Recruited, Managed, Confused – Why your People & Culture Strategy Must Evolve?

Adam Cliffe: Look, I really want to touch on first around the skills and labour shortage crisis in Australia. I know during COVID, and it feels like it's kind of like this lingering thing. Is it real? Is it still happening? I know when I've spoken to my customers, they've certainly felt the pinch in terms of finding decent you know staff and retaining them and attracting them, and it seems like it's still ongoing.

Xavier Miller: Yeah, well, I would say absolutely, Adam. It's still ongoing and it's not really centred to one particular industry. I think it's quite broad in terms of that skill shortage. You've got the typical industries of healthcare and aged care, childcare, where it is difficult to find staff and there really is a shortage of skilled employees out there looking for work. But then you've got it in the technical side as well, from IT to accounting to legal as well. So, it is quite widespread that that labour shortage and even there's the 627,000 at the moment people unemployed that currently or in the last census data through the ABS. There are two people for every job that's advertised as well. So, in terms of competition there's a lot of competition, a lot of people looking for work, but the skills there across those big sectors, very difficult to find and even with the influx of immigration over the past 12 months into Australia, it's making it even more challenging.

Adam Cliffe: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it was pretty interesting because I think the Australian Bureau of Statistics just released their numbers for September and I think economists kind of forecasted around a 25,000 jump in jobs for the month, but it's come out at about 64,000. So, I thought that was a bit surprising and I think it's caught a lot of people off guard, and I think it's also interesting when you drill into those 64,000 jobs. How many are private and how many are public? It's just very interesting what was forecasted and what come out of that. So, it's a threefold increase.

Xavier Miller: Well, I haven't seen those exact stats, Adam, but I'm going to make an assumption that the majority of that increased over number from what they were expecting is probably in the public sector, the smaller businesses, and certainly the smaller businesses that I work with They've grown, certainly. A number of them have grown in employee numbers, but not to that particular extent as we're still sort of coming out of that post-COVID salary push which is now coming back a little bit, and cost of living, of course. A lot of the small businesses, they may have increased headcount, but it may be in that shorter contract or casual employment status rather than the permanent full-time or part-time.

Adam Cliffe: Yeah, I think that's a really good point in terms of separating out, I guess, the bigger end-to-end, the bigger business, whether that's private or the public sector, and those small medium businesses, because I think it's very different, isn't it, like the skills required for certain small medium business or very professional services based can be quite different, and I think that's what you were saying before about that competition aspect as well.

Xavier Miller: Yeah, absolutely. In small business, no matter what industry they're in or specialisation that they have as a small business employee, there's, I suppose, a need for a broader skill set, whereas the bigger end of town, as you put it, and public sector, they're looking generally for quite specialised skill sets and experiences, whereas that small business are looking for someone, yeah, that all-round type of skill set which is difficult to find in the current market.

Adam Cliffe: I feel like there is a bit of a higher turnover rate. Maybe that's a demographic thing, I'm not entirely sure. You know, maybe some lower employee tenure. I feel like there's a lot more shift going on. How do those SMBs, those small medium businesses, how do they compete with that larger end of town for something that is highly competitive? You know, and you've got all these people applying for similar roles and, you know, jumping for X amount of money or whatever. Like, how can SMBs really retain that talent and not lose them to the bigger end of town? Is it all salary?

Xavier Miller: No, I would absolutely say no. It's not all about salary. There's a number of factors and even those factors over the last 12 months, particularly the last couple of years since we've come out of COVID, are very different to what they perhaps were pre-2020. You mentioned about the average tenure in any business, and particularly small business, are the same. If we look at the average tenure and certainly some of the latest statistics that have come out, it's around about three years and four months is average tenure in Australia, but generationally those figures change. So those that are under 25, we're looking at a much shorter. It's almost half. So one year and eight months is the average tenure. When you get to the 25 to 35-year mark, it goes up a little bit, but it's still almost well. It's about six months less than the average. So, we're looking at two years and eight months. And then when you're 35 to 44, we're getting up to four-year average tenure and 45+ the average pushes right up to about six years eight months. So, it gives us the average of three years and four months across the board.

