The Latest from Kristy-Lee

Hello and welcome to Episode 169 of the People Powered Business Podcast.

This week we have a brief but important technical update for you after the Fair Work Commission announced its decision around the National Minimum Wage increase effective 1 July.

This year has seen the most significant increase in the history of the Fair Work Act with a 5.75% wage increase being applied to the National Minimum Wage and all Modern Award Minimum Wages effective 1 July 2023.

In addition to the wages increasing, all of the allowances in the Awards will also increase, so you need to keep a close eye on that.

If you pay staff Award rates, or if you have IFA’s or AWA’s in place, this is time to review.

If you’d like to connect with other businesses who are also juggling the challenges of teams, I’d love you to join us inside our free Facebook Group, HR Support for Australian Businesses, so I can learn more about what’s working for you and any challenges you might be...

FROM THE VAULT!

Hello and welcome to Episode 168 of the People Powered Business Podcast!

In today's episode we are talking about revisiting one of the most popular episodes - tackling tough talks with your team.

You know the conversations I mean, the one where you get a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, the ones which give you heart palpitations at the thought of having them, that keep you up at night.

Whether it’s a performance management issue, a change in the business, a termination or anything else that is going to be a tough conversation with our team, we’ve all been in a situation where we have to have them, and maybe even try and avoid them!

However, avoiding those conversations in bad for business in many ways, which we unpack in this episode, and I also share with you a simple framework to follow next time you need to tackle a tough conversation with a team member.

As promised, you can get your free guide to tackling tough conversations here -...

Hello and welcome to Episode 167 of the People Powered Business Podcast.

Today I’m covering off the key compliance changes that every business needs to be across right now – given the absolute avalanche of changes that we are seeing, it feels ‘unprecedented’.

Starting with the introduction of the ‘Secure Jobs Better Pay Act’ which as the name suggests, is designed to make jobs more secure for workers, and put upwards pressure on wages across the board.

The changes here include pay secrecy clauses becoming banned in employment contracts, significant changes to the enterprise bargaining landscape, including the massive expansion of multi enterprise bargaining. Through to the broadening of flexible work requests and limitations on denying them and the new l imitations on fixed term contracts coming into place by December.

Then we cover the changes to and introduction of Family and Domestic Violence Leave.

And finally the Respect@Work Act which sees a...

The term employee engagement sounds like one of those HR buzz words which fade in and out of popularity over time.

However, the concept behind it is not a new one, and the impact it can have on an organisations bottom line results in terms of profitably, efficiency and revenue generation should not be underestimated.

So, how do we define it? Employee Engagement ultimately is a level of an employee's commitment and connection to the organisation. Two keys words commitment and connection, both are critical to engagement. Commitment in not only showing up, but giving their absolute all, and connection not just to their job, but to a cause or calling bigger than them, their roles or perhaps even this organisation. Connection to the leaders, to their colleagues and to the important part their role plays in achieving something bigger.

To put it simply, engagement refers to the extent to which an employee is willing to go above and beyond, commit that extra bit and throw all of their...

Hello and welcome to Episode 166 of the People Powered Business Podcast.

Often here on the podcast I chat about themes or topics that keep showing up –whether with my private coaching clients in the Power BOSS Program, with our People Powered HR members, my consulting clients, in conversations I am having with leaders and experts I am speaking to and generally in the content that seems to randomly show up in my social media feeds - and this weeks no different.

I wanted to start today’s episode with a quote from Sheryl Sandberg “we cannot change what we are not aware of, and once we are aware, we cannot help but change”.

I think this sums up perfectly the discussion of today, we need to create self awareness in our leadership skills, because without awareness nothing can change, and with awareness change and development is inevitable.

So in this episode we look at how aware you are of your current leadership skills, strengths and blind spots.

We’ll then...

Hello and welcome to Episode 165 of the People Powered Business Podcast.

In today's episode we are looking at just one of the latest Industrial Relations updates – this one relates to our ability as employers to direct employees to take annual leave over a close down period – the most common of which for most businesses is over the Christmas and New Year period.

Let’s be honest, there is an absolute avalanche of changes rolling through from the Fair Work Commission, the Federal Government and a range of other legislative bodies, and many of the changes are getting a decent amount of media coverage. So changes like this one, which has much less public interest attached to it, can slide by without anyone realising.

Closing down our businesses over the Christmas and New Year has been common place in many, if not most, industries in Australia for decades. Sometimes this has been fuelled by industry norms, like the Building and Construction Industry where suppliers tend...

We all know the feeling, we’re losing sleep, we’re avoiding the person at work, we’re angry, frustrated and tearing our hair out. We have an employee who is not performing, not showing up how we want them to at work or behaving in a negative way, a way that isn’t sitting right with you.

We can’t always quite put our finger on the exact issue, it’s just not quite right, but it’s wrong enough to be consuming our time and attention. Or maybe it is more obvious, but we feel like we’re going over the top if we bring it up – we don’t want them to feel like we are micromanaging them or pulling them up for something that feels petty and insignificant (yet the fact that it’s consuming our time and attention does in fact mean that at some level it is significant to us).

So, we tolerate it, whether it’s behaviour, attendance, performance or something else, we tolerate it. We think maybe it’s not that...

As a business owner, leader or manager, the ability to successfully delegate tasks, responsibilities and authority is critical to your ability to grow and develop your business.

However, it’s a skill that often we struggle with.

Even those who can delegate, often don’t do it as effectively as they could, and for those who own their own businesses this can be a really tough art to master, because it involves letting go, and releasing control.

Put simply, delegation is the action of assigning responsibility for the completion of a task to another person.

Typically, you as the delegator maintain the responsibility for the task being completed, although you may, depending on the circumstances, delegate the authority up to a certain level as well. So, you delegate the ‘doing’ but still need to ensure the doing gets done.

As your business grows, delegation becomes critical, you will ultimately become a bottle neck in your own...

Hello and welcome to Episode 164 of the People Powered Business Podcast.

In today's episode we are discussing how adaptable we are as leaders, and whether we’re displaying adaptive leadership with our teams.

We all have a natural or default leadership style that we tend to lean towards, and we all also have blind spots or weak points in our leadership – but how well can we move from one style to another to lead in the best possible way based on the situation, circumstances and people.

Today we take a look at what adaptive leadership actually looks like, why it’s important to work on our adaptive leadership skills, and how we can develop a more adaptive leadership approach.

I also mention research conducted by Tomoko Yokoi, here is a link to the Harvard Business Review article outlining the work of her and her team:

https://hbr.org/2022/01/finding-the-right-balance-and-flexibility-in-your-leadership-style

If you’d like to continue the conversation on...

Do you ever get the feeling you are trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole when it comes to your team?

It’s not that people are doing a bad job, or underperforming, but simply that the skills they have no longer suit the business, or that the business has changed and needs new skills.

All businesses face these challenges as they grow and evolve. The skills that were once critical to your service delivery perhaps are now obsolete, technology has absorbed tasks or customers have changed how they do business with you.

When we need to grow what we tend to do, often out of uncertainty and desperation is just to ‘tack on’ a new role, where we think the gap is, without any strategic thought or forward planning.

The problem with this approach is you end up creating a team structure that’s clunky, anything but streamlined and usually isn’t the most efficient and productive structure for your business.

This is why I...