Think about the last person you turned down for a job. What would they say about your business? 

Even though they might have been disappointed, they may still have been impressed by the people they met. Or perhaps they’re wondering what really happened, when the interview seemed to go well but their next communication from you was a rejection letter. 

Now imagine those candidates describing their experience to someone you’d love to hire. Would they make your workplace sound like one people would actually want to join? 

Your hiring process is a preview of your workplace 

You know what it’s like to work in your business, but candidates don’t. The only glimpses they’re likely to get are the job advertisement, perhaps a recommendation from someone they know and the interactions they have with you during the recruitment process. 

Based on that alone, they’re likely to form an impression about everyday working life. On this front, an interviewer who has read their application and can explain the role properly gives a very different impression from one who arrives unprepared. Two managers offering conflicting accounts of the position could leave them wondering whose expectations they would need to meet. 

The research reinforces that candidate experience is not a nice-to-have extra. A meta analysis covering 86 samples and 48,750 participants found that positive perceptions about the selection process were associated with more favourable views of the employer, along with stronger intentions to accept an offer and recommend the organisation to others. 

Put simply, while you’re assessing candidates, they’re assessing you. So, if you want potential employees to perceive your organisation as respectful, collaborative and well organised, recruitment is an important place to demonstrate it. 

Better hiring starts with a clearer brief 

A good recruitment process begins before you advertise. Everyone involved should understand what the person will actually do, what success looks like and which capabilities they’ll need to bring to achieve it. 

That sounds straightforward, but a vacancy can expose differences you haven’t properly resolved – or perhaps even thought about – internally. Those differences matter because candidates may experience them as moving goalposts, inconsistent feedback or unclear expectations. 

For instance, one manager might want an experienced operator who can take responsibility immediately. Another might be looking for someone they can develop. Unless they agree, candidates could be assessed against different expectations or find the requirements changing as they progress. 

When you’re making these calls, be sure to distinguish what’s essential from what’s desirable, including any skills or capabilities someone could reasonably learn once they join. This helps you write a more useful job advertisement and gives candidates a clearer basis for deciding whether to apply in the first place.  

Also agree who will assess the candidates against which criteria, who makes the final decision and who keeps candidates informed. A shared brief gives your team a consistent basis for selection and helps prevent candidates becoming caught in an internal debate about what you need. 

Give candidates structure so they can show what they can do

Once you know what you’re looking for, the next question is how you’ll recognise it.  

Often employers engage candidates in unstructured conversation that leaves everyone feeling positive but gives little insight into their ability to do the job. 

A 2022 reassessment of recruitment research ranked structured interviews highest among the selection methods examined for predicting job performance. The researchers also found that the predictive power of many selection methods – including cognitive ability tests, work-sample tests and unstructured interviews – had previously been overstated.

A structured interview uses consistent core questions linked to the role’s requirements, with an agreed approach to assessing answers. You can still ask follow-up questions and let the conversation develop but the structure gives you a common basis for comparison. 

For example, if managing competing deadlines is essential, ask each candidate to describe a situation where they had to prioritise conflicting demands. Assess how they made decisions, communicated with others and handled the outcome. 

Ask interviewers to record their assessments before discussing candidates together. This gives everyone’s observations a chance to be considered before a confident or senior colleague shapes the conversation. 

A short, relevant practical task can also help potential employees demonstrate their capabilities. Explain what it assesses and how long it should take, and keep the demands proportionate to the role. 

Every stage should help answer a question about suitability. Adding more interviews or a lengthy assignment without a clear purpose creates extra work for everyone and can tell candidates something you didn’t intend to about how your business operates. 

Keep people informed even when there’s no decision yet 

A recruitment delay might be easy to explain from your side: a manager is away, interviews need rescheduling or you’re waiting for approval. From the candidate’s side, however, silence can undermine their confidence in you.  

They don’t know whether they’re still being considered, whether the role has changed or whether they should move on. That’s especially damaging if they’re also weighing another opportunity. 

Set expectations early. Explain the stages, who candidates will meet, any assessment tasks and when they should expect to hear from you. Give them a contact for questions and make someone responsible for providing updates. 

If you miss a promised deadline, acknowledge it. A brief message explaining the delay and giving a realistic date for the next update helps candidates plan, even if you honestly can’t yet give them a decision.

