Management

Employment Contracts
Staff Entitlements

Core Agreement Information

All staff that are employed in any organisational size are covered by the basic rights set out in the Australian Fair Work Act 20091 in the National Employment Standards (NES). There are a number of entitlements all staff are given by the NES. The casual employees base set of entitlements are: (i) unpaid carer leave, (ii) unpaid compassionate leave, (iii) community service leave, and for casuals over 12 months in a business, the employee has the right to (iv) request flexible arrangements and, (v) has access to parental leave.

For non-casual workers the NES provides: (i) minimum weekly hours, (ii) requests for flexible working arrangements, (iii) parental leave and related requirements, (iv) annual leave, (v) personal carer and compassionate leave, (vi) community service leave, (vii) long service leave, (viii) public holidays, (ix) notice of termination, (x) redundancy pay, and every employer must  (xi) provide each employee with a copy of the Fair Work Information Sheet.

The Fair Work Information Sheets provide employees with information about awards, the Fair Work Act, workplace rights, flexible hours, termination, the Fair Work Ombudsman, the Fair Work Commission and other important information on how to find help should there be a situation which requires assistance. The core agreement also typically states how a dispute resolution or unfair dismissal may be handled (e.g. should the employee performs a specified unlawful act then the organisation reserves the right to dismissal).

The entitlements for each employee should be clearly expressed in the core employment contract that is issued when an offer of employment in made. The purpose of having a contract in place is so that the employee is not worse off than the minimum legal entitlement. The contract should be very clear on what the employee is given (including enterprise and other registered agreements), probation, safety, how to resolve disputes3 and dismissal.

Another legal right which is also expressed in an employment contract is the right to work without harassment and bullying behaviour4. This legal right also applies to work experience students, outworkers, volunteers/contractors and volunteers. Often there is a paragraph (otherwise known as a “clause”) in the core contract which talks about this right.

In some form or another, the core contract will talk about  reading more detailed information in another section. These sections are called the Appendices which also apply to the contract, but they are flexible and they may change. So what are these additions?

Appendices to the Core Employment Contract

These are the important sheets of information that are “companions” the core contract. There is far too much information to possibly write into a core contract which is why these additions are a good idea. The core contract should focus on the main entitlements and a paragraph is added in that core contract to point to reading about any industry related, company-centric or role specific additional information in another section at the back of the contract. After treating the additions in this way, the core contract is protected, stays in place, is valid. If a change needs to happen to those additions it’s easy to do without it affecting the core agreement.

These additions are often called “Appendices” or “the Appendix” and are usually numbered (e.g. Appendix 1, Appendix 2, Appendix 3, etc). Each organisation can have different information sheets in their Appendices. For example detailed information about the Conditions of Service, Company Culture Statement, Pre-existing Injury Declarations and the all important Position Description.

Position Descriptions (PDs) are handled as a separate item so that they are flexible enough to grow as the organisation grows. PDs allow the employee to perform a variation in their role without having to renegotiate their entire terms of employment. If the role has changed significantly then a whole new contract does need to be provided to capture all the new and relevant information changes (including pay rate scale changes).

The Flip Side: Business Owner Protection

As weighted as it may appear toward the employee, employment contracts are also in place to protect the Business and the Business Owner. It provides clear, written, documentation that covers the business should the employee believe they are entitled to more or were not provided with equal benefit.

Take for example the story of a plumbing organisation in Victoria who allegedly underpaid their 20 year old employee $26,8825. The plumbing business did not specify in writing or in any formal way, that the staff member was an apprentice, they did not sign the employee up to an apprenticeship and incorrectly paid the employee lower apprentice rates (a third of a full rate employee). The business also did not correctly provide leave entitlements, travel allowances, pay slips, overtime hours and a multitude of other basic entitlements during the three months when the employee was working with them.

Not providing an proper and clear employment contract meant the business was left wide open for legal action and, in this case, a hefty bill. An employee contract would have resolved issues of entitlements, rates, hours etc, and provided the employee with the opportunity to either accept or reject the role before they began. Saving the business on time and thousands of dollars in a potential lawsuit.

The additional information (or Appendix) of a position description must accompany contracts and advertisements for available or existing roles. It  provides added protection for businesses because it lists out the specific tasks that the role is required to perform (and expected targets). So coupled with the core contract, the position description gives a very fair view of what a role will involve.

Making it clear to prospective recruitment candidates (and existing staff) what you need in your business, what they will receive and how they will be asked to contribute to your business, will not only provide much needed protections, but it makes good leadership sense.

Leadership in a business means actively communicating a message of expectations from the offset. Providing clarity to the business and all its members means everyone knows what they need to do to meet expectations.

