By Debra Bela
It’s Monday afternoon. Exams are looming. The credit card is maxed out and you desperately want to go out with the guys on the weekend. You’d get a job, but you don’t want to commit to anything long term.

There was a time when this scenario would lead to an un happy ending. But in an Australian first, potential casual workers can now hook up with employers in minutes to find one-off shifts using a new employment utility called www.PloyMe.com.au. All you need is a mobile phone and a computer.

The Brisbane-based initiative, created by former restratuer Matt Kesby, is a direct response to casualisation of Generation Y workforce. “Industries really are struggling.” Kesby says.
“Changing jobs more frequently is kind of what our lifestyle is all about. So it begs us to find a new way to work with this shift. Rather than seeing people leaving a job forever, let’s stay connected and view human resources exactly as they are – a resource.”

“It’s like water in a drought. There’s water in this dam, none in that dam. We have to pump water between to two. Essentially, that’s what we do. We allow people to stay connected to more than one employer with their availability, so at any time they can pick up extra work.
You simply log into the site, outline your skills, the type of work you’d like and your availability over the next four weeks or more. In minutes, you’re connected to up to six employers looking for your talents.”

The first person to email or text YES when a shift is available gets it, no questions asked.
Since launching in August, the record stands at two minutes between registering an interest and being offered a shift.

Make no mistake – this is work not a career, that’s being offered. It is not a career hob board or temp agency that is seeking a long term commitment from its casual entourage. Work can vary from packing shelves, delivering pizza and selling clothes to working as a roadie or theatre usher.
“It’s for students supplementing their income, who can only work at certain time of the day; for people whoa are unemployed and have found it difficult to get their foot in the door, for mums looking to find infrequent work from time to time,” Kesby says.

“We even had an article clerk who picked up work sending out flyers in the city in the mornings, because if you want to live the lifestyle but don’t have the budget, you need some options.”

PloyMe has 20,000 workers online and employers from 14 industries in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne with smaller representations in Adelaide and Perth.

Minimum award rates must up held and people with greater experience can quoting closer to award rates tend to get more work, because employers are trying to save money where they can.” Kesby says. “But those who really need people appreciate that paying $2 or $3 more an hour for a more experienced person saves them money in the long term.”

With the number of new employees entering the Australian marketplace in decline as the population ages, and the average worker expected to have 10 to 14 jobs by the time they hit 38, Kesby says building relationships could be a better investment than working towards retaining an existing workforce.

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

It was a great day with over 250 people attending to learn new and practical ways to assist their business growth. Keynote Speaker Tom O’Toole the infamous Beechworth baker brought the room to life with his energetic approach.

David Koche from Channel Seven’s sunrise program as keep the crowd’s attention with his insights into the future of SME’s in Austraila with a global economic outlook.

I would also like to thank all of the attendees for my opportunity to speak on the day, it was especially great to engage with so many people after my presentation on “Attracting and keeping staff in the new age.”

A few people also mentioned that they would like some more information on building your company’s core purpose and values. I high recommend you visit www.jimcollins.com visit the “laboratory” section or go straigh to the download http://jimcollins.com/pdf/Vision_Framework.pdf

For those who would like more information on the “One minute HR health check” please read my earlier blog post on this topic.
I also spoke to a few people and offered them some assistance setting up their free business profiles on www.PloyMe.com.au I would also like to extend this opportuntiy to readers of this blog, all you need to do is contact the office on 07 3852 3232 and our friendly team will assist you.

Bye for now

Matt Kesby

CEO

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.

Any HR manager worth their salt would recommend conducting full 360 degree analysis on your team to learn where your people are at. The reality check for a lot of organisations is that they either do not have the time or resource to undergo this approach on a regular basis.

The good news is that there is a simpler fast and effective way to conduct a full company health check with just two questions. The concept is adapted from Fred Reichheld’s book “The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth.” In the book Reichheld delivers his work on customer advocacy and how he uses the Net Promoter Score calculation to determine this (for more information visit www.netpromoter.com ).