Automated acknowledgements and reminders can help you stay organised. Just be sure to keep them to the initial phases. Once someone has invested time in interviews or an assessment, a personal update shows that you recognise that effort. 

Reliable communication also gives candidates a practical example of how you handle expectations when things don’t go to plan. 

A rejection doesn’t have to end the relationship 

Most candidates won’t get the job.  

That means much of your reputation as an employer will be shaped by people you turn down. 

Research published in 2025 examined rejection timing across two studies involving 264 and 259 candidates. Faster communication improved the candidates’ perceptions of fairness and satisfaction, along with candidates’ intentions to reapply and recommend the employer to others. The comparisons included rejection notifications sent after seven versus fourteen days. 

The practical lesson is to close the loop promptly once you’ve made a decision. Leaving someone waiting doesn’t soften the disappointment. 

How you communicate should also reflect how far they’ve progressed. An applicant rejected at the initial screening stage may need a straightforward notification. Someone who’s attended several interviews and completed an assessment deserves a more personal response. 

For finalists, useful feedback can explain the decision against the role’s requirements. For example, saying that the successful candidate demonstrated more experience managing a team gives someone more to work with than a vague reference to “fit”. 

That said, you will never make every candidate happy with the outcome. But you can help them leave knowing their application was considered seriously and their time was respected.  

That leaves the door open for a future opportunity, even when this one hasn’t worked out.

Treat the process as part of your recruitment strategy 

It’s easy to judge a recruitment campaign by whether you filled the vacancy. But it’s also worth asking how you reached that decision and what candidates experienced along the way. 

Did everyone involved understand the role? Did your assessments give candidates a fair opportunity to demonstrate their capabilities? Were timelines realistic, updates reliable and decisions explained respectfully? 

You can ask candidates for feedback, too – including those you didn’t hire. Their answers might just reveal problems your team couldn’t see, such as repeated questions across interviews or unclear instructions for an assessment. 

For the person who joins, the process has already begun setting expectations about working with you. They’ve seen how you prepare, communicate and make decisions. Following through on that experience once they start helps turn early confidence into an ongoing working relationship. 

And for those you turn down, a thoughtful process gives them a reason to consider you again… or recommend you to someone else. 

Want more? 

Catalina Consultants can review your recruitment approach, clarify what you need from a role, and then build a process that supports both sound hiring decisions and a positive candidate experience.  

Contact us to discuss your next hire.

For years, the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) has been a common feature of workplace sexual harassment settlements, with the idea being they can be used to protect the affected person’s privacy.

However, they’ve also come under growing scrutiny for the role they can play in silencing victim-survivors, prioritising the protection of organisational reputation, and preventing organisations from recognising patterns of harmful behaviour.

That scrutiny has intensified with new laws in Victoria restricting the use of NDAs in workplace sexual harassment matters. The changes, which came into effect on 1 July 2026, are designed to give greater control over confidentiality to the person who experienced the harassment.

But, while the Victorian reforms may be significant, they also raise a much broader question for employers across Australia: when a workplace sexual harassment complaint is settled confidentially, has the organisation actually resolved the problem or simply resolved the complaint?

An NDA designed to protect an organisation from risk can sometimes have the opposite effect. It can prevent the organisation from seeing the risk at all.

 

Why NDAs became commonplace in workplace harassment matters

There are legitimate reasons why confidentiality has become a common feature of workplace sexual harassment settlements.

The last thing a person making a complaint often wants is for colleagues, future employers or others knowing the details of what happened. Confidentiality can also provide a sense of closure and allow people to move on without having to repeatedly revisit an upsetting experience.

For employers, non-disclosure agreements can help bring disputes to a definite end, reducing the risk of further litigation, protecting sensitive personal information and providing certainty about what can and can’t be said once the matter is resolved.

In that sense, confidentiality is not inherently problematic. In some cases, it may be exactly what the person affected wants. The difficulty arises when confidentiality becomes routine or when it is imposed primarily to protect the organisation rather than the individual.

Also, what reduces an organisation’s immediate legal or reputational exposure may also make it harder to understand its longer-term impact on people and cultural risks.

That’s where an NDA can shift from an instrument for protecting privacy to one that reinforces silence, while also exposing the organisation and its other employees to increased risk.