Fringe Benefits of Contracts and PDs

On a lighter note, there are many positive benefits of position descriptions and employment contracts that goes far beyond legal requirements and protections. When a business has successfully attracted the mix of staff that they need to grow the business further, these documents act as a guide to greater things.

For example, staff may informally view their position description as a “baseline” for performance, where they will seek out what is required to go above and beyond those expectations. This adds value to an organisation, brings a new dimension to your customer’s experiences, and may even provide repeat or referral customers for a business.

In many businesses position descriptions are used as a form of promotion or goal setting for those staff members who want to move into a more senior role. The staff may request a copy of the senior role and can make personal efforts to go above and beyond their role in order to be taken into consideration for the desired position.

Another use for position descriptions and contracts is to enable a person in a role to expand, learn new skills, provide incentive for greater pay scales, and add more knowledge and expertise to their experience in the business.

Promoting a positive attitude toward position descriptions and contract entitlements can start a new wave of culture in a business. It attracts more motivated staff and creates a unified team that focuses on goals, customers, and all the other areas that makes a business, a great one.

Online References
1 https://www.legislation.gov.au/Series/C2009A00028
2 https://www.fairwork.gov.au/awards-and-agreements/employment-contracts
3 https://www.fairwork.gov.au/employee-entitlements/bullying-and-harassment#who-is-protected-from-bullying-in-the-workplace
4 http://www.civiljustice.info/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=adreval
5 https://www.fairwork.gov.au/about-us/news-and-media-releases/2016-media-releases/september-2016/20160907-pulis-plumbing-litigation

Additional Resources
Employment Contract Templates are available from Action Centre.
https://www.ahri.com.au/assist/contracts

It’s Monday morning and the boss walks in. Everyone stops talking about their morning mid-sentence, shuffles to their stations and begins tapping on their keyboard, measuring up, drilling, cleaning...anything. The number one reason why staff leave their jobs is that they don’t like their boss (1). Effective leadership is one of the most talked about and elusive skills to master because it involves two unknown factors - other people, and other people’s personalities.

Working out your own personality and potential leadership style(s) is a good place to start. There are many different experts who categorise leadership styles. For example, David Coleman has six emotional leadership styles: Visionary, Coaching, Affiliative, Democratic, Pacesetting and Commanding leaders (2). Each have their positives and negatives according to the groups and situations they manage. However most widely used group of leadership styles are: Laissez-faire (free reign to staff), Autocratic (single decision maker with little input from others), Participative (democratic decision making), Transactional (use of rewards for meeting performance standards), and Transformational (high communication/visibility in the team, big picture focus, delegate small tasks) (3)

Once you have formed a picture of which type of leadership style you may be then the next step is to ask yourself what does that your style say about you? A 360 Degree Review can be drawn up although it not necessarily reliable (4) on its own as there are personal relationships and biases at play, never the less it may be useful. Perhaps ask yourself in addition to surveying your staff - how do I feel when you lead? Am I getting the responses that I am looking to achieve? That is the core of leadership - influencing others to willingly do what you would like for them to do without fear or hostility.

Humanising yourself as a boss is important. To be ‘a person’ and not an entity creates a personal connection where sympathy, respect and listening to others invigorates a team, to the point where you can even throw down a challenge and they take it on. Dale Carnegie wrote about this kind of influencing in How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1936 - a book which has since been re-published over 30 million times. Influencing rather than telling people what they should and shouldn’t do is more effective in the long run. People need to feel a sense of being part of something great and that they have made a difference to the world. A great leader understands and activates this innate human need to belong and contribute without arousing resentment. In fact, building rapport with others is central to taking a plan and turning it into a reality.

Influencing others can also operate on a subtler level than knowing styles and techniques. Body language such as ‘matching and mirroring’ another person has been widely recognised as a psychological cue, communicating to the other person that you are on their side. Additionally, and importantly, mirroring and matching actively shows you understand the other person’s feelings and intentions5. Body language is powerful even in situations when perhaps a person is feeling overwhelmed when normally they would curl their shoulders inward and lowering their head, the person instead adopts a “power pose”6 (think Superman and Wonder Woman). This pose automatically increases the levels of cortisol in the body and quickly communicates to the other person high confidence and personal mastery. Even the pace in which we breathe communicates to other people our thoughts, moods and intentions. If we breathe at a fast, short pace it shows impatience, worry and in some cases panic. To monitor your breathing as a leader could mean that you adopt an even pace of breath, slower speed of speaking and subsequently communicate to others a calmer consistent personality.

Pulling together the combination of your style, the ability to influence other people and using body language to communicate that you are the type of person that can work positively with other people will create the foundation of a terrific leader.

