Kim Bigg
All right, welcome to episode 10 of Show Me The Perks. We have Cecilia White with us today and I’m really pleased to have Cecilia joining us. She’s the second female guest of Show Me The Perks, which is still too few. We should need to level that up pretty soon. really pleased to have Cecilia on. And Cecilia, can you kick us away with providing us a brief of your career and where you’ve come to be where you are today?
Cecilia White
Sure, thanks for having me. Glad to be the second female, second of many. Thanks Liz for being the first. yeah, career wise I, well I’m a lawyer by trade, that’s my background, so graduated from University of Adelaide with a Bachelor of Law and Arts. The arts were the fun bit, and the law was…
Kim Bigg
Not so fun
Cecilia White
And then went in pretty much straight into private practice from university for around 10 years or so at load firm, Norman Waterhouse. So went straight into employment and industrial law, dabbled a little bit in insurance, little bit in public liability.
Kim Bigg
Was the employment law when you were starting, thinking it’s very different to where it is now? it a… different. Was it an infant industry almost at that point?
Cecila White
Yes and no. mean, it was still pretty decent, but it was just very different landscape really back then. We’ve had, you know, since then we’ve had work choices and now the Fair Work Act. I’ve been through three lots of massive legislation changes. But definitely the nature of it has changed a lot. But I always just knew that I wanted to do… If I was going to be a lawyer, I wanted it to be something to do with people. I wasn’t into contracts and transactions that just bored me. So, the employment law side of things sounded to be quite a good fit. Was that family law, which was not very. Yeah. The people part. So, I did that for about 10 years and then went and worked for the government, actually, for a little while, for about eight years in the government. in there…
Kim Bigg
What was your role there?
Yeah, so I worked in the Attorney General’s department, but in the Equal Opportunity Commission, which was part of that department. And so that’s like an independent government agency that deals with complaints of discrimination, sexual harassment.
Kim Bigg
Not just in government organisations, but across the Right across the board.
Cecilia White
So it’s like your ombudsman.
Kim Bigg
Your independent mediator type person to the umpire.
Cecilia White
That’s it. So I did lot of mediation conciliations in there. Was acting commissioner for a little while as well. and again got to be involved in heaps of legislative changes, which was really interesting during that time. And then this job came up at Perks, then part of the Perks business, was an HR consulting role, which I thought was quite a good blend of what I’d been doing as a lawyer, but then also the stuff I’d been doing in conflict resolution and that side of things. So was a good opportunity to bring it all together. But I’ve always, in whatever capacity, worked with employers, really, in different ways, helping employers, business owners manage.
Kim Bigg
And mostly sitting on the side of the employers in terms of them managing their staff.
Cecilia White
Definitely. Yeah. I haven’t done a lot in the way of employee representation. It kind of depends on, you know, in law anyway, you land in a firm and they either do one or the other typically. So I was in an employer representative.
Cecilia White
You never deviated, you were happy to stay in that area. Yeah, I did. I like working with business owners and working through those tangley problems, representing employees is obviously a really important part of the landscape, but it’s a different skill set, I think, that you need because obviously there’s a lot more personal investment and such in that area, but I really like working with employers.
Kim Bigg
Fantastic. And I’m sure they all like working with you. And just to give you a, just to give us all a bit of background, Cecilia White is Director of Perks People Solutions. So that’s where you’ve come to know. Perhaps can you provide us a bit of a background or just a bit of an understanding as to what Perks People Solutions, what your role is there and more broadly, what Perks People Solutions capabilities. What is their capability both in sort of mainly in HR consulting, which is your area of expertise?
Cecilia White
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So Pex People Solutions, we’re essentially outsourced HR and recruitment consultants. So I look after the HR side of things. I’m the Director in that team. We’ve got a half a dozen also HR consultants with a whole different range of qualifications and skill sets. But basically, we help businesses who don’t have their own HR resource or maybe they have one but they just need a little bit of extra help from time to time and tap into that external expertise so that’s pretty much we’re like a virtual HR manager if you like.
In a nutshell, but again, working across a whole heap of different HR matters.
