Are Your HR Basics In Place?

We encourage all employers to always have signed employee contracts in place with all employees ( Yes even with mates). To have a thorough staff handbook incorporating all your workplace polices, it is important that this is kept up-to-date, in sync with your employment contracts and accessible to everyone. Lastly, we all value a great induction, employers need to make time to plan their employee induction program and provide employees with that great first impression of their employer. As we all know “First impressions are lasting impressions” and yet another famous one just to stick the reality to you “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail“

Some of you will know exactly what we mean when we say “Don’t be too nice“, maybe you are scared of hurting someone’s feelings, stepping on toes, losing the one employee you actually like or simply maybe you think the best of people and that nothing will ever go wrong? However this isn’t a perfect world and whichever way you want to interpret this, its best to have that professional line between yourself and employees, speak up when something Is not flowing like it should, take notes of your meetings and document as much as you can. Most importantly encourage an effective two-way communication stream, make employees feel they too can speak up and raise any concerns.

Employers should be documenting not only their interactions with employees, but their own observations of employee interactions and behaviours especially when conducting performance reviews. Employers will then have acquired solid talking points to avoid recency bias. Emails can always be relied on as an exchange of words, however face-to-face or virtual interactions one should try their best to record/transcribe or take minutes of your meetings. A useful tactic is to provide a meeting summary after your meetings to all involved. When we say “Document Everything” try to document as much as you can for meaningful exchanges, not those that are inconsequential.