Risk, Compliance and
day-to-day operations
EMPLOYMENT AGREEMENTS
When hiring staff you need the terms and conditions to be both lawful and to accurately reflect what has been agreed with your employee. Sometimes selecting the correct contract can be confusing, and if you don’t define days and hours correctly there may be payroll headaches downstream that you want to avoid.
Changing Gear can build templates for full time, part time, fixed term or casual employment agreements so you can easily populate these yourself, or you can provide us with the information and we can produce the entire document for you.
HR POLICIES
Most organisations need at least a few basic policies to ensure employees know what is expected in specific areas that are not usually included in the employment agreement. Whether its a code of conduct, a health and safety policy, or a policy on the prevention of bullying, harassment and discrimination we can develop these for you and write them in a way that is consistent with the culture and tone you want to encourage in your business.
INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATIONS
Dealing efficiently and comprehensively with complaints can be tricky, particularly if that complaint involves a manager. It is difficult to separate your personal views of the parties involved in the situation. To avoid accusations of failing to complete a thorough investigation, or showing favouritism towards one of the parties, it might be worthwhile to call us. Accepting a guiding hand to ensure correct process is followed is one step you can take to avoid costly or embarrassing mistakes.
Changing Gear is licensed under the Private Security Personnel Licensing Authority to complete workplace investigations and key personnel hold a personal Certificate of Approval.
DISCIPLINARY PROCESSES AND EMPLOYEE RELATIONS
It’s not unusual to avoid tackling the difficult conversations – we’re all nice people right? Remember this – “feedback is a dish best served fresh”. Addressing any potential issues at the earliest opportunity gives you the best chance of resolving them positively. Involving specialist advice early will mean that if the situation ultimately ends in termination, you can go through the process without fear of an expensive claim from the employee that you are unable to defend.
Finding the next gear:
Improving individual and
team performance
RECRUITMENT & SELECTION
Have you found you are spending way too much time and energy recruiting? Staff turnover costs on average between 0.5 and 3 times the base salary of an employee, so it makes a lot of financial sense to do it right the first time. They say that if you “recruit hard, you’ll manage easy”, but that can take a lot of time and effort and it is a specialist skillset. Sometimes it pays to get professional help to make sure your hiring decisions don’t just fit today’s needs, but supplement your talent and leadership pipeline, and remove any potential biases. We can provide you with templates for interview questions, screening, and reference checking or we can do it for you. The great thing about working with us is you get to choose!
DEVELOPING YOUR TEAM
Without investing in the ongoing training and development of your team, your business performance will likely stall at best or you will be overtaken by your competitors. From getting a new starter up to speed with a robust induction plan, building skills to have someone ready for promotion, or developing your leaders so they can get better performance from your teams - we’re here to help.
PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
To have a high performing team you need everyone to be working towards the same goals, to be clear about what they are accountable for, and to give them regular feedback about how they are tracking to keep them motivated, focused and engaged. You also need to support them along the journey by removing any barriers that might prevent them from succeeding. Regular reviews, clear feedback and goals are therefore essential to empower your employees to deliver your business plan. But you don’t want to over-engineer it - everyone’s had those ghastly annual reviews hated by both managers and staff in equal measure. How do you get the balance right? Ask us! We will take the all important factor of your unique company culture into account to ensure your performance management system aligns with your culture.
CHANGE LEADERSHIP AND RESTRUCTURING
It’s so important that when you implement changes in your business you do this in a procedurally correct way to avoid, at best, damaging your culture and destroying productivity or, at worst, having employees take time-consuming and costly personal grievances. It’s not difficult to do it right but you may want to get advice very early in the process to avoid the potential pitfalls.
Strategic HR - building long run sustainability through people
HR Strategy and action plans aligned to your business plan
Making sure you have the right talent in place to deliver your business plan probably won’t happen without a well considered HR plan. It ties everything “HR” together. Like the marionette puppet, it considers the linkages and consequential impacts, to ensure all the cogs keep turning.
Most businesses undertake an annual budgeting and planning process, however many do not consider their HR plan is an essential component of the planning process.
We can work with you to develop a winning HR strategy and we can assist in delivering your plan, or support your own team with the implementation.
Culture and Engagement
You don’t want to leave your organisation culture to chance when this is the one thing your competitors are unable to replicate quickly or easily. The culture you have internally, and your employee experience in your business, will reflect all day, everyday, in the way they treat your customers. Your culture also contributes significantly to your employee turnover – ever noticed how things seem to get instantly better when you deal with that one toxic employee? A poor culture can reflect in high employee turnover, high levels of absenteeism, and poor performance by individuals and team. So if you don’t want to have all this wasted time and money, let’s work together to build a plan to focus on creating a great place to work.
Talent Management
High performing talent is a rare commodity. Do you know when you need to utilise a “grow”strategy rather than a “buy”strategy? It’s important that while managing growth and development opportunities for existing staff you are avoiding the risk of downgrading your overall business capability. Knowing which are your critical roles and having a documented succession plan in place will give you peace of mind that your business is not going to stall when you least expect it.
Organisation Design
We all know structure follows strategy, but we often spend too little time thinking about much more than the boxes on the page or the total cost of the revised structure. How well you communicate the What, Why and the How of your new design will determine whether your change succeeds or fails. Successful delivery of a revised organisation design can be the difference between enhancing or hindering inter-departmental collaboration to deliver exceptional service for your customers. Don’t leave this to chance and find yourself reinventing the wheel again in six months’ time.