Kim Bigg
How many people in the team overall?
Cecilia White
So on the HR side, we have, there’s nearly nine of us now.
Kim Bigg
On recruiting side?
On recruiting side, I think there’s seven on the recruiting side. A couple of our teams sit across both parts of the business, which is good. And it’s a great model when you’ve got both the recruitment and the HR.functions working really nicely together as you can imagine we cross -refer a lot.
Kim Bigg
On the one side you help the recruiters help businesses and clients get people in and then when things go a bit awry or just to help manage the HR function the HR can tell it step in to support once you’ve got the service. Yeah, yeah, does kind of work well.
Cecilia White
They hire them, we fire them.
Kim Bigg
Hopefully you’re not firing them all the time.
Cecilia White
Not all the time, not all the time. We try and prevent that. Or mediating them or otherwise. Yeah, that’s right.
Kim Bigg
And just to put that into perspective, you’ve got, there’s about 18 or 17 people starting in your team at the moment. So this started, so PPS started, I’m going to say in 15, 16, something like that?
Cecilia White
Well, 2018, guess, officially. I was with PERCS a few years prior to that, just with running the HR consulting side. we spotted the opportunity to beef up, I guess, the recruitment offering, and that’s when Perks People Solution formed with Matt Hobby and his business.
Kim Bigg
So you’ve taken it from a team of, I’m gonna say, four or five in 2018 through to about 16 or 17 now.
How have you evolved or how has the industry evolved more generally and how has PPS evolved to take up that opportunity in last five, six, seven years?
Cecilia White
Good question. It’s evolved a lot. We’ve seen massive changes in that, even just in that short space of time and the demand, I think, for support for business owners as things become a lot more complex for business owners in terms of, you know, the compliance with the law, but also just how do we remain competitive as an employer? How do we make sure we are still attracting, retaining really good people? That’s been a massive change in focus, I think, now. Humans just aren’t seen as just a resource now. It’s actually, they’re an asset, you know.
Kim Bigg
So a change in mentality from and really from the business owner, you, and not to think back all the way back to your original Norman Waterhouse days, but in some ways the mentality that needs to be taken from business owners in how they, their understanding of staff and how to get the best out of them, is that, it’s a big definitely.
Cecilia White
I think people get it now. They get that actually the success of our business depends our people, they’re everything. You don’t have a business unless you’ve got good people. So what’s our role to play as an employer in creating that, sustaining that, getting the good people, keeping the good people, being able to manage out the ones that aren’t, you know, aligned with that. It’s a total shift from I think where it was back in the day when I was at Norman Waterhouse where it was all very black and white, pretty transactional. well, if that person leaves, we’ll just get another one in. It’s not like that anymore. It’s a lot harder. The market’s really different.
Kim Bigg
Yeah, there’s a war for talent across the board, isn’t there? Seemingly. yeah, I guess, yeah, it’s gonna, it’s gonna, it’s here to stay, it would say in terms of the war for talent and the need to, you know, change mindsets and work out what’s best for employees.
Cecilia White
Yeah, and I reckon the seismic shift there was COVID because what we’ve definitely noticed is since then staff, employees, people just aren’t prepared put up with a workplace that isn’t engaging and doesn’t value them. It’s just, it’s just, don’t put up with it anymore. And that mobility, people move around a lot more. So employees just have to work harder, I think, at that and maintaining that stability.
Kim Bigg
It hasn’t helped having a 4 unemployment rate across the board as well. It makes it incredibly tight. So think every business owner out there would be feeling that no matter which industry you’re in. Yeah, feeling like if you lose a good staff, it’s going to be hard to get another one. And so it becomes a defensive ploy to say, I’m better off trying not to lose staff rather than having to fight through the recruitment phase because that’s difficult angle at the moment. How has, with all of that in mind, in the changing industry, how has PPS, or Perks People Solutions adapted their services they deliver to business owners through that phase?