 

What Victoria has changed under its new NDA restrictions

Victoria’s new laws place significant restrictions on the use of NDAs in workplace sexual harassment matters.

The key change is that confidentiality can no longer simply be imposed by an employer as a standard condition of settlement. In most cases, the person who experienced the harassment must initiate the request for an NDA. The agreement must also reflect their genuine preference.

The reforms also introduce safeguards designed to make sure that the decision to sign an NDA is informed and voluntary. Employers can’t pressure a complainant into accepting confidentiality. The legislation also preserves that person’s ability to make certain disclosures, including to legal and health professionals and others providing support.

In effect, these reforms shift the starting point. Instead of asking whether an employer can require confidentiality, the focus is increasingly on whether confidentiality is what the person affected actually wants.

That means an NDA might still be appropriate where it protects a complainant’s privacy and gives them greater control over what happens next. But it becomes much harder to justify when its main purpose is to protect the organisation from embarrassment or scrutiny.

 

Why NDAs can create risks for employers too

Victoria might be the first Australian jurisdiction to significantly restrict the use of non disclosure agreements in workplace sexual harassment matters, but the broader shift against the use of NDAs is already national.

Since December 2022, Australian employers have operated under a positive duty to take reasonable and proportionate steps to eliminate workplace sexual harassment, sex-based harassment and related conduct as far as possible.

This is a preventative duty that requires them to think about workplace culture, risk factors, reporting mechanisms and patterns of behaviour before problems escalate. It is not enough to respond only once someone makes a complaint.

And that has important implications for the way organisations use confidentiality.

An employer may be able to settle an individual complaint and keep the details private. But if the process also prevents it from identifying repeat behaviour, understanding cultural problems or learning where its systems have failed, it is effectively resolving the dispute without addressing the risk.

It is this broader duty to prevent harassment in the first place, that all employers should consider before using NDAs.

In this regard, a complaint isn’t simply a problem to resolve. It is also a piece of risk intelligence.

 

From complaint resolution to organisational learning

That’s why one of the dangers of treating sexual harassment purely as an individual complaint is that it can obscure the bigger picture.

A complaint should not only prompt questions about what happened between the people directly involved. It should also encourage the organisation to look more broadly at the circumstances that allowed the behaviour to occur in the first place.

Was this genuinely an isolated incident? Have similar concerns been raised before, formally or informally? Are there particular teams, managers or working environments where the risk is higher? Do employees feel confident reporting inappropriate behaviour? And, importantly, does senior leadership have enough visibility over complaints to identify patterns when they emerge?

None of this requires anyone to disregard a complainant’s privacy. Organisations can protect sensitive personal information while still learning from what happened.

 

What you should be doing now as an employer

For employers, Victoria’s changes to the rules around the use of NDAs should offer a good reason to review how workplace sexual harassment complaints are handled within the organisation.

To do this, begin by looking at whether confidentiality clauses are being used routinely or only when there’s a clear reason for them. Consider who’s proposing confidentiality, how broad the clause is, and whether it genuinely reflects what the person affected wants.

You should also make sure that settling an individual complaint doesn’t prevent the organisation from learning from what happened. Complaints should feed into broader risk management, including identifying recurring behaviour, cultural problems, weaknesses in reporting processes and areas where managers may need more support or training.

It’s also important to consider what information is reaching senior leadership. For example, individual identities and sensitive details may need to remain confidential, but you still need enough visibility over trends and patterns to understand where risks are emerging.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, avoid treating settlement as the end of the complaint process.

Because while resolving a complaint is important, so too is understanding why it happened, what it says about the workplace, and what needs to change to reduce the risk of it happening again.

 

Conclusion

Victoria’s new laws may have brought renewed attention to the use of NDAs, but the broader issue extends well beyond one state.

Across Australia, employers are already expected to take a preventative approach to workplace sexual harassment. That means looking beyond the resolution of individual complaints and considering what those complaints reveal about culture, systems and risk.

Confidentiality can still have an important role to play, particularly where it is genuinely what the person affected wants. But it should not become a mechanism for making uncomfortable problems disappear.

Because while an NDA may bring a dispute to an end, it cannot by itself prevent the next one.

 

Want more?