We can use the same Net Promoter Score calculation to test Employee Advocacy. Ultimately we want all of our employees to be advocates, to measure this we first need to understand that employees can fall into three categories:

1. Promoters: the advocates that love and actively tell others how great the company is to work for.
2. Passives: Employees, who neither love nor hate the company, simply go about their duties.
3. Detractors: people in the organisation that are having issues, small or large and are actively telling others inside and outside the organisation about the problems they see.

To determine which of the three each employee is at, simply have them anonymously answer the following question,

QUESTION 1 “On a scale of 0 – 10, where 0 is least likely and 10 is most likely, how likely would you be to recommend our organisation to others to join as an employee?”

Once you have all of the results in:

• Count the number of people who answer between 0-6 to find your total number of detractors.
• Then count the total number of people who respond with a 7 or 8 to attain the total number of passives.
• Finally count the total number who responded with a 9 or 10 to determine the promoters.
• Calculate the both the promoters and detractors as a percentage of the total respondents by dividing each number by the total respondents. Then deduct the detractors from the promoters to reveal your net promoter score. See the example below:

EXAMPLE

Organisation has 100 employees

Total number of people responding between 0 - 6 = 20 or 20% of total employees

Total number of people responding 7or8 = 20 or 20% of total employees

Total number of people responding 9or10 = 60 or 60% of total employees

Promoters – detractors = Net Promoter Score

60% - 20% = 40% download excel calculation

We now have a Net Promoter Score for our employee advocacy, with the assistance of one simple questions and easy calculation. It is important to note that your score can range from -100$ to +100% and a score of 65% is actually very good. Take the time to read Reichheld’s book for an indepth understanding of the Net Promoter Score.

There is one more question we need to ask if we are to start to have a positive influence on this result. This question also comes from Reichheld’s work and it is:

QUESTION 2 “What is the one most important thing our organisation could do to help us to achieve a score of 10 from you.”

With this open ended feedback an organisation has the power to influence real change and start to make positive in roads to increasing advocacy and employee retention. What I love about this approach is that it can be measured on a regular basis with minimal effort. I recommend making it at least a monthly practise and have the management team review the responses to the questions and look for trends and items to act upon.

After implementing this in one of my previous businesses I quickly learnt from my team that understaffing during peak periods was having a negative impact on the team and that if I didn’t act quickly I would start losing employees. In such a tight labour market the thought of losing anyone is scary and expensive.

This led me and the team at www.PloyMe.com.au to develop our online employment utility that allows tens of thousands of casual workers to share their spare availability with thousands of employers. With PloyMe employers can take the pressure off their team by tapping into a vast pool of available workers ready and willing to work at times that suit both you and them.

Log on to www.PloyMe.com.au to learn how PloyMe can make a difference in your business or contact me at matt@ployme.com.au

This can often be the cause of much frustration and quite draining to employers and manager. But there is good news, YOU are on the right track.

Remember when you were a kid at school learning your times tables? How did you learn them…2×2=4, 2×3=6…and you would repeat them over and over again relentlessly until one day all of a sudden, they became second nature to you.

This style of learning is no different from the way many people in your business learn both simple and complex tasks. We have all heard the term practice makes perfect, well grab hold of it and repeat, repeat, repeat, relentlessly.

Now in this new age of employment the last thing your employees will want is you nagging them over and over again. So we need to convert this idea of relentless repeatability into a scalable systematized approach. The simplest and most effective way to do this is build checklists.

At the start of your next day hand outlined pieces of paper to each employee have them write their name at the top and the date, then add three columns, TASK, DESCRIPTION, TIME. Next ask them to write down every activity they perform today pre and post your service period. Then at the end of the day compile their information and turn them into checklists.

To gain maximum impact, chances are you will need to remind them a few times and help to coach them into writing tasks down. Remember to catch them doing it correctly and praise them for their efforts. This is especially important as this is not part of their normal daily activities.

When you are engaging your team to write the checklists and then to use them every day, it is important to have them own the checklists through their involvement, rather than just having them handed down by management. Their involvement in the development turns them into a form of agreement. Now they may not get them perfect the first or even second time, rather than pointing out all the items they missed. Print off the check list and use it the next day. Then at the end of the shift ask them, “What were the other tasks you completed today?” This will help to prompt them to add additional items.