Cecilia White
Well, aside from just purely just growing our capacity to be able to meet the demand, what we’ve done is really build out our ability to provide not only the, I guess what you would call the reactive support. I’ve got an issue with this employee. Can you help me? Performance, manage them, move them on, turn it around, whatever. Like a lot of the work, we used to, it was quite reactive. Now what we’ve done is built out skill set and our offering to do more of the proactive development work, know, organisation development, exactly.
How do we upskill managers, coach managers, build good value bases in organizations, build employee engagement. That’s now a huge part of what we do. And we’ve built out with our great consultants, Collette Ordish and others that work in that space have really upped that offering because there’s absolutely a much greater need and demand for it. Again, I reckon since COVID, I think that was the real
Kim Bigg
The employee retention has become paramount in whatever you can do to…I mean, you get the employee retention on the one hand, but hopefully there’s also some improvements in your business moreover because your organisational development and skillset means you’re operating more efficiently.
Cecilia White
Yeah, actually then hits your bottom line really in the day, your productivity, performance, but also just your reputation in the market, whether that’s with potential people who might come and work with you, but it’s also your customers, your clients, where it gets out, particularly in a town like Adelaide, businesses become known as being, they’re great operators, they treat their people well, they’ve got good values, good culture, that stuff becomes quite known, particularly I reckon in the Adelaide market. So that’s worth investing. And that’s definitely what we’ve seen companies, employers, business owners, much more willing to invest in that side of things, that preventative proactive work and not just being ready to deal with stuff when it goes wrong.
Kim Bigg
Yeah. Because it becomes a harder problem to deal with there than meeting the challenge head on of just looking after your business and your staff in a much better way from the outset. Defensive strategy almost. I’ll jump onto a different phase here. This podcast is commonly all about small and medium business owners and the challenges that they face and how they work their way through those. So, I’m going to throw sort of a scenario to you if you like. This is around…What would someone do if they were starting out in business? Let’s imagine they’re a plumbing business or anything along those lines where they say, right, I’ve got a couple of staff, I’m starting off, been going for a couple of months now. What should they be thinking about at the outset of saying, I’m employing some people?
Where might Perks People’s solutions come into it? But just more broadly, what things should they be thinking about, even from the outset? It’s like the old question, okay, so you want to employ a person. What does that mean? What do you need to think about?
Cecilia White
What do I need in my little start -up kit? So, there’s a couple of fundamentals that we would recommend anyone, even if you’re only employing one person. But certainly, as you employ more and more, obviously the starting point is employment contracts. We see a lot of handshake and verbal offers and
Kim Bigg
verbal start on Monday, we’ll give you 30 bucks an hour, that’ll be fine won’t it?
Cecilia White
Yeah, and it’s all happy days until it’s not.
Kim Bigg
And what have you got to think about there? I mean there’s probably award wages and things. Definitely award wages. what they think is $30 an hour might not be because they’re asking them to work 60 hour weeks or something.
Cecilia White
That’s it, you know they’re like, oh we’re paying them above all, at flat rate we’re fine. That requires a bit more work. know rigor to it. So contracts that have proper wage rates in them and are compliant with whatever the particular award. Most employees in Australia are covered by an award. So that’s where you’re gonna start. And it doesn’t need to be a 20 page contract. It can be fit for purpose, but you’ve gotta have something in place. And I think there’s also a bit of a misunderstanding that if someone’s casual, you don’t really need a contract. Or in fact, if someone’s casual more now than ever, you need a contract. There’s so much uncertainty about what is even a casual. That’s why contracts are super important. Things like good HR policies and procedures, again, fit for purpose. You don’t need a 500 page policy manual if you’ve got five staff, but you do need some fundamentals. Just your foundations. And it’s always a sort of thing you can build on as you grow. But there’s a handful of things. There’s probably 10 or so HR policies that any employer wants to have in place from the get go.
There’s other things like, you know, different forms and templates, which just for ease of running.
Kim Bigg
induction How to induct people. They turn up. they have a high vis on? Safety they just turn up in their old school jumper.
Cecilia White
That’s right. Your sandals, your clothes, clothes shoes. We don’t do a lot in the safety space, but we obviously, we integrate with a lot of safety work because it all comes under the banner of people management. But the other thing is which people often forget or don’t realise maybe the importance of it, is just job descriptions, which sounds very HRE, but it’s actually a really awesome document to have in place for a new starter, because everyone then understands exactly what am I here to do? What does good look like in this role? And it becomes a real cornerstone for a heap of conversations.