One of many things that small businesses need to do or need to think about is keeping those figures in mind going, “I am likely to have this person that that has the right skill set, the right cultural fit for the role that I'm looking for. I'm likely to have them for 12, 18 months, two years, three possibly at the most, and so onboarding and training needs to be swift so we can get the most out of them for the maximum amount of time, because the likelihood is they're going to move on.”

When small businesses are competing with the bigger end of town when it comes to working from home and flexibility and I think pre and well, not pre, but during and post COVID, there's a lot of talk about flexibility and the majority of that is around working from home. But for a small business, it's not just about working from home. Flexibility comes in many different facets. It's shorter weeks or later starts, earlier finishes. Yeah, it could be a hybrid sort of working from home and the office. It could be compressed work weeks and working a few extra hours Monday through Thursday and having that Friday off. Could be things like RDO. So, it's not every small business can necessarily compete with the bigger end of town and allowing everyone to work from home either full-time or part of the week. But it's important for those small businesses to remember that they can compete in terms of that flexibility with looking at a number of other flexibility options.

Adam Cliffe: Yeah, I actually had no idea that the average tenure for the 25 and under was so low. Yeah, that's floored me. So, you spoke on the flexibility part. Is that the biggest driver for that age demographic?

Xavier Miller: Yeah, well, there's two things for that particular age demographic. One is flexibility, and it's that, I think we've all heard it I'm not in that age bracket, unfortunately, anymore, but we've all heard it that under 25s, and really probably under 30s, they want work to fit in with life. So, flexibility is very important to them, and where they do their work and when they do their work is very important. The other factor for that particular demographic, too, is the values of the business and whether they're socially responsible within the workplace and within society. And then, as well as “What's in it for me? What career opportunities, development opportunities can I expect or can I have within this particular role or this particular business?” But flexibility in managing their life and work is very important to them, yes.

Adam Cliffe: And I think also that whole flexibility piece was largely driven probably by COVID, where you really had no choice but to have staff work from home or remotely. So, it's really interesting to now see trying to compete and offer that flexibility. Yet we're starting to see a bit of a trend, probably with the bigger end of town. I know Amazon and some of the banks in Australia have started to mandate this return back to the workplace. It's quite interesting, given that flexibility is so highly rated, and I think I read something on Robert Half. They did a big census of 1,000 businesses, and I think 39% of the respondents said that they would leave their job if they were mandated to return back to the work.

So, it's a little perplexing why tech giants like Amazon and financial services, in terms of banks, are making this move. Do you have any thoughts on that? There are a few theories that I've heard floated in terms of like instead of making a large amount of redundancies, those 39%, if they get a portion of that that just voluntarily leave, then that sort of solves the problem. But where does, I guess, employee satisfaction, employee happiness, where does that obviously fit into it over that. I feel like, yeah, it's this weird dynamic that we're starting to see now, where certain employers are mandating this, yet we've got a certain demographic that are valuing this work-life balance and this hybrid or work remotely or work anywhere in the world type mentality. So, I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this and where do you think this ends up?

Xavier Miller: Yeah, well, I can't talk to the conspiracy that you've heard, Adam, around redundancies and I'd hope that that's not necessarily the case, but yeah, I've seen it too with Amazon and Commonwealth Bank, the bigger end of town, and certainly some smaller businesses as well in the eastern states that I typically work within requiring and requesting all of their staff to return to the office on what is, in a lot of cases, full-time back to the office. I think what perhaps we're not hearing in the media is that in the other options that are available to those employees in terms of flexibility and the way that they do their work and when and how, but returning them back to the work, I think a number of factors being around collaboration and teamwork and culture. There's a lot of and we might touch on it a little bit later, Adam, but in Australia particularly, there's that sense of pressure and stress in Australian workers that, and it might sound counterproductive, but these companies are requiring people to come back into the office so that they can build a greater culture, and a greater collaboration focus within their team. That perhaps reduces that pressure and stress that they're feeling from working from home the majority of the week.