I have found checklists to be invaluable assets to my businesses over the years. In the early days as a proprietor, I thought I was smart enough to know how to do everything and I would race around micro managing my team. Then I learnt that novices don’t use checklists it is only professionals use checklists.

Take an airline pilot for example, before takeoff they have a long preflight safety checklist that needs to be completed before they take off from the ground with their precious cargo of passengers. They do this because they know, that if the preflight safety checklist is 100% complete and every item is passes then that is the best prediction of arriving at their destination safely.

When I heard this example of an airline pilot explained to me, it sounded very similar to running a venue successfully to me. At the start of each day we have our precious cargo “our customers”, join us for a “journey” their dining experience. Critical to our success is that they arrive at the end of their experience incident free and able to depart as raving fans. To do this, it takes a lot of timely execution of hundreds of tasks from frontline and support crew, just like on an airline. When each member of the crew has a checklist that that successfully complete on time every time with relentless repeatability, you can predict that it is going to be a great service period.

If you’re really intelligent, your working memory – the part processing what’s in your consciousness – can handle up to seven thoughts at one time.

As soon as the eighth thought rears … pop … one of the earlier thoughts is lost.
Unfortunately not everyone is able to process this many thoughts; a recent study found most people can only handle three or four thoughts in their “working memory”.

The working memory is constantly fighting to filter out all the needless distractions around us. These distractions have a major impact on our ability to concentrate and learn.

As a trainer, you are constantly battling to maintain as much of the working memory real estate of your students as possible, for as long as possible.

Each generation of new employees coming through is growing up in a world of hyper-stimulation, with hundreds of ideas, thoughts and distractions whizzing past them at the lightening speed of our information super highways. DVDs, ipods, blogs, wikis, SMS, email, instant messenger; an abundance of stimulus is being cast at our new employees and some of us are still trying to figure out just exactly what they are.
It’s so much more for the human brain to adapt to filter out the noise in order to learn.

The good news is that the new generations are highly skilled at consuming and filtering information. If we are smart enough to adapt our styles to draw out these talents, we can train quickly and on the run.

The key here is to understand that, more and more, learning occurs in bite-sized consumable chunks. Remembering that people are bombarded with so many stimuli, it is important to find the balance between delivering the right amount of information and not overwhelming our employees when educating them.

Understanding that people can only hold onto between four to seven thoughts or concepts in their mind at one time, top trainers are conservative with how many of these thoughts they try to control. Effective trainers allow students to have at least one or two to thoughts to themselves.

This concept becomes even more necessary if you are to engage a student on a questioning level directly after you have taught them how to perform a task or learn new information.

For me, this approach has provided outstanding results time and time again. When training or attracting the attention of students, I will often start with the phrase:

“There are three key points you will need to remember when…”

This simple phrase prep’s a student’s expectations of what is to come. It also puts their minds at ease, ensuring them they are not about to enter into some sort of epic draconian saga.

Having only three key points also increases the chance of information retention.
To qualify if the individual is learning, ask the question:

“Tell me the three key points you have just learnt.”

You have a higher chance of a positive outcome.

The three key points training method is particularly useful when bringing on first time employees and you don’t have the luxury of timeout for a full induction. Simply show and write down for them the three key things they need to focus on during their first shift and watch them perform. It is also a great way to test their comprehension skills.

When training teams of people, focus on just three key points for a day or week, then print them in large font on A4 paper and distribute them around your venue. Have your supervisor quiz each team member at the start, middle and end of their shift on what the three points are. Then have your supervisor ask each of them at least once to demonstrate them.

This process also empowers the supervisor to learn through teaching.
Now imagine you had three points to focus on each week. Within a year your team will have been given the chance to become experts in approximately 150 different tasks.

Thanks for Reading

My Goal with this blog is to help Employers and Casual Workers to better understand each other and achieve great results togehter.

If you are an Employer or person looking for casual work, please check out our revolutionary approach to matching you together to fill shifts of temporary work in your area http://www.ployme.com.au/