Have You Had Your Flu Shots?

It is flu season again. I know this as I have spent two days this week in bed, shivering with a fever, joints aching, nose running, blocked ears... all the symptoms that hail to the world: I Have Not Had a Flu Shot. In fact, it made me realise that I hadn't had a flu shot in eight years! This was also the first year I had come down with the flu since having the flu shot. Eight years ago when I had my flu shot, it was provided free of charge as part of a company-wide initiative. This fact, and my fever-induced delirium, started me wondering about what the return on investment is for company funded wellness programs.

Let's consider an average-sized contact centre with 150 employees. The average salary for an outbound sales representative in the contact centre is $42,000 per annum (source: the Hays Salary Survey 2007). The contact centre has decided to implement a wellness program, the initial phase of which is to provide free flu vaccinations to all employees. Employees can choose whether they want to participate in the program or not, it is entirely voluntary.

In the first year of the program, only a quarter of employees participate in the program and receive their flu shot. Despite this relatively low participation rate, the return on investment for the contact centre still makes the program very worthwhile. Let's do the sums:

• 38 employees participate in the program
• The cost of the each flu shot is $25 (a total cost of $950 for the organisation)
• The average prevalence of influenza in Australia is 12% per annum. If the vaccine is only 80% effective, 4 cases of influenza will be prevented at the contact centre over this year.
• On average, an employee with the flu will take 4 days leave to recover. With 4 cases of flu prevented, 16 work days have been saved! This is a total monetary saving of $2,720.65!
  
• That's a return on investment of 286%!

This is just one example of how a comprehensive wellness program can be effective in your business. By focusing on both mental and physical well-being, your wellness program can provide your organisation with a more productive and engaged workforce, with significantly lower levels of absenteeism.

Many people use work, stress and a lack of balance in their lies, as a key reason why they don't eat well and exercise. Australia is fast developing a reputation as one of the least healthy, over-weight nations in the world. In Australia, the cost of absenteeism to employers is billions of dollars every years (in 1990 it was estimated at $7Billion! Source: Mark Wooden) which is a highly compelling reason for employers to develop programs that are aimed at increasing employee wellness, and reducing the costs of absenteeism.

Some wellness programs that you might want to consider applying in your business include:

• Quit Smoking Campaign. This can have the added benefit of reducing the number of smoke breaks chronic smokers take at work, as well as reducing the impact of other health issues associated with smoking;
• Employee Counselling. Employee Counselling sessions have been demonstrated assist employees to be more focussed on work, even when they are battling personal issues. It is equally important to support your employee's mental as well as physical health.
  
• Employee Fitness. You don't have to have an in-house gym to work with employees to get fit. Perhaps you could provide a personal training session once or twice per week? Or alternatively, get everyone involved in training for a fun-run which supports a charity? It is important that you ensure a Fitness Program is suitable for people of all levels of fitness, and not intimidating for employees who may be over-weight and unfit (particularly as they are the ones who will benefit the most from the increased exercise).
  
• Introduce a Fruit Bowl. By removing lollies and junk food, and providing fresh healthy fruit and nuts in your office, you will find that your employees will not be on the daily sugar-binge roller-coaster, and will have better concentration and higher levels of productivity. The provision of fruit is a very cost-effective way of providing a healthy workplace.

Do you want some assistance in putting together a wellness plan for your organisation? The EI Group can help you develop a wellness strategy that aims to increase employee participation and reduce absenteeism. Click on the link to contact us about wellness programs!

"We're Are In The Process of a Pretty Extensive Staff Turnover Exercise"

This last week I received an email from a client which absolutely floored me. The client actually said they were "in the process of a pretty extensive staff turnover exercise right now". There are few work-related things that take me by surprise these days, but this comment left me speechless. What employer in the current labour market feels they really can afford to have (or in fact actively encourage) high employee turnover?! If the fact was that this particular employer was encouraging staff turnover because they had under-performing and/or under-skilled employees, then that says to me that they have two inherent problems with their HR (neither of which will be solved by a "staff turnover exercise"):

1. Their recruitment processes are not hitting the mark. They are failing to source, attract and hire the right staff from the beginning. An "extensive staff turnover exercise" is only going to exacerbate this situation unless the organisation re-engineers their recruitment processes.
2. Their performance management systems are not working. Performance management encompasses employee rewards, as well as improvement programs, counselling warnings and termination. The best performance management systems encourage good performance and continuous improvement of employees. An "extensive staff turnover exercise" is not going to address the inherent issues with employee performance.

