The EOFY is the ideal time to review policies, procedures and employee record-keeping to ensure everything is up-to-date and accurate. In addition, there are likely to have been compliance, regulatory and employment law changes over the past 12 months, or which will roll out in the new financial year. These also need to be accounted for.

Now is the time to take stock about the year that has passed, review what’s been done well, and identify areas for improvement in the year ahead.

Our handy checklist touches on all areas within HR’s mandate, including:

• Payroll and superannuation obligations
• Employee contracts, entitlements and awards
• Employee files and records
• Recruitment and staffing
• Performance management and professional development
• General HR hygiene (workplace health & safety, employee discipline and termination, leave policy, expenses policy reviews)

With links to relevant government websites and handy tips, our EOFY checklist will ensure your business is in the best possible position to excel in FY25.

The post 2024 end of financial year HR checklist appeared first on HRM online.

The words ‘unprecedented’ and ‘pivot’ might make many wince after two years working and living with COVID-19. However, the mention of hybrid work can still yield rave reviews, impassioned anecdotes and even the odd quizzical look.

As our professional lives have continued to evolve from the learnings of lockdown life and work, HR executives have revolutionised the hybrid work model and how it functions, dispelling myths to show that hybrid work is a driver of commercial success and people goals. 

Read on to learn how Australia’s most innovative HR leaders have implemented hybrid work with, yes, unprecedented results.    

Behind the scenes of Telstra’s hybrid work revolution

At Telstra, there was a desperate demand for technology skills even before COVID-19. Once the pandemic hit, there was no other choice but to drive innovation with a people-first perspective, deep diving into a hybrid work model that has since seen the telco thrive.

Speaking on season two of LinkedIn Talent Streams, Alex Badenoch – Telstra’s Group Executive of Transformation, Communication and People – dissects what makes a hybrid work environment thrive, beginning with frank conversations about mental health and wellbeing. 

From there, it became apparent that despite some calls for a return to the traditional 9 to 5, 5 days per week office model, Telstra saw an opportunity to turn the Great Resignation into the Great Realignment with an approach that emphasises choice and blended experience with maximum flexibility.

While misconceptions surrounding productivity and working from home may be changing, Badenoch outlines that a hybrid work model creates more jobs and increases productivity by over 20 per cent, with the added benefit of growing employee engagement in the process. It also helps in recruiting the best talent, as well as increasing equity for employees with accessibility needs and creating a non-gendered parental leave policy, resulting in a 50:50 gender split of employees on parental leave at Telstra.

Badenoch has a  ‘don’t knock it until you try it’ philosophy, and still  advocates for  the role of the office, believing it to be important in traditional processes such as onboarding However, she says the hybrid work model needs to be rethought holistically for it to be successful.

Removing barriers while hitting commercial KPIs and people goals, Telstra’s all-in approach to hybrid work is clearly here to stay.

Discover how companies can navigate the shifting talent landscape and create a human-centred company culture in LinkedIn’s 2022 Global Talent Trends report.

Fungibility, hybrid work and AI with NAB

At National Australia Bank (NAB), creating a hybrid workforce begins with a strategic vision and values at the top. 

As Susan Ferrier, Group Executive of People and Culture at NAB reveals, the financial institution’s hybrid work model is borne from three key guiding principles: for every employee to have a great leader; for all staff to have meaningful, exciting, and challenging work; and to create a platform for the NAB workforce to experience real investment in their talent and elevate their skills across the board.

Ferrier details the concept of fungibility as the skeleton key to a hybrid work framework. 

With an organisational philosophy focused upon the acquisition of skills to create maximum capacity and capability in one’s portfolio, NAB sees the future of work as being centred upon organisational breadth, correlating with employees’ increased appetite for learning opportunities as a result of COVID-19. 

Noting that hybrid work is not just a balance of office attendance versus work-from-home arrangements, Ferrier emphasises the importance of showing care for staff in an entirely different, holistic manner compared to the pre-pandemic workforce.

Envisioning the role of CHROs in this new era as imperative to challenging the status quo with insight, data and diagnosis, NAB is beginning to explore the full capabilities of AI in recruitment, noting its accuracy in scouring CVs and producing skillset insights that result in faster and more accurate hiring decisions. 

Combining technological innovation with a people-first approach has resulted in hard-earned results for NAB, an approach that Ferrier sees as intrinsic to the financial institution’s success as we learn to live and work alongside COVID-19.   

Click here to find out more about LinkedIn Talent Streams and how people leaders in Australia are reimagining people and culture in the world of work.

The post Why hybrid work is here to stay, for the good of people and culture appeared first on HRM online.

A crisis usually requires people to make radical changes in order to survive. But those changes aren’t always a complete U-turn. Instead, it’s more common for crises to accelerate existing trends. 

Changes that were in the pipeline, but would have taken a business a year or more to get started, can get actioned over a single video conference. How many companies that had wanted to allow for more workplace flexibility found themselves asking their whole workforce to operate from home?

Paying more attention to organisational governance is a trend that is accelerating. Whether as a reaction to the wage underpayment scandal or the findings of the royal banking commission, prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic more and more organisations were rethinking the frameworks of their risk management, business administration and leadership. 

And the pandemic has only made those considerations more important. 

Organisations that already had firm governance were better able to weather the effects of the pandemic, including the massive move to remote work and all the risks that entailed. Even if they weren’t entirely prepared, they knew who their key decision-makers were, had compliance champions ready to carry out risk assessments (from WHS concerns through to online data security) and had the systems in place to communicate all need-to-know information to key stakeholders.

They knew all this because good governance isn’t about overcoming a single event; it’s about having the structures in place to navigate through any and all eventualities.

Not too late

Governance is complicated enough that some organisations might be worried it is something they can’t address in this moment. But, depending on business circumstances, now might be the perfect time. 

The fact of the matter is that no one knows what the immediate future holds. Will people come out of lockdown and immediately re-engage with your organisation, or will the financial situations of your normal client and customer base prevent such a thing? It is dangerous to bet everything on a forecast. But regardless of your organisation, designing its systems and structures to be agile enough to handle circumstances at either extreme will help.

And if your concern is that you cannot get the training you need to begin upskilling staff in the principles of good governance, that can be overcome.

The Governance Institute is the only fully independent professional association with a sole focus on governance excellence. Guiding organisations so that they achieve that excellence is a mission we hold dear. That’s why our training has been specifically designed to meet this current moment. You can see our latest COVID-19 news here, or check out the pandemic resources in our online hub.

Every organisation is unique

The differences between a not-for-profit charity and a retail empire are profound. So it is no use pretending that each can be served by the same approach to governance.

Governance Institute matches our highly acclaimed intellectual property with the internal documentation of your organisation to ensure our training is practical and aligned to your organisational needs. Because a change to your governance that requires you to change your organisational identity just won’t be effective.

If you’d like to trial the quality and practicality of the Governance Institute’s content, download one of our free Good Governance Guide starter packs.

Governance Institute is also offering cost-effective, convenient and flexible training. It can be conducted online or in-house. You choose the time and we will tailor the program to meet your people and their experience levels, with all training led by leading industry practitioners.

Find out more about our online in-house training here. We look forward to helping you.

The post Good governance in a pandemic – an urgent HR need appeared first on HRM online.