There's a new resource for employers on Immigration New Zealand's website.

The Employer Hub is a useful resource where you can find out about employing migrants, the visa options available to you, and how to help your new employees settle in New Zealand.

The hub is divided into four sections:

• Employing Migrants -- to help you identify appropriate visa options for the type of position you need to fill, and the steps you need to take as an employer.
  
   
• Finding & Recruiting Migrants -- to help you connect with potential candidates through a database using the free SkillFinder service, and the DoL funded NewKiwis service, as well as practical suggestions to help you get started if you are a beginner to recruiting migrants.
  
   
• Settling & Retaining Migrants -- provides you with access to information, tools and settlement support services to assist your new employee with settling into New Zealand both at work and at home, and to help your workplace welcome and retain new migrants.
  
   
• News, Tools, and Statistics -- helps you keep up to date with migrant attraction activities, find out about events for employers and migrants, access tools to assist you, and provides access to news, research and statistics related to immigration.

Visit www.immigration.govt.nz/employers for more information.

The Employers Chamber of Commerce Central held a Member Briefing in Wellington last week.

They presented findings from the annual analysis of the decisions made in 2010 by the Employment Relations Authority.  It was interesting to learn that:

• The number of personal grievances overall has slightly grown compared to 2009, with a 59% success rate for employees and 41% for employers.
• The change in average hurt and humiliation award compared to 2009 has increased significantly in Auckland but overall has grown at a moderate rate.
• On average, it cost an employer slightly less than an employee to win a personal grievance claim.  However, it cost an employer approximately 2.5 times that of an employee to lose a personal grievance claim.

Successful Claims by Location 

Hurt and Humiliation Awards by Location

Average Employer Costs

Average Employee Costs

The numbers highlight that employers can benefit from seeking professional advice about staffing situations relating to restructuring and performance issues.  This will ensure fair and reasonable processes are being followed, legal obligations are being met and will help minimise the risk of employees feeling aggrieved by their employer’s actions.

This Christmas Day (25 December 2011) and New Year's Day (1 January 2012) both fall on a Sunday.

The rules about transferring these days apply, which in this case is to transfer them to Tuesday. 

This means that if Sunday is a day an employee would otherwise have worked, those days are observed on Sunday.  If Sunday is otherwise a day that an employee would not work, the day is transferred to and observed on Tuesday.

Boxing Day (26 December 2011) and 2 January 2012 both fall on a Monday and therefore no transfer takes place, unless you have a specific transfer agreement with your employee as allowed under the 2011 Holidays Act amendment.

For more information visit the Department of Labour website.

Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, ended the second day of the Financial Education Summit in Melbourne with a memorable keynote. Here are the “can’t forget” HR highlights from his on-stage interview:

• Lead with your heart. A business is a group of people … a good leader will motivate, praise not criticize, and inspire to get the best out of them. If you lead this way you’ve got a good chance of being successful.
• Learn the art of delegation. Spend time to find people better than you to run your business on a day to day basis so you can be entrepreneurial. Once you’ve delegated, don’t second guess them. Give them the freedom to make mistakes and accept they won’t do things the same as you.
• If people are happy (proud of the company, have the tools they need, and feel listened to) they will stay. People don’t usually leave for more money, they leave out of frustration that they’re not being listened to.

Pretty good advice if you ask me.

We often find that small business owners are very unsure about how to handle concerns with employee performance, so much so that they tip toe around the issue rather than tackle it head-on.

I was speaking recently with an owner that had a casual employee that worked fluctuating hours and submitted a timesheet for payroll. The employer had noticed that the hours on the timesheet had been increasing over time and now were around 25% greater than orginally planned. The employee's workload hadn't increased so in addition to higher wage costs, the business was suffering from a reduced workplace productivity rate. 

To address the problem, the owners had been keen to alleviate the employee's workload by taking on some of the tasks themselves. On the surface this might appear to be a good option, especially as it's a zero conflict approach - instead of confronting the employee to talk about nasty things like poor performance you can talk about how to ease the load - but what's the real cost of not tackling the issue head-on? 

1. The employee will not know that their performance is not meeting your expectations

2. The owner falls into the trap of working in the business, rather than on the business (which defeats the purpose of having employees in the first place)

3. The employee's productivity rate may become even worse if they continue to work the same long hours with a reduced workload

4. Everyone else who completes their work in the expected hours sees their workmate getting a helping hand, so they might all increase their hours to get the same reward!

We always recommend that employers speak openly with their employees about general progress and any concerns and ideas either may have.

In this case some points for discussion might be:

• how is work planned and reviewed?
• what slows people down?
• how are hours determined / approved?
• how can we ensure that the allocated work gets completed in the allocated hours?

The key is to have a two-way discussion ... educate your employees about productivity and what in means in your business, and figure out together what it means for them in their job. Problem-solving conversations like this can be really useful to identify improvements to operational systems and processes which may be all that is needed to address performance shortfalls.

But, if pain persists ... see your Doctor.

Maybe that's our new tagline? Blue Dot ... the Workplace Doctors!