Now you can picture a new Monday morning. Two people are chatting about their mornings, they give you smile and a nod to say hello. You smile back, ask about their weekends, listen. They let you know what they have on the go that day while another group say hello and get ready for your ten o’clock catch up meeting. Great leadership is more often the result of what isn’t said but done.

References:
1http://humanresources.about.com/od/resigning-from-your-job/a/top-10-reasons-employees-quit-their-job.htm
http://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2015/10/10/why-do-employees-leave-their-jobs-new-survey-offers-answers/#3edb5b3556a9.
http://fortune.com/2015/10/11/common-reasons-for-quitting-job/
2 Goleman D., Boyatzis R. E. and MacKee A. 2002, The New Leaders: Transforming the Art of Leadership Into the Science of Results. Little, Brown Book Group. London United Kingdom.
3 http://smallbusiness.chron.com/5-different-types-leadership-styles-17584.html
4 https://hbr.org/2011/10/the-fatal-flaw-with-360-survey
5http://www.forbes.com/sites/carolkinseygoman/2011/05/31/the-art-and-science-of-mirroring/#29d33a4e56be
6https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are?language=en

Further reading:
Carnegie, D. 1936, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Gallery Books. New York, America.

Turnover is Vanity. Profit is Sanity.

Turnover is interesting to know because it is representing gross monies a business generates for a business. It provides information about the total number of transactions that have occurred within a business in a given sales period without taking other business expenses into account. This is the simplest and most widely used form of describing turnover.

In some businesses turnover refers to how well a business is using its assets and liabilities as compared to its sales. If a business has to spend more to move its inventory and parts than what the revenue of sales are, then maintaining those sales orders are no longer viable. Therefore, businesses with efficient back-end operations manage their assets and reduce their liabilities in order to produce a sale at a decent profit margin.

This is why turnover is a relative term. It refers to the effort level a business expels, in order to gain and fulfil its sales, however the business requires sustainability which can only come from a healthy profit margin.

Which brings the discussion neatly over to profit. In this paper we term profit as a net figure - after the initial sale is made, business expenses are deducted, and the product or service has been rendered to the customer/end user.

Profit is the clearest indicator that a business is thriving and operating at its optimum. For example, Cash Flow or Income Statements detail all deductions and expenses against the total sales revenues. Line items deductions include cost of rent, utilities, salaries, equipment/machinery maintenance and depreciation, cost of stock/inventory, administrative costs etc.

The reason why profit referred to as “the bottom line” is in business statements the profit amount is worked out at the very bottom of the sheet. It is the cold hard fact after all business activity has finished for that period.

Profit is the state of play for all businesses. Sometimes it is better to cease some activities, take a step back, and see where the profits are leaving a business with its current sales orders, than to continue to fulfil more orders only to see lower profit margins.

Further reading:
https://actiontradie.com.au/tools/ebooks

Why is business coaching important?

Managing a business in differing economic times and remaining competitive as well as profitable are key challenges facing Australian businesses. It no longer is a matter of simply demonstrating the ability to sell a product or service in order to be a viable entity. With the proliferation of other business in Australia, businesses are required to develop and maintain their competitive advantage and know how to exercise buying power, respond to threats of substitution, barriers to entry and exit, and others jockeying for position within their own industry1. The business community in Australia has grown at such a staggering rate that in 2013 Australia there were 563,412 small businesses employing approximately 4.5 million people2. Last year, Australian small businesses grew even further to employ over 4.7 million people3.

The extended language of businesses in Australia now includes the ability to deliver on not only operational efficiency but also in areas of sustainability, differentiation, and solid leadership. Coaching has therefore become an integral part of this new wave gaining a steady momentum over the past decade. Business coaching also assists business managers into becoming business leaders. A core area of leadership is the ability to motivate, inspire and produce a higher level of productivity in teams through skills such as modifying behaviours and understanding preferences of behaviour to bring about change4.

Subsequently successful businesses in today’s landscape have increasingly sought relationships with those that can sustain and grow their business in the long term.

What do business coaches do?

Business coaches assist business managers into becoming business leaders. A core area of leadership is the ability to motivate, inspire and produce a higher level of productivity in teams through skills such as modifying behaviours and understanding preferences of behaviour to bring about change4. They take holistic view of a business and also have in depth knowledge and practical experience on how to better market and improve the state of a business on an operational level.

Business coaches such as ActionCoach® create a trusted environment where business owners can analyse, monitor and plan their activities. They can be viewed as pseudo Board of Directors for businesses, and relied upon to give appropriate levels of accountability. A business coach is similar to a sports coach of a major league team, they provide learning opportunities and identify areas to strengthen and maintain. Additionally, a business coach will ask those tough questions which for various reasons have been avoided.

