It’s important to understand the meaning of Ordinary Hours, particularly in relation to permanent part-time employment as these contracted hours have ramifications for how you roster and pay employees. It’s common in many small businesses for part-time employees to be rostered like casual employees, but there are risks associated with doing this that you should be aware of. Part-time employees are...
HR is Human Resources (or Human Resource Management). It’s concerned with getting the best out of the people who work for you. Every time you add an employee to your business, that person can either contribute to the success of your business or to the failure of your business. They’re either adding value, or taking value away. Your business is reliant...
The Fair Work Ombudsman is targeting restaurants and cafes after uncovering widespread wage underpayments in the industry. And the fines are massive. For example, just this month a burger restaurant in Melbourne (Burger Buzz) was fined more than $300,000 for underpayment of wages, which excludes the cost of repaying the underpaid wages.
A lot of small to medium sized businesses don’t have written employment contracts in place. With more than 20 years’ experience in HR, we are aware of a lot of problems that businesses can encounter when they don’t have employment contracts in place or where they have poor employment contracts in place. A lot of these problems can be prevented.
Here are 10 reasons why it’s good practice to have employment contracts in place:
There’s an exciting area of psychology that helps us to understand that much of what we learn occurs without us even realising that we have learnt it.
There is no conscious effort involved in this learning – it just happens through exposure, such as by spending lots of time with another person who is skilled in an area that we are not.
This type of learning is called Implicit Learning, which simply means learning that occurs outside of our conscious awareness.
It’s that time of year again: performance review time…argh!!! Nobody seems to look forward to doing these, not the HR people who have to hassle managers to do them, not the managers who have to conduct them, and certainly not the employees who can stress about their review for weeks in advance.
And what a tangled web of complexity we’ve made the performance review process, with tortuous online systems, endless lists of behaviours to be rated on 5 or 10 point Likert scales, and written responses to question after question. Hard copy systems can be 10 pages long.
There are so many things a manager has to be on top of, so many important things! If you’re a manager, you may need to manage budgets, roster staff, organise promotions, put out communications, attend meetings, deal with problem staff, and meet with clients. It’s an endless list of “important things”. Add to that list, providing employees with direction and feedback. Now here’s the thing. We all know that providing employees with performance feedback is important, but it’s an important thing to do amongst an endless list of important things to do.
I’ve been working in Human Resources for more than 20 years, many of those years as a Human Resource Manager, in a broad range of industries including government, manufacturing, logistics, and pharmacy. I don’t love everything about the profession I have chosen, but one of the aspects I do love is that almost daily I have managers confide in me about what they think about the people that work for them. They tell me what they like about their star performers and they whinge to me about the people they are having problems with.