Aureum

How does the Staff Turnover Rate Effect the Bottom-line?

If your staff turnover rate is high, then your bottom-line will be significantly affected. Unexpected resignations cost between 100% & 300% of the person’s salary to replace. The costs that feed in to these percentages include recruitment costs, lost knowledge and productivity, down time to hire and train new hires and so on. What is considered a high turnover rate for your company will depend on the industry you are in. Check with your Industry... Read More

Employee Engagement

According to a Towers Watson Study, employee engagement is the willingness to put additional discretionary effort into work (extra time, brainpower and energy), beyond what is considered ‘enough’. Engaged employees have the desire and commitment to do the best they can and make a measurable contribution to an organisation’s performance. In other words your employees are performing at over 100%.     Some of the benefits of employee... Read More

Employee Assistance

Have you heard of Employee Assistance?  It is a great tool for managers, and comes in handy when an employee tells you something that crosses the boundaries between work and personal problems  i.e. their personal financial problems, gambling issues, personal relationship problems…what do you do? You want to be compassionate, however set some boundaries about what you can and can’t do to help them. Employee Assistance is a great middle ground.... Read More

How to write a job description

To understand how to write a job description, first you need to understand why have a job description in the first place. The key reasons for having a job description are: The Employment Relations Act 2000 requires an employer to have ‘a description of the work to be performed by the employee’ in their employment agreement Avoid hefty non-compliance fines which can be up to $20,000 Providse clear objectives/goals for the employee Helps the employee... Read More

Performance results – how do you get them?

When it comes to getting performance results, one way to do it is to tell your employees what to do. This approach can be a lottery – sometimes they do it, and sometimes they don’t. Why is that? Neuroscience is discovering the human brain can be like a two year old, tell it what to do and it automatically pushes back. The reason for this is we all have unique ways of thinking about things, this is because of the unique pathways we have developed... Read More

What is pay for performance, and does it work?

Pay for performance is extra pay the employee receives when certain work goals, targets, piece rate items, or key performance measures are achieved. It is used as a motivational tool. For example: Increase revenue by 10% by end of financial year to receive $5,000 Pack 12 bottles of wine per box to receive a 10 cent bonus per box Create a team based work culture by end of the financial year to receive $3,000   Does pay for performance work? The... Read More

What are disciplinary procedures?

Disciplinary procedures are what an employer follows when an employee is suspected of unacceptable behaviour i.e. being frequently late, falsifying their timesheet, theft, spending too much time on the internet, being verbally abusive, not meeting their performance targets and so on. These examples are what are known as conduct issues. Disciplinary procedures help address these conduct issues in a legally defensible way. Disciplinary procedures enable... Read More

What are Employment Policies?

Employment policies are those sleep inducing documents, usually given to new recruits to read during their workplace induction. Employment policies are usually wordy and boring documentzzzzzzzzzz, setting out the rules and responsibilities to help maintain compliance with legislation, fairness, order, and make expectations clear in the workplace. This is important information for building a good company culture and maintaining appropriate conduct.... Read More

The Best Questions for Recruiting New Employees

What are the best questions to ask to help predict future performance of employees? In my experience the best questions are either situational or behavioural based. Situational based – Candidates are asked questions on how they would handle/react to a hypothetical job related situation in the future.  These are the best questions for candidates who don’t have past experience in the area concerned, and you wish to test how they would handle... Read More

Rewards and Incentives – A Novel Approach

Employee rewards and incentives are a way to recognise employees for doing a good job. These can take the form of vouchers, gifts, bonuses, and so on. Science is finding novel ways to structure rewards and incentive programmes to get the best bang for your buck. For example studies have found, if as a company you write out a cheque to a charity, this has less impact on job satisfaction, than if instead the money is allocated to employees who then... Read More

Can you legally record a conversation?

It is getting easier to record a conversation with iphones, android devices and so on. Can you legally record a conversation? Remember the famous case of the secret recording of John Key and John Banks in the Tea Cup Incident. Can you record a conversation in secret? It is a question that comes up quite often these days, people wanting to record a conversation, and others being concerned about secret recordings. What are your rights under legislation? According... Read More

What is the most important poor performance risk to manage?

Newly promoted managers (especially from technical backgrounds) can change very quickly from high performance in a technical capacity, to poor performance as a manager. This has a multiplier effect as it  impacts not only their own performance but the performance of their new team. It often occurs because it is a significant transition changing from doing the work (as an employee), to getting the work done through others (as a manager). Our experience... Read More