I think and you might be able to talk to it better than me, I'm probably the least technical person, but in some cases, and probably more the smaller businesses, technically or technologically, they're finding it difficult to look at and measure the productivity of their people if they're not in the office. Perhaps that's an excuse, I'm not sure, but I think there's a number of factors in terms of collaboration, culture, productivity, training and development as well, because, as I said before, a lot of the people that they're hiring are looking for development opportunities and training and mentoring, and one of the best ways to do that is side by side, one-on-one coaching and mentoring from someone a little more experienced, so you tend to be able to do that better in person.

Adam Cliffe: Yeah, I really agree with the collaboration aspect of it. Even I've noticed that the in-office culture and collaboration is a big part for me anyway. I actually feed off other people's energy, so it's a really good thing when I am able to have people in the office and talk with and support and build up. So, I think there's definitely aspects of that. I think the productivity and the trying to work out if they're getting enough out of the staff, I think that might be a bit of a leadership issue. To be honest, I don't necessarily subscribe to that. I think you can effectively manage it quite well. We do it here at ADITS and I like to think we do it really well. So, I think, as you said, there's multiple factors. But the one thing I really do want to touch on a bit more is, I guess, that availability creep which then leads into those pressures, and I find I do it myself like sometimes when I'm working from home, it'll be like eight o'clock at night and I've been working all day and I've just kind of you know, uh, forgotten to, you know, switch off and I've just kept going and I'm still answering calls and emails and I'm sure you know there's a lot of people out there in the same boat, and then you get this feeling of a bit more sort of, yeah, pressure to do that. And then that probably leads me into the next segment, that is, around the right to disconnect. So I'll leave it at that and get your thoughts first on the availability creep and the pressures that we're putting on people and what we can do about it, and then, if you want to segue into, you know how that fits in, I guess, to the right to disconnect and what that even means, because I think there's a lot of hype around it. There's a lot of buzz around the right to disconnect. I don't know if people necessarily what it entails, so it'd be great to get your thoughts on that as well.

Xavier Miller: No problem, yeah, great, and the availability creep is absolutely real, and we live in a global world where everything is at our fingertips and communication at work is on our phones, which are generally either in our hand or our pocket most of the day, and notification after notification and most businesses I work with have multiple communication channels. So, whether it's Teams or text or WhatsApp or email, it does that availability creep because you finish work at five or at six or whenever you finish, and you're still getting dings on your phone and you feel, you know most people who are engaged and really committed to their work have that feeling of “Oh, I better check that” and that's okay. That works for a lot of people. The availability creep, though, you've touched on a really good point, Adam.

The right to disconnect is actually, I suppose, the core function and why it is now legislation, is to address that creeping availability that we're all experiencing and, like you said, there is a lot of talk out there, whether it's media hype and beat up and misinformation, disinformation. Whatever the case might be, the reality is that the right to disconnect is really new legislation. We're all learning it at the same time. So, I think, number one, the best thing to do as a small business employer or a big business employer is to talk about it with your people, number one. But if I can give you my overview of what the right to disconnect is, I think from my perspective I do get a little bit angry with the media hype that they're only talking about one side of it and that's that an employer can't contact an employee after they finish work. That should never be the case if that contact is unreasonable anyway. So, I think the right to disconnect is required 100% and every employee, no matter if you're a business owner or an employee, should be able to disconnect from work. And as that availability creep says, it's more and more challenging these days. But the right to disconnect means that when an employee finishes work and an employer perhaps rings them or messages them, it's okay for that employee not to respond to that message, provided that it's unreasonable or reasonable to do so.

But most importantly to think about is that depending on the employee, or have a look at the employee base that you have within your business, the roles within the business, what they're there to achieve and perhaps the employee base or the client base they support, and look at what is reasonable contact during and after hours, and you know if I think about an IT business like you, Adam. In ADITS, you've got people on the service desk from 8 till 6 or thereabouts, but IT doesn't stop at 6 o'clock and then start again at 8. Every now and then there is a need for an employer or a client to contact someone at ADITS to help them with an IT issue. So, we've got to then look at the purpose of that contact. Is it reasonable? Is the employee compensated for that time after hours to do that work? And if so, then that contact is reasonable.

What it does say, though, is that if an employer messages someone after hours and it's an email or a text message that can wait, it's not life-threatening, then the employee doesn't have to respond, and that's okay, and the employer then can't take any action against that particular employee for not responding or not answering that phone call.

But so that right to disconnect although it's legislation and it's required to really draw that line in the sand of what's reasonable and what's unreasonable, I would say, I would encourage most businesses, or all businesses, just to have a really open and transparent conversation with their employees, so that everyone's on the same page about what is reasonable and what is not reasonable, and just, and work through it over the coming months as we see a little bit, yeah, perhaps a little bit of precedence being set out there if there are any unreasonable contact cases within Fair Work. But it's also important as well to remember to your clients and viewers that it's only applicable at the moment to businesses that have 15 or more employees, so they're classed as the larger employers and then next year I think it's in August of 2025, it then applies to all businesses, whether they've got 15 or more employees or not.

Adam Cliffe: I think I really love your point about having that clear and open and honest communication, with your staff talking through it. I think that will go a long way into just being all on the same page and having that really cohesive environment for both employer and employee. So, I really like that. I think that's going to be a great start for a lot of businesses and I probably would recommend that these smaller businesses, where it's not applied to right now legislation, maybe even start those conversations now and say this is what's happening in August 25. Let's actually, you know, look at your role, look at your expectations and work through it together.

Xavier Miller: Yeah, absolutely. I think you're right. For those businesses it doesn't apply to now, start talking about it, because it is legislation, it's coming, and it may be that you need to have a look at a right to disconnect policy or a workplace communication policy whatever you'd like to call that policy. You may need to look at the employment contract as well and just include some wording around that right to disconnect, around that right to disconnect. And one of the other things that I forgot to mention before, Adam, was when it comes to the business and having those open and transparent conversations.

It's also looking at where your business is located. You might just be in Queensland, or you might just be in New South Wales, but you may have employees that are over multiple states and throughout six months of the year. I think we have about five or six different time zones in Australia, so it's been really clear if you're an eastern seaboard-based business but you have employees in WA, for example, now for the next six months, they're three hours behind New South Wales and Victoria and two hours behind Queensland. So, it's being really respectful and mindful that when we're either emailing or setting meetings, that we're respectful of that time zone and keeping that in mind. So that's where that availability creep creeps in as well, because we're not thinking about the different time zones of our employees. We're Queensland-based, so everyone needs to work on our time. We just need to be a little bit mindful of that.

Adam Cliffe: So, I want to just pivot a little bit and talk to you about AI. It wouldn't be a podcast in 2024 if we didn't talk about AI. But it's an interesting thing because, in my opinion, we see a lot of media hype and buzz about AI in terms of replacing staff. So, I'd be really interested to get your thoughts on that because me personally, I think, whilst there will be certain jobs, I think, that AI will replace, I think we're not talking enough about the job creation side of AI and what that looks like. So, really interested to see if you've actually had anything or come across anything so far. I know it's very early days with AI in terms of Copilot and ChatGPT and generative AI at least, and business adoption of it. But yeah, it'd be just interesting to see where you think maybe that's heading and what your take on that is.

Xavier Miller:Yeah, and I think you're right. It's probably important to address that. Yes, there will be some jobs that no longer exist in the future because of AI, but equally, I think AI is going to create jobs. It's also going to enhance jobs as well. So, if we think of what we've talked about, the job creation at the moment and as you said, Adam, it's quite new and, again, I am not technical, so I'm fascinated by AI and that's certainly helping enhance my role, but we'll talk about that in a minute.

In terms of the job creation, what we're seeing out there 12 months ago, 18 months ago, we wouldn't have seen job ads for AI officers or chief of AI to support the chief technology officer. There are multiple roles that didn't exist 12 months ago, so job creation is very real. Job enhancement is probably even more relevant and probably not spoken about as much that there's so much more efficiency to be created. The AI can enhance the speed at which we provide services or products. It enhances the quality of work that we do.

There's a lot of cyber and security-related issues which I'm sure you'll be able to talk to, Adam, when it comes to AI in a workplace, but I think we need to, again it's like the right to disconnect. If we're having conversations with our employees about the introduction of AI into our business and what that means and what our I suppose intended use of AI is and how it's going to support and enhance their role and their learning and their growth, I don't think there's necessarily a great deal to be scared of in terms of AI replacing everyone's role, but I think there's more upside to it than downside definitely.

Adam Cliffe: Yeah, I agree, and I really like the job enhancement side that you just touched on before, because I think that is definitely one area of AI that is not spoken enough about as well. I think whoever can actually leverage AI in their role are the ones that are going to definitely stand out and have that higher quality and higher output. Obviously, as you said, security implications, privacy implications all those things definitely need to be addressed at the start in terms of how we or how you adopt AI in an organisation. And if you are an organisation that is interested in like Copilot or even chatbots and stuff like that, I definitely recommend looking at things like privacy by design, secure by design and doing those types of assessments before looking into that, because there are some implications around that, and I think we've seen some pretty interesting cases recently from the Victorian Office Commissioner around a caseworker using ChatGPT to do up some case notes on a very sensitive topic and got it wrong and, yeah, there's some pretty big consequences for that. So, I think it's definitely something we need to think about. We need to talk about, again going back to that right to disconnect in the policy talk you said, thinking about some type of AI policy. What are we actually hoping to achieve from an organisation with it? What do we want staff to actually do with it? Is it just to do policy process creation, stuff like that, so putting some guardrails around it? Obviously, ethics come into it as well, making sure we do that sort of stuff. So, I do think it's not as scary as we think.

I don't think it's going to replace all the jobs either. I think it's here to stay. It's going to continue to grow and I actually kind of relate it back to the early days of the internet. There was a very similar fear around the internet coming and being introduced to businesses and it's going to take this job and that job and, look, it did for some things. But look at the creation that it's done over the years. Like you know, we wouldn't be doing this right now without it. So, you know, and then also think about technology as a whole. You know who would have thought podcasting would be a full-time job for some? So, I think there is going to definitely be some enhancements on current roles and creation of others and, yes, look, there might be some roles that it does maybe replace. But then I think maybe organisations and employees in particular, should look at maybe what's coming and maybe retraining or look at adopting a certain training around that.

Xavier Miller: That's right. Yeah, and I was going to touch on that as well. That learning piece is like when the internet came on board and perhaps for the generation before us, Adam, I'm going to try and class us as young bucks, but probably not yet, probably not still, is learning new roles, and perhaps if there's a particular role or sector that is affected a little more than others with AI, it's then, well, the government has a part to play and so does business in retraining and cross-training skill sets, and whether it's AI or another part of technology, technology is definitely a skill set that needs to be, that everyone needs to train on and be lifelong learners and, yeah, the opportunities to cross train or go into a new career. I think you know we were touching on the average tenure earlier on of someone under 25 being just under two years. Well, in a normal working life, my maths isn't great, but they're probably looking at somewhere around 18 or 20 careers or different jobs. So, learning and reskilling, upskilling, I think is part of everyone's responsibility as an employee or a worker within Australia.

Adam Cliffe: Yeah, well said. Look, thanks for joining me today, Xavier. That was a fantastic chat. I really enjoyed that. I think there's some great insights there that I think our viewers will be able to take on board. So, yeah, once again, thank you very much for joining me.

Xavier Miller: Pleasure. Thanks so much for having me, Adam, it's been great.
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