Kim Bigg
They often start out really basic, and if you use the plumbing example, they might say, look, just come along and you can help me out with, you know,the next, I’ve got half a dozen jobs I’m working on at the moment and you’ll be an extra pair of hands. But then you turn up and you go, well, they might need to use a Bobcat, or they might need to use an excavator and how do you know whether they’ve actually been, know, know how to use that, are the expectations? You know, I guess there’s lots of little things, just worksite management as much as anything. How
how they work in with your clients and on the other end. So I imagine, yeah, it seems simple. I’m just gonna employ someone because it’s gonna help me, but you gotta be prepared for what comes with that. And I guess that’s part of what Perks People Solutions has been providing for SMEs for a little while now is just supporting them to do the right thing so they don’t get caught out later.
Cecilia White
Exactly, getting set up well from the beginning. And then you know you’ve got good solid foundations. And it’s a lot easier then to deal with, issues, queries, disagreements, whatever it might be going forward if you know you’ve got that stuff to go back to and it’s clear.
Kim Bigg
And obviously once they start, there’s other trainings that just come along, along the way. Things like, you know, how people should be acting and this is some of the changes in the employment environment as well. There’s things around, I believe, business owners and directors have a positive duty to ensure that there’s no harassment in their organisation and otherwise, maybe you can elaborate a bit more. I’m only vaguely aware of these and I probably should be more aware of them, given my role of Perks. But I’m certainly aware that there’s a lot of positive duty to be aware of what you’re doing to prevent harassment in your workplace and things like that. How does PPS…
changes have happened in that area and how does PPS support clients in those situations as the employment journey continues on.
Cecilia White
Yeah so probably the biggest change most recently is what you’ve just touched on is that introduction of a new positive duty for employers to prevent sexual harassment specifically and sex -based harassment some other sort of similar behaviours. So we’ve been used to I think in work health and safety world understanding that yes, employees have an obligation to put safe practices in place to maintain work health and safety. That’s pretty understood. So this is almost like an extension of that, but specifically about sexual harassment. So this is creating a fair bit of activity for business. And it doesn’t matter how small or large your business is, you’ve pretty much got the same set of obligations. Obviously, they were taken to count resources, that sort of thing. But even the smallest of small businesses is required to do and it’s just shifting it from, that’s all right, when things happen we just deal with it really well, so we’re fine, we’re compliant. That’s what used to be the case. that’s not enough to just deal with things when they arise. You’ve got to put in place a heap of things around training and policies and whole range of stuff to do the preventative bit.
Kim Bigg
How well known do you think this is out in the market in general? If you, you, I mean, are you getting clients coming to you going, I had no idea that this was a thing. I mean, how well has this, has the cut through been from the government enacting this new legislation and then getting it out there? Do you think most employers know that this is something they need? This positive duty has changed?
Cecilia White
Yeah, really good question. No, I don’t think they do, to be honest with you.
Kim Bigg
The bigger ones probably do because they have HR connections.
Cecilia White
Exactly, exactly. And I reckon some industries are probably more across it than others. For example, hospitality industry has been fairly hammered with the messaging for some time now. So I would be surprised if there weren’t people in that industry who were at least had a pretty decent understanding that there’s been some changes, but I would argue there’s a huge amount of the employer population out there that haven’t quite got the
Kim Bigg
Well, sit in the world of, if something happens, I know I’ve got to deal with it carefully and sensibly, as opposed to the world of, no, you actually have a positive duty to ensure that there’s no sexual harassment and sitting there saying, you know, I’ll just deal with it as it comes, she’ll be right, is not going to cut it as far as an excuse when it comes to, you when issue arises coming up.
Cecilia White
Totally and I think what will be super interesting is to see what’s going to happen in those scenarios with employers. Not interesting if you’re the employee question, the employer in question. an academic point of view it’d be really interesting to see how Fair Work deals with these cases. What are the penalties going to be? What’s that going to look like in terms of compensation or damages or other sorts of orders.