Researching which business coach is suitable to ensure a business owner receives positive results is highly recommended. This can be done by reviewing their online presence and contacting an organisation to discuss their capability. Reputable organisations will offer the ability to reference check their business coaches by way of providing direct access and contact details of their clients.

Are there different styles of business coaching?

Yes. Each business coach has his/her own personal experience and finding the coach that suits an owner is important. The journey that is undertaken is for a year or in many cases, multiple years. Business coaching organisations give owners the opportunity to experience a coach through various events throughout a given year.

The delivery of how coaching is provided also comes in different forms. The most common and effective is one-to-one coaching, where both the business owner and the business coach assess that particular business and arrive at a highly individualised program. Other forms of coaching are delivered through team training, providing interactive experiences for all involved; or a round table boardroom approach where multiple business owners to meet and share their collective views.

SOURCES

1 Porter, Michael E. (1985). Competitive Advantage. Free Press. ISBN 0-684-84146-0.

2 http://www.treasury.gov.au/PublicationsAndMedia/Publications/2012/sml-bus-data

3 http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/8165.0

4 https://www.discprofile.com/what-is-disc/overview/

5 https://actiontradie.com.au/ is an affliated organisation of ActionCoach®

Plan and Achieve - every 90 days

When we hear the saying “never look back unless you’re planning on going there” we agree with it completely. Why visit old ground, over and over again if it’s not getting you anywhere? Although our thoughts agree with the logic, a part of us can’t resist remembering how it used it be - back in the day, and it's true to say that a lot has changed since then - every sector in society has been redeveloped or redefined from education and healthcare to housing and construction. We are now living in a world of constant change. For a business to remain competitive today, decisions need to be made according to what has happened in more recent times like, last year, last month and even last week. The speed of communication is rapid and consumers are used to demanding instant responses due to the spread of social media and technological advances. Building a business into a viable organisation big or small does require a return, but not a return back in time, but a return to learning updated principles of management.

In order to achieve anything of real substance in our personal lives we require to set a goal. In previous papers for One Week At A Time we talked about how writing down goals will ensure that actually have a good chance of working on them. The same applies to business management. Planning ahead using definable goals will shape behaviours, show consequences and influence future decisions (Blanchard & Johnson 2015, pp 83-85).

For the most part, when people are faced with an overwhelmingly large undertaking a common response is to look for the first exit and try and make a run for it. Taking a large vision for a business for example, doubling the profit margin of a business within 6 months, then breaking that down into small activities that will create that change is more palatable and easier for teams to feel they can actually achieve that goal. Success is the sum of small efforts repeated day in and day out and if we make the effort, we will get better (if we don’t, then we won’t) (Goldsmith and Reiter 2015, p139). This thinking comes to the fore when a business develops a 90 Day Plan.

Plan to make small but significant changes

A short term plans help develop commitment within in the business because the goals and activities are relevant, rooted in the ‘now’, and small enough in size that the team can tackle them. Start planning with where the business needs to go in the next 6 months, year and two years, giving a timeframe and deadline to work within. The first actionable plan however is one which focusses on the activities which have a deadline of the preceding 90 days only. This is essentially how 90 day planning works.

Following is a list of what every successful plan includes to ensure a business is on the path to achievement (Tracy 2003, p150):

• Develop a clear vision & purpose
• Write down your goals, defined into top areas of the business
• Prioritise each goal and set a completion date
• Identify key obstacles or difficulties for each goal and organise them as well
• Identify the skills and knowledge that is required to achieve each goal
• Identify which person, group or association will help achieve the goal or goals.

For Business Leaders a personal plan can be incorporated in parallel to include the type of life that that person aims for, including holidays, personal pursuits and other personal goals such as retirement.

Celebrate the battles won

The greatest time to go back in time and reminisce is to celebrate the small battles that your business and team have won in the previous 90 days past. Send the message that the sum of all parts do make the whole and without the people working in a team together those achievements couldn’t have happened. Make the change in the business from could’ve-would’ve-should’ve into…. We-are-doing-it-bigger-and-better. Now. And that’s the true value of 90 Day Planning.

90 Day Planning Template

Please contact Action Centre BusinessCoach, Brett Burden on telephone 1300 971 763 or email brettburden@theactioncentre.com.au to request more information on starting your own 90 Day plan.

References

Blanchard, K., Johnson S., (2015) The New One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey. HarperCollins USA.

Goldsmith M., Reiter M., (2015) Triggers. Crown Business. New York, USA.

Tracy B.(2003) Goals! Berrett-Kohler Publishers, Inc. San Francisco, USA.