It concerns me that there are employers out there who would rather increase their costs of employment exponentially by actively encouraging employee turnover, rather than invest a fraction of that cost into professional HR management, performance management, reward systems and recruitment processes that would resolve these issue and add value to their bottom line.

When you consider that the average cost of turnover is fifteen times a person's salary/wage, encouraging employee turnover is a high risk, low return option no matter which way you look at it.

Let's do the sums:

This particular employer has 30 casual employees, all engaged on the minimum wage for their industry ($19.12 per hour). The average employee works 22 hours per week, and has been engaged with the organisation for 6 months. The employer's "extensive employee turnover exercise" is aiming to turnover 50% of all of the employees.

The average employee has earned a total of $10,936.64 during the period of their employment. The total cost to the employer of turning over 15 of these employees will be $2,460,744! It is staggering when you do the sums like this.

Most businesses, especially small businesses like this one, could find better uses for their $2+Million! Investing just 10% of this cost into a well-structured rewards program can increase employee retention by up to 40%! A good recruitment strategy can also reduce your chance of mis-hire by 90%. A good performance management program can increase productivity by 20 - 30%!

So why waste money on an "extensive staff turnover exercise" which produces no positive outcome for your business at all, when a fraction of the cost, wisely invested in developing good HR system will not only directly save you money, but positively impact on your bottom line!

Power2Motivate is an online employee rewards management platform. It has and no set up fees and no ongoing monthly administration fees. You only pay for the points you reward! By investing in employee rewards in you business, you can increase your organisational profitability through reduced turnover, better engagement and higher productivity. As Power2Motivate does not charge ongoing administration fees, your rewards investment goes directly to your employees. Click on the link to check out Power2Motivate!

Do the World Youth Day Laws Institutionalise Discrimination in NSW?

The New South Wales Government has introduced far reaching laws for World Youth Day that provide police with extensive powers to arrest protesters and anyone deemed to be causing an "annoyance" to WYD Pilgrims, and issue fines of up to $5,500. Those in opposition to the laws state they are an infringement on civil liberties, whilst the government states that the laws are necessary to ensure order during the festival. The validity of the laws are now being challenged in the New South Wales Supreme Court.

Interestingly, the laws and the debate around the powers they provide to inhibit protests and opposition to the Pope and the World Youth Day festival open up another question: Do laws such as those introduced by the government for World Youth Day institutionalise discrimination?

It is important to note that this blog is not being anti-Catholic (or any faith for that matter) in examining this issue, and it certainly isn't our intention to criticise the celebration of any group in a festival such as World Youth Day. Our question is merely directed at whether the New South Wales government is discriminating against people of other religions, and those who have no religion, by limiting their right to free speech and peaceful protest during the World Youth Day festival. In short, should laws be made at the advantage of one group, where the laws infringe upon the freedoms of other group(s).

As John Stuart Mill stated in On Liberty:

"The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest."

Interestingly, the New South Wales Anti-Discrimination Act 1977 does not make it unlawful to discriminate against someone on the basis of their religion. Precedents have been made in making it unlawful to discriminate against another on the basis of their ethno-religious background, but there is a clear defining difference between this and Religious Discrimination. In passing legislation that seeks to provide people of a Catholic faith a higher level of civil liberty than people who oppose the Catholic faith, or support a different religion (or no religion) the government could be seen as positively discriminating in favour of Catholics. This in turn institutionalises Religious discrimination within the Statute.

The fathers of Liberty, particularly the great French and US revolutionaries who instilled the concepts of freedom of speech and civil liberties in democracy would be aghast at the New South Wales' government's restrictive legislation. In Australia, we have been fortunate to have been raised within a culture that has historically been very open and free (we've never had to have a revolution or a civil war to demonstrate our independence). "A fair go" is instilled in our culture. So it makes one wonder why the New South Wales Nanny-State feel the need for such draconian laws that remove the basic and fundamental human rights to choice, freedom and protest.

The World Youth Day laws can be seen as a further slippery step towards removing other civil liberties and instilling further discrimination within the Statute, after the APEC laws. Employers are expected to ensure they take all reasonable steps to eliminate discrimination in their workplaces, however the State is able to introduce laws that openly discriminate? It seems a little incongruous to us that this double standard should apply.

Do you have any thoughts about workplace discrimination? Let us know!

Hit by a Bus: Succession Planning for your Organisation

I drove home late Friday night, and as I was getting out of my car on my busy inner-city street, I was nearly taken out by a bus. Admittedly, I was slightly distracted as I was talking on the phone at the time, however it was still terrifying having a big blue Mercedes bear down on me. Rather than having my life flash before my eyes, being the consummate HR Professional that I am, my first consideration was whether the succession planning I had put in place in our organisation was sufficient to ensure that every client got attended to, and every project was able to be picked up and completed.

Succession planning: most people think about it only when it is all too late. It really is an under-rated process in workplace management, but one of the most important things an organisation can do to ensure operations are continuous beyond the career horizon of your employees. Done well, succession planning can also provide ongoing career structure for employees, showing them how they can develop and grow within your organisation.

Many smaller employers often tell me they simply don't have time for succession planning (and many other HR functions) and it is often considered a luxury that HR departments in large organisations can strategise around. However consider this: In a workplace with 20 employees, the loss of just two employees is a 10% loss to the workforce. Consider the same situation in a workplace like Westpac, which employs 29,000 employees across Australia and New Zealand, a loss of the same proportion of employees (10% of employees is the equivalent of 2,900 staff) would make news.

Consider also that in a small business there are fewer people to fill the gap left by employee turnover, so the capacity to keep the business growing and progressing is much more limited in small businesses.

Succession planning is vitally important for businesses of all sizes. As I said at the beginning: it involves the consideration of how your business will continue to function in the event of unexpected employee turnover - or as I like to refer to it the "hit by a bus" scenario. If your three most key people in your organisation were hit by a bus tomorrow, would your business survive? How would those people who remain cope?

To succession plan in your business, you should also take into consideration the following:

• Do you have sufficient staff numbers to continue to operate if you lost just three key staff?
• Are the employees you have on staff sufficiently qualified and skilled to be able to fill key roles within your organisation? What additional training may be needed in order to ensure all core positions are covered?
• Does your organisation promote multi-skilling to reduce the propensity for the organisation to be caught short should a key employee leave unexpectedly?
  
• Do you have a recruitment strategy that aligns your people, their skills and values, with those required by your organisation structure now, and in five years time?

Here are some tips for succession planning in your organisation (whether you have 5 employees, 50 employees or 5,000+ employees):

• Start by developing an organisational chart for your business. Are all positions in the chart filled? If the answer is "No" you need to consider recruiting to fill those unfilled places. Are there people in your organisational chart covering more than one position? If the answer to this question is "Yes" you have a situation where some jobs are being undertaken as a secondary job by some employees. This usually means insufficient time is being dedicated to that secondary position, and it is not getting done as well as it would if it was the dedicated duty of a single employee. If that position is part of your core business, you really should consider recruiting some more employees to fill the gap.
  
• Your organisation chart will also show you where the career paths are within your organisation. This allows you to developed the skills of current employees and providing them with opportunities to grow with your business.
• You can also consider running a staff survey to find out why employees enjoy working for your business; what areas you can improve on; to ascertain what areas of your organisation interest employees for development purposes; to determine skills shortages; assess the management of people within your organisation, and to identify what motivates your employees.
• Build a training and development plan that aims to ensure you are hiring, retaining and developing the staff you need for not and for the future growth of the business.
• If you don't already have one, develop a recruitment process and strategy that ensures your business is competitive in the current labour market.
• Implement an internal mentoring system that provides employees with a buddy in management as a way for employees to develop some management skills before they are placed into a management role (don't just assume that your employees have inherent skills in financial management, budgets, people management, rostering and reporting).

If you need assistance in building a succession plan for your organisation, one of our consultants can work with you, your management team and your employees to build a plan that provides your organisation with the security that it will continue to operate efficiently even if key employees leave unexpectedly. Click on the link to contact us about your succession planning needs!

Compliance & Culture: June Edition

Every fortnight The EI Group publishes a free email newsletter that provides information on legislative change, best practice compliance and tips on improving workplace culture. Below is a selection of the articles for the month of June which you may find of interest:

Toxic Avengers: Combating Bullying in Your Workplace

Culture: It's More Than Just Yoghurt in the Morning

Employers on a Rocklea Road after AWA Era Ends

The No Stress Guide to Managing Injured Workers

Can Union Officials Enter your Workplace Uninvited?

The Workplace Safety Darwin Awards: Poor Safety Practices Lead to Serious Injury

Handshake Deals and Verbal Agreements can Cause a Nightmare for Your Business

Sexual Harassment: Managers and Supervisors Acting Like Donkeys!

Awards Increasingly Becoming a Workplace Nightmare

Please click on the link to subscribe to The EI Group Newsletter.

HR is Key to Business Prosperity

It never ceases to amaze me how many people in business (both business owners and senior managers) still under-rate the contribution of good human resource management to overall business performance. More so, it astounds me that often HR is viewed as an administrative function within an organisation, and not as a discrete and specialised skill set that can offer a strong return to the company's bottom line.

Perhaps this occurs because the actual contribution of HR to organisational growth and profitability has long been considered difficult to measure, and is not as obvious as that of direct income-generating business units (like sales and marketing). Nonetheless, it is becoming increasingly apparent that there is a widening gap between those organisations that value the contribution of HR to their businesses and fully embrace the strategic contribution of specialist HR managers, and those businesses that opt out of focusing on HR Management. As such, there is a growing body of evidence that provides strong direct correlation between good HR management and better organisational performance.

So, what are so many businesses missing out on, and why?

Human Resource Management is more than organising employee birthday cakes and welcome morning teas. It is the practical application of a wealth of management theory into the better management of people in a workplace, providing for the alignment of people and business values, to produce a collaborative environment conducive to higher productivity. It is the point at which organisational compliance and positive culture converge that represents best practice human resource management.

At the end of the day it is a really simple formula: If people are happy and engaged in what they do, they do it better and for longer. It is in meeting this goal that so many businesses fall short by assuming that employee happiness derives from a simple set of administrative processes, rather than a considerate and ongoing exploration of what we like to call the "Workplace Human Condition".

The term "bread and circuses" was first used in Ancient Rome to express the two assumed fundamental needs for people to be generally satisfied: sustenance and entertainment. Many employers mistakenly take this same perspective to their HR Management: if you pay people a wage, and throw in friday-night drinks, people will therefore be engaged with their work, right? WRONG!

People are complex, the needs of a particular group of people (for example, Generation Y) are not homogeneous, nor do individual's needs stay the same over time, what motivates and engages employees differs from person-to-person. Businesses that manage to address the complex and ever-changing needs of their employees end up performing exponentially better than those that do nothing or following the Roman Imperial example. It is about creating a sustained competitive advantage for your business through the one element that is not easily replicable by your competition: Your People! Chairman of South-West Airlines in the United States, Herb Kelleher said it best when he said:

"Our costs are lower because our productivity is higher, which is achieved through the dedicated energy of our people. We have the same equipment as other airlines. The difference is when a plane pulls into a gate, our people run to meet it!"

I don't believe in making such grandiose statements without the research to back it up, so here are some figures for you to digest:

• The average number of employees engaged at any one time is 21%! Or put another way 79% of the workforce are not fully engaged in their work. At best this means they are coming in and just "going through the motions" (things are at least still getting done) at worst, employees are not contributing or being destructive to the business operations. And don't forget that is on average - the best workplaces have higher levels of employee engagement (meaning there are workplaces where employee engagement is in single digits). Where does your workplace fit into this spectrum?
• Accordingly to David Maister if you increase employee engagement in your business by just 20% (for the average business this means lifting engagement from just 21% to 25%) productivity will increase by 40%! That's exponential growth!
• Workplaces that have lower levels of employee engagement have correspondingly higher levels of employee turnover. When the average cost of replacing an employee is 14 times their salary, direct bottom-line benefits can be seen by improving HR performance and employee engagement!
• The book Contented Cows Give More Milk by Bill Callette and Richard Hadden examines ways of creating a positive workplace culture and the impact this will have on employee engagement and organisational performance. According to this text, organisations that focus on employee engagement rather than just their bottom-line performance, have an average net income increase of 756% compared to just 1% for other organisations; and their stock performance increases by an average of 901% compared to 74% for other organisations.

Amazing statistics like these are the reason why I wonder why so many business owners and senior managers continue to under-rate HR Management and fail to introduce comprehensive people management strategies in their businesses. Why do they risk the sustainability and future prosperity of their businesses in this way? When so much due diligence is done on suppliers and product development, why do business owners ignore their major client facing asset?

So I will leave you now with this warning: Ignore Your People At Your Peril! Stop second guessing how to make your workplace more productive and engage some professional HR Management experts with the knowledge and skills to provide you with the answers.

The EI Group can help your business grow through your people by providing comprehensive strategic and tactical people management covering:

• Training and development;
  
• Remuneration and performance recognition;
• Rewards and incentives;
• Policies and procedures;
• Occupational health and safety;
• General workplace compliance
• Culture auditing, employee surveys and 360-degree reviews

Click on the link to contact us about how we can give your business the expertise it needs to better engage your people.

It's appropriate that a man who is globally recognised as having worked miracles in the US airline industry during a time when many airlines were boarding on bankruptcy, has the last word:

"The customer is not number one, the employee is number one. Get it right with the employee and they will get it right with your customers" - Herb Kelleher

Best regards in prosperity!