Managing workplace complaints effectively means looking beyond the immediate incident to understand the people, cultural and organisational risks behind it.

Catalina Consultants helps organisations build healthier workplaces, strengthen leadership capability and manage complex people issues.

Contact us to find out more.

By their very nature, hiring decisions are imperfect.

CVs can embellish what someone’s actually achieved. Candidates can come across much better – or much worse – in an interview than they’re likely to perform in reality. And the judgement of hiring managers isn’t always as objective or reliable as we might  like to believe.

This creates an unavoidable problem. How do you decide whether to hire someone before you have access to the clearest evidence of all – actually seeing them do the job?

Psychometric testing aims to reduce that uncertainty by providing insight into how someone is likely to think, communicate and behave at work before they begin.

Depending on the assessment, it can reveal information about a potential employee’s cognitive abilities, personality, workplace preferences and emotional intelligence that may not emerge from a CV or conventional interview.

But psychometric testing isn’t a crystal ball. Its usefulness depends on what’s being assessed, how relevant that is to the role and how the results are interpreted.

So, do psychometric tests actually work? And if so, when should you use them? We explore what employers need to know.

 

Why employers use psychometric testing

Anyone who’s an experienced interviewer will tell you that when you interview several candidates for the same role, you’re rarely comparing like with like.

One candidate could be highly polished, convincing and personable, but scratch the surface and they might turn out to be an unreliable employee. Another could have excellent skills and judgement but struggle to demonstrate them in an unfamiliar or high pressure setting.

And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. An even bigger issue can sometimes be the conversation itself. What gets discussed can change between interviews – and potentially explore completely different territory – depending on the answers given, the  questions asked and the rapport between candidate and interviewer.

Psychometric testing aims to remove some of these variables and let you compare potential employees based on the underlying qualities that actually matter in the role. It can also uncover potential strengths or weaknesses that haven’t emerged elsewhere in  the interview process, challenge impressions you’ve already formed and highlight issues worth probing further in a second interview or reference check.

 

What are the different types of psychometric tests?

Virtually everyone has done a form of psychometric testing at some stage in their careers, and one reason for that is that it’s a very broad term.

“Psychometric testing” doesn’t refer to one particular assessment or even one type of information. Instead, in recruitment, tests generally fall into several categories.

Cognitive ability and aptitude tests

These assess how someone processes information, learns, reasons and solves problems. Depending on the role, this might include numerical, verbal, abstract, spatial or mechanical reasoning.

Cognitive ability and aptitude tests aren’t usually designed to measure what someone already knows but to assess their capacity to understand information and apply it.

Personality assessments

These tend to look at relatively stable traits and behavioural tendencies. They may explore qualities such as conscientiousness, emotional stability, openness, adaptability or extraversion.

Unlike aptitude tests, there’s usually no “correct” personality profile. The relevant question is whether particular traits are likely to help – or hinder – someone in the role they’re applying for.

Workplace behaviour assessments

These focus more specifically on how someone is likely to operate at work. For instance, they may provide insight into how a candidate communicates, collaborates, makes decisions, responds to pressure or approaches risk and detail.

Emotional intelligence assessments

These examine how well someone recognises, understands and manages emotions – both their own and other people’s. This can be especially relevant when you’re recruiting for leadership, management, sales or other roles involving complex interpersonal situations.

Some recruitment processes also use situational judgement tests, job-knowledge assessments and work samples. While these aren’t always described as psychometric tests, they can apply similar principles to assess how candidates respond to realistic  problems or perform tasks they would encounter in the role.

The Australian Psychological Society says employment-related testing commonly covers reasoning ability, personality and vocational preferences, but may also examine areas including integrity, leadership and emotional intelligence.

Do psychometric tests actually work?

The short answer is yes. But not simply because someone has put the word “psychometric” on the box.

For any assessment to be useful, it needs to clear two separate hurdles.

First, it must be reliable, meaning it measures the relevant characteristic consistently. Second, it must be valid for the purpose for which you’re using it. In recruitment, that means there should be credible evidence connecting what the test measures with  performance in the particular type of role.

The truth is that some assessments clear that bar more convincingly than others.

A major reanalysis of decades of research into employee-selection methods found that structured interviews had an average correlation of 0.42 with subsequent job performance. Job-knowledge tests recorded 0.40, work-sample tests 0.33 and cognitive-ability tests 0.31. In this context, the higher the correlation, the stronger the relationship between the assessment result and later performance.

The same research found that personality assessments became more predictive when questions were placed specifically in a work context. In other words, asking someone how they tend to behave at work can be more useful than asking broad questions about  what they’re like generally.

This is really at the heart of whether psychometric testing works. If it’s not being used to measure a quality that’s genuinely required in the role, it’s also not likely to be useful.

For instance, a numerical-reasoning test may tell you something important about a financial analyst but very little about whether someone will be an effective people leader. Likewise, a candidate’s degree of extraversion may matter in some roles but be almost irrelevant in others.

What the critics of psychometric testing say

Psychometric testing has no shortage of critics, and some of their criticisms may be well founded.

One obvious shortcoming is that candidates know they’re being assessed. In a personality questionnaire, they might choose the answer they think the employer wants rather than the one that most accurately reflects how they behave.

In fact, one meta-analysis comparing how the same people completed personality assessments in real job applications and lower-stakes settings found that applicants tended to give more socially desirable answers when employment was on the line. Their  answers also became less varied, making it harder to distinguish meaningfully between candidates.

Another problem is that not every test commonly used in workplaces was designed to predict job performance.

Four-quadrant personality assessments – which divide people into colours, letters, animals or other broad “types” – can be engaging and useful for prompting conversations about communication, teamwork and self-awareness.

But that doesn’t necessarily make them suitable for deciding who gets a job.

As the Harvard Business Review has observed, these assessments can be relatively easy to manipulate, meaning they can measure preferences or temporary “states” that change with context, rather than stable traits. Many also lack the reliability, comparison  data and demonstrated connection with job performance required for high-stakes hiring  decisions.

Testing conditions can also create problems. A candidate’s result can be affected by time pressure, anxiety, language, cultural background, disability or simply unfamiliarity with the testing format.

So, unless those factors are genuinely relevant to the job, the assessment might end up measuring how well someone takes the test rather than how well they could perform the  role.

 

How to effectively introduce psychometric testing into your organisation’s recruitment process

If you’re going to introduce psychometric testing, it needs to be designed into your recruitment process rather than simply bolted onto it. Here’s how to do it effectively.

  1. Start with the requirements of the role

Identify the abilities, behaviours and personal qualities that genuinely influence success in the position. The Australian Human Rights Commission says psychological and aptitude testing should only be used when it’s reasonably required to determine whether someone can perform the specific requirements of a job.

  1. Choose a test that actually measures those qualities

Don’t choose an assessment simply because it’s popular, inexpensive or produces an impressive-looking report. Ask the provider what the test measures, how reliable it is and what evidence connects its results with performance in comparable roles.

  1. Decide where testing belongs in the recruitment process

Testing every single applicant is likely to waste time and discourage good candidates. It’s often more useful to introduce psychometric testing after an initial shortlist, when you can use the results to inform subsequent interviews and reference checks.

That’s broadly how we hire at Catalina Consultants: a brief initial conversation and two interview rounds before psychometric testing.

  1. Determine how much weight the results will carry

Decide this before you see anyone’s score. Otherwise, there’s a risk you’ll embrace a result that supports your preferred candidate while dismissing one that challenges your existing view.

  1. Explain the process to candidates

Tell candidates why they’re being tested, what the assessment involves, how the results will be used and who will have access to them. You should also give them an opportunity to raise anything that may affect their ability to complete the assessment and provide reasonable adjustments where appropriate.

  1. Make sure the results are interpreted properly

A percentile, colour or personality label rarely tells the whole story. Make sure someone with the right training interprets what the results mean (and equally importantly, what they don’t mean) in the context of the role.

  1. Use the results to ask better questions

Treat the assessment as a source of questions rather than a final answer. If the results suggest a potential strength, risk or inconsistency, explore it with the candidate and, where appropriate, their referees. Look for evidence rather than assuming the test must be right.

  1. Carry the insights into onboarding

Once the successful candidate starts, relevant findings can help their manager understand how they prefer to communicate, receive feedback and approach their work. They may also identify useful development priorities or potential sources of friction  within the team.

But the assessment should remain a starting point for discussion, not a permanent label. Once you’ve seