blog.ployme.com.au

Great article written by my friend Louise Broekman Managing Director of the Australian HR Coach Network.

Keeping the doors open in your business just got a whole lot more difficult in this tight labour market. The signs are, quite literally, everywhere. Just last week my local bakery was closed with a note on the door that said “Shop Closed- Can’t Find Staff”. Don’t laugh, it could happen to you. Just think of the impact on your business if you were to lose a staff member and struggled to find a quality replacement.

Most business owners are overwhelmed with buzzwords and jargon like “Skills Shortage”, “Labour Crisis”, “Attraction and Retention Strategies”, “Employer Branding”, “Employer of Choice” and the list goes on. The old adage used to be that a business can’t survive without sales. I’d argue that the 2008 sentiment is that most businesses cannot survive without employees.

Labour Shortage is here to stay
Media outlets have been running hot with topics like labour shortages, low unemployment rates and increasing wages. Although the market dropped approximately 20,000 jobs in May 08, the consensus is that this is merely a blip on the radar and not a sign of an easing of the market pressures.

Quite simply, we have passed the tipping point. More people are now leaving the labour market than entering it. The demand for talent and skills outstrips supply. Employees are more choosy and more demanding than ever before.

The real question is – what do businesses do about it? More importantly, how can your business compete against big, attractive corporate companies with deep pockets and heaps of perks?

Are you Attractive?
This is not a personal question! But are you attractive to a prospective employee? Would they want to come and work with you? Remember, it’s a buyer’s market and employees are in high demand! So how can you make your business attractive? Well, as the saying goes, beauty comes from within.

Implement systems to make your business a great place to work and achieve your strategy. Make sure that you look after your staff, measure their satisfaction, look for ways to continually improve, increase motivation and productivity, invest in your people and focus on retention. It sounds like a lot but the most important thing is to start somewhere. One strategy is to benchmark where you are now to determine where you need to focus your energy. A Staff Satisfaction survey and Employer Satisfaction survey are a great starting point.

Hire for Attitude, Train for Skill
The smaller the business, the greater the teamwork and flexibility required within roles. This was identified in organisational behaviour research conducted on growing businesses by the HR Coach Research Institute. Businesses valued staff with the right attitude and would prefer to teach them the skills for the job.

Promote your Employer Brand
The more attractive you are in the market, the more likely you are to draw high quality applicants to you. It’s not as difficult as you think. Focus on the way you promote your business to your clients and use the same message for your recruitment process. One way to draw quality candidates to you is to highlight your employee focussed business culture. You can participate in programs like the STAR Workplace program from HR Coach. Prospective employees will look for the logo and instantly know that your business is a great place to work.

How Professionals Can Help
You don’t have to wing it and your time is too important to waste. Look for a qualified HR Coach who understands the changing labour market, your future business needs and can assist you with implementing solutions that create a positive impact on your business.

One quote that speaks to me in my business is, “a bend in the road does not mean the end of the road… … unless you fail to make the turn.” Don’t wait until it is too late for your business. There are dangerous curves ahead.

About the Author
Louise Broekman is the Founder and Managing Director of the Australian HR Coach Network. Louise also leads the HR Coach Research Institute which focuses on researching issues that affect the SME sector. Contact: 1300 550 674, www.hrcoach.com.au; business@hrcoach.com.au

Shocking trends in the Australian labour force.

We all know there is a skills shortage, we hear it in the news every day. The next bombshell we are about to face is simply a people shortage.

In March 2008 the National Australia Bank small business quarterly survey found that 72% of business said that their growth is being limited by difficulty in hiring employees, this was 65% in September last year. Glenn Stevens the governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia recently revealed that their business survey showed that staff shortages is now the number one concern for businesses in Australia and it is limiting their ability to grow.

The difficulty in having enough workers is a product of many factors all coming to ahead at one point in time. From a numbers perspective, Australia’s working population generally grows by around 166,000 people per year. Trends currently in place will see a rapid decline in the growth of new people entering the workforce by 2010. By the decade commencing 2020 it is predicted that the total number of new people entering the workforce will be less than 199,000. That is less than 13% of what we currently have each year.

Compounding this is an ageing population brought about by a decrease in our birth rates. At a recent conference with the Queensland Tourism Industry Council Dr Heather Pearce shared with me that businesses will start to see the major impact of our people shortage in 2010 as a result of the birth control pill. In 1961 the birth control pill was introduced in Australia and for the first time ever women gained the freedom to choose to delay or forgo child birth. Not surprisingly Australia’s fertility rates have declined from 3.6 in 1960 to 1.7 in 1997. In 2005 we saw a small increase in the fertility rate to 1.77 which is still below the repopulation target of 2.1.

Adding to the pressure of an aging population and declining birth rates is the impact of new industries. The impact of IT, biomedicine and other industries which did not exist 30 years ago at any significant level are now impacting the labour pool draining precious resource from traditional industries such as hospitality.

Growth in sectors like mining and construction are also causing significant impact. In the last 20 years the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported the number of workers in the construction industry grew from 500,000 to 1 million. 

More than ever employee retention will become paramount and businesses will need to break with old habits and find new ways of retaining employees. It will also become important for businesses to keep the doors open for past employees to return as the cost of training new employees is already a burden on employers.

To survive the years ahead, business will need to develop new systems, processes and adopt new technologies to deal with the people shortage. ANA hotels are already changing their cooking processes and technologies. They have introduced the knife less kitchen that reduces the need for trained chefs and focuses on the use of food process workers. They are even adapting in room dining to a high quality takeaway style service, where the guest receive their in room dining in disposable containers. This reduces the need for workers to return to the room to collect crockery. ANA are definitely one of the many savvy operators to watch in the upcoming years.