to as constructive dismissal and harassment.

So, if you are thinking about implementing this novel method of employee motivation, perhaps you may be better serviced sticking with the good ol’ Employee Of The Month award until something better comes along . . .  

You can download the HRwisdom Employee Attraction & Retention Guide now.  

HRwisdom

Many Australian businesses focus purely on pay and conditions to attract and retain good staff. Unfortunately, such an approach has limited impact. Today’s HRwisdom blog post shares some excellent ideas to reduce staff turnover and retain good staff.

Why does a focus on pay and conditions only have a limited impact on reducing staff turnover?

Imagine running one of those ‘blind taste tests’ where you ask blindfolded 16 year old volunteers to taste different types of soft drink. Serve the volunteers samples of prune juice, water, tomato juice, and lemonade, you’ll get some fairly distinctive results. You may even get some swearing.

Next, serve the 16 year old blindfolded volunteers ten different types of lemonade drinks and see what happens. You’ll have a tough time establishing clear points of difference and loyalty to your brand of lemonade may be hard to come by.

Now, try applying this blind-folded taste test to your company’s pay and conditions. If your company is like most other companies, you’ll be watching your competitors, paying what they pay, and generally staying near the pack.

Ask your potential employees and current employees to go blindfolded and taste test all the different pay and conditions on offer out there in the labour market. Just like the lemonade scenario, you’ll have a tough time establishing clear points of difference. Loyalty to your brand of pay and benefits may be hard to come by. 

Add to the mix a skills shortage, ageing demographics, a return of the war for talent and you may be wondering what to do about your employee turnover issues.

Furthermore, re-run the blindfold test every few months as other companies adjust their pay and conditions to stay with the pack – you’ll probably feel your employee attraction and retention problems intensify.

Click here: Employee Retention Plan

One important piece of the employee loyalty and employee retention puzzle is the slightly obscure concept of employee culture.

HRwisdom strongly recommends you take a look at an excellent article from Smart Company which describes a particularly powerful employee culture that has been carefully developed by a successful company. The company’s strong focus on developing their corporate culture has paid off in terms of profitability and with a staff turnover rate of just 3%.

In its focus on employee culture, this company describes itself as being slow to hire, and quick to fire and it has a range of ‘left field’ differentiators which include:

• A division in the business called Culture Club which only manages employee culture. The Culture Club has no managers or directors in its ranks and all potential employees must pass through the separate Culture Club selection process before joining the business.
• All employees are trained to use Twitter and get 10 minutes a day to tweet about life working at the company. This is used for internal and external purposes.
• Other than meeting legislative requirements, there are no formal annual leave allocations – employees just take as many holidays as they feel they deserve. This has loyalty impact but also forces managers to ensure they only hire the right type of employees in the first place.
• The company is very active in social activism and recently gave a major company, customer, and employee donation to help build an eye hospital in Cambodia.
• Perhaps of most interest: All new employees are offered $2,000 to quit when they have completed the new starter training program. Apparently, less than 3% of new employees take the cash and leave. Imagine the impact that has on employee culture…

HRwisdom highly recommend this Smart Company article on employee attraction and retention. We leave you with a quote from the article in which the MD of the company says:

“Culture is the most important thing to attract the best people. Gone are the days when you can just pay people more. They want their jobs to offer them more, and they want great places to work. If you want to maintain the brightest and the best, then corporate culture is everything.”

For information on developing your employee culture and reducing staff turnover, click here: Employee Retention Plan

HRwisdom

At HRwisdom we encourage you to be proactive and seek the right information to successfully manage staff.

In today’s HRwisdom blog post, we draw your attention to an excellent industry update by HR expert Ron Jones.

In his latest update, Ron has pointed out a subtle change in employment law which can have a big impact on small businesses in Australia.

The Fair Work Act has defined a small business as one with fewer than 15 employees. Employees may be full time, part time or casuals employed on a regular and systematic basis.

An employee of a small business is unable to pursue a claim for unfair dismissal unless he or she has been employed for at least 12 months.

A small business is also exempted from paying redundancy benefits in the event that the business makes an employee’s position redundant.

These measures have been introduced to assist small business growth and development and to help insulate them from some of the costs which would impede that growth.

Under the provisions of the Act, it is anticipated that as business grow, they will be able to meet the same costs as larger businesses.

However, the definition of small business has another twist . . .

As Ron Jones points out, the implications for many businesses are significant and will force a complete reassessment of the cost structures which apply to the organisation.

If you run a small business then you really must check out the latest legislative change and see how it exposes your business to unfair dismissal risks.

To see what’s changed, read Ron’s latest blog posting here: Right Work Advice

To see more of Ron’s invaluable commentary, visit his guest HRwisdom blog Q&A session here: HR Advice

HRwisdom

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 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

Under the Fair Work Act, it is very important to keep good records regarding your staff and their employment arrangements.

In today’s HRwisdom blog posting, we’ve turned to industry expert, Ron Jones for some quick advice . . .

Ron Jones:

Employers covered by the Fair Work Act are required to maintain certain records for at least 7 years.

The records must detail – for each employee:

1. The basis of employment (full time, part time, permanent, casual, etc).
2. When the employment commenced and when and how it ceased.
3. The rate of remuneration, including allowances, penalty payments, loadings etc.
4. For casual staff, the total hours worked in the pay period.
5. For any other type of employee, any overtime hours worked (but only if they are receiving a penalty rate or loading for that work).
6. The gross and net amounts actually paid to the employee, including any deductions.
7. Superannuation contributions made on behalf of the employee.
8. What leave entitlements have been accrued and taken and the current balance.
9. Details of agreements (eg flexibility agreement under a modern award) which applies.

The records can be kept in electronic form.

An employer can be fined for not keeping these records, or making false or misleading entries.

Also the employer must provide access to a record, if asked by the employee to whom it relates, or by an inspector.

For more information, read here: managing staff.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

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

A quick thank you to the HRwisdom community members for their recent contribution to the HRwisdom blog on HR Horror Stories.

There was a variety of HR horror stories shared and all made us laugh (and cringe).

All the postings were excellent and we thank the members for their contribution.

We decided to award Worst HR Horror Story to the first posting which sound truly horrid. The contributor of this post has now received their free HRwisdom Library access.

By way of thanks to all those who contributed, HRwisdom shared two very useful staff management resources:

1. An interview with an international expert on employee management and retention.

2. Top 10 Interview Questions & Answers to help them avoid some of the future HR horror stories.

Thanks again to all HRwisdom community members for their ongoing support and contribution.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

Click to browse the HRwisdom Library