Kim Bigg
How they evaluate the scenario where someone says, I didn’t know, you know, just how, how, you know, critical they’re going to be of that. the fact that they should know. And in terms of, you know, helping SMEs to support them on this change from sort of, I’ll call it. Negative duty is not the right call, but defensive duty or, you know, sitting on your laurels or leaning back in your chair if you like, in terms of how you deal with these things towards leaning forward in your chair and turning into it. How does PPS support our SME clients?
Cecilia White
On the back of all of this, what we thought would be helpful was to develop like a bit of a self audit tool that businesses can use. So they go away and do a bit of all of mirrors stuff and go, right, how are we looking here? Under this new set of requirements and do a bit of an assessment. And then that spins out some red flags. Here’s what you’re missing. If you’ve got some great things in place already, maybe, or maybe you’re doing stuff, but you just haven’t documented it. That spins out a list of things, actions, I guess, that they can do.
Kim Bigg
This is something they can do pretty easily. Maybe even just a… It might end up telling them that they’re not as bad as they think and they’ve just got a couple of things that need to be worked on. Exactly. maybe a piece of mind.
Cecilia White
Yeah. A lot of people, good employers, will have a lot of this stuff in place already. It might just need a little bit of an uplift. It might just need to be built out in certain areas. Things like they might be doing some training, but maybe they’re only it once every blue moon and it needs to be a bit more regular than that or maybe they’ve got a policy which hasn’t been dusted off and looked at for quite a while, it’s bit stale, needs a bit of a refresh. Often it doesn’t actually take that much to get an employer back into a pretty decent position to be able to meet that positive duty.
Kim Bigg
And you’ve developed some training modules that people can do online through the PPS website as well to help support them so that you know it’s not a hopefully not a massively costly exercise, they can actually just say, hey, staff, come in, let me have a chat for 10 minutes, we’re gonna need everyone to do this, this is the why, this is why we want to have a positive workplace that’s got adhering to all these requirements.
Cecilia White
Yeah, that’s right. We developed that tool specifically to help mostly small to medium businesses who don’t have the huge infrastructure to keep on top of it. Yeah. And it’s the sort of thing you can do on your mobile, can do it on your iPad or what have you. It’s quick, it’s easy, but it meets the requirements that they need to. Yeah. So, it’s not hard or costly to put some of this stuff in place, but it’s really, really important that you know, people start turning their minds to it.
Kim Bigg
Excellent. All right, I’ll change tack again. We’ve talked a little bit about small medium enterprises and what someone in employing should do. Can you provide an example of me to talk about some real life examples? I won’t ask for the absolute horror stories because that might be not fit for a PG consumption. But perhaps if we can just talk through some of the scenarios that you’ve come out with, I’m sure you’ve had a few of them. The employer rings up and says, you know, person A is, I don’t know, fired a nail gun at his own boot, or someone else had a play fight with it, or something along these lines where someone has an issue. I guess, give me a couple of examples of what you hear and what you have come through. And I guess how PPS then turns it around and says, here’s what you need to do if you’ve got an issue.
Cecilia White
Yeah, right. A fairly not uncommon scenario is a phone call from a manager or business owner which is we’ve just got these two people who cannot work together. are narky with each other, yelling at each other. I mean we’ve had physical altercations so that’s where they’re at and they’ve tried.
Sometimes they’re good staff as well and they’re good at their job but they just create they aren’t, that’s why they’re still there. They’re there because they’re doing a great job for whatever reason. know, humans, you throw a couple of humans together and anything can happen. These things happen and from time to time there’s conflict and that then starts to have that ripple effect, people around them and it can affect all sorts of things. Often, they’re just tearing their hair out. How can we sort this. And there’s different ways we can work with them on that, but we have, you know, a few of us in the team are accredited mediators. And so we actually, you know, nationally accredited to do workplace mediations. And so we get out there on site often, or we bring them in here and bring them together in a room and just work through their issues, clear the air, come up with a bit of an agreement. This is how we’re going to, you know, move forward. So that’s a pretty common scenario that we might get.
Or, you know, a fairly common one is just dealing with someone whose performance might have slipped for a bit. This person’s been great. We’ve just noticed over the last few months, they’re forgetting this or they’re doing that, or they’re taking heaps of leave, absenteeism. What are we going to do? So again, different strategies that we work through with them to help support them on that might be, you know, working through a bit of a performance support plan with them, or if it’s getting to a much pointier end, it might be type of conversation around is this the right job right this point in time for you.
Kim Bigg
Yeah and performance reviews in that environment can be a bit hard for SMEs because often the person delivering the performance review is the SME owner themselves which always becomes a bit hard either delivering negative performance feedback if you like and even discussing things like pay and things like that can get a bit hard, whereas the owner.
Cecilia White
It’s hard at the best of times. You know it’s really hard. Family businesses trying to do performance manage each other. We work with a lot of family businesses, and you know there are people who are in that who are family, they’re not going anywhere, more than likely but it’s not working. then how do you navigate through some of those issues? That’s pretty common. But honestly, the stuff that we get, the queries that we get, that’s the thing I love about consulting. No two days ever the same you never know. Yesterday I got a call from a client who said, a couple of our staff were arm wrestling and one of them’s broken his arm during the arm wrestle. is this a work cover claim? Is this a disciplinary thing?
Kim Bigg
Should we have put together a crowd to come and watch? No, I’m not saying we should have done that. But I’m sure this is the sort of thing. then I guess it dovetails from you dealing with the issue itself or helping the manager or the business owner to deal with the issue in question. But then it probably then inevitably sidelines into your other part of your business in terms of HR consulting, which is organisational management and development and making sure there’s training of people and maybe saying, hey, looks like you might need some training on what’s appropriate workplace behaviour and things like that. And then all of a sudden the arm wrestle was turned into, all right guys, we’re gonna have a training on what’s appropriate. Do your arm wrestle down the road at the pub if you need to, not in the workplace.
Cecilia White
Yeah, you’re spot on. What we see are often the little symptoms of some other root cause or something else that’s gone wrong along the way. And this is just a scenario spun out of that. But yeah, it does generate a heap of conversations with businesses then around, okay, perhaps we actually need to go back and look at your contracts or need to go look at your position descriptions. Clearly that person wasn’t clear about it, what it was they’re meant to be doing. Hence, they’re not performing because they didn’t have the clarity. Let’s look at your PDs or yeah, what training we need to just remind people don’t do X, Y, at the Christmas party time to roll out some training. So, it’ll start with that thing but then it does often lead to a bigger conversation about how can we stop this from happening again? I guess if it’s something negative.
Kim Bigg
And if there is a, let’s call it a significant HR accident on a site, or this could be a factory or it could be a work site, a construction site, someone’s perhaps through your own, through someone’s lack of care or someone’s had a significant injury or otherwise. Obviously the first issue is make sure the person’s okay, to some extent I imagine they then call for yourself, for HR support in how they should manage it, either with the rest of the team who’s witnessed it. Also just trying to make sure they do the right thing. Do you find that happens from time to time where you’ve got to walk someone through what’s required to manage something like that?
Cecilia White
Yeah, like the aftermath of the workplace incident. Yeah, depending on what it is, because we don’t work heavily in the work health and safety arena, if it’s a really serious industrial accident, we wouldn’t necessarily really closely involved in the nuts and bolts of it. But certainly, we’ve had plenty of occasions where there’s been some sort of incident, whatever it might be. And like you say, there’s some need to support staff or retrain staff or remind staff around what their safety obligations are and whether that’s some sort of physical safety incident or whether it is just some huge blow up, personality clash yelling, tired, whatever, there’s always something that can be done on the back of that to re -educate, prevent, remind people, support people, you know. So yeah, we definitely get involved in various ways in that sense, yeah.
Kim Bigg
Supporting them through it, they, ultimately just so they do the right thing, protect themselves, but also just what’s the right thing more broadly for their business. Coming towards the conclusion of podcast now, just Looking for a message, if you like, for SME owners out there. I guess more broadly, keenly interested in what you think of the industry more broadly in terms of the employment industry. if I’m talking about SME owners, what’s coming in employment management going forward? What should people be thinking about? Where’s the next change is likely to come from? What next thing is the government got little time for in as far as how our employers may be managing their staff and what people should be watching for and just if you had a message for SME business owners more broadly about the way forward and how they look after their employees, what would that be?
Cecilia White
So guess part one, what’s on the horizon a lot at the moment, to be honest, is a massive amount of changes that have just been introduced by the federal government.
Kim Bigg
Maybe give us a flavour of some of those.
The big ticket items would be what is a casual employee? It’s flip -flopped around a lot in the last few years and now it’s changed again. So that’s causing a lot of business owners a fair bit of grief as far particularly those that have got long -term casuals. So that’s a big thing to watch Wage theft. So huge focus now and some really… Underpaying. So really significant penalties now. There’s not a lot of, not going to be a lot of leeway or leniency.
Kim Bigg
bit where I didn’t know, or I thought I was doing the right thing is going to not going to cut it
Cecilia White
That’s not going to cut it anymore. You’re expected to know. It’d be nice if they made awards a bit simpler so people could understand them. But look, that’s another topic, but definitely wage theft. And then I think this thing probably draws in what we were just talking about before with the positive duty sexual harassment, but also what’s, might’ve heard a bit of commentary on psychosocial. Psychosocial hazards and psychological safety. That’s a big. I can tell you now that agencies like SafeWork SA and their equivalents in interstate are hot on this piece at the moment. So that’ll be one to watch. And for a while it was all just workplace bullying, workplace bullying. Now it’s gone a lot broader than that.
Kim Bigg
The breadth of the employment relationship between the employer and the employee creating a safe workplace for people to work in both on their way to work, on their way home, all manner of, just phyc safety or however you describe it. Really up the ante.
Cecilia White
Yeah, and it’s all the stuff that you want to be doing as a good employer.
Kim Bigg
Because if you can get it right, then you’re going to get a better performance.
Cecilia White
Definitely. So they’re probably the main, and there’s also just some stuff around, you know, the right to disconnect now, you know, not being able to contact people outside of working hours. That’d be interesting to see how that plays out. Work from home stuff. from home, hybrid. So, you’re gonna see a heap of really interesting, know, interesting for us, tough stuff to navigate for employers. But probably the, if I had to distill it all down to like what’s the key message, I guess for SMEs, it’s my classic line is just like prevention’s better than the cure. Get some help. There’s heaps of support out there, but just carve out the time to do it because you’ll be grateful later on when an issue comes up if you’ve done some of that thinking and some of that legwork to do some of the prevention. There are two benefits from it. Obviously, you can manage trouble.
you know, troublesome situations when they arise if you’ve got a lot of those good things in place. But also, they’re just good to have in place anyway, because it will create a better environment for your staff, for you, clarity, you know, all of those things that people look for in value when they’re deciding, do I want to go work for that business or not?
Kim Bigg
Staff that are happy and feeling valued and engaged in the business are going to deliver a better outcome for the SME as hands down, let alone the fact that they you’re going to have less issues that are going to crop up that the business owners are dealing with on the negative side of things as well.
Cecilia White
Yeah, and then when you do, you know you’ve got a way to deal with them. And you’re well set up.
Kim Bigg
Fantastic. Well, look, I’m going to finish off there. That’s been really insightful. Thank you for, Cecilia, for taking the time to have a chat with me today. Yeah, it’s been really good. And look, I think I’ll just emphasise your point there. The message for SME owners is to lean into this. If you sit back, I think it can only get worse. I speak for Cecilia that she would welcome anyone to give her a call and have a chat about what these sorts of things mean for their business and how they might be able to help just more broadly. Yeah, turns into the issue itself. These things aren’t going away. They’re only gonna get more involved as the years go on. Thank you very much for your time and appreciate your insights and we look forward to catching up with you again, I guess in future, at future episodes of Show Me the Perks.
Cecilia White
Thanks Kim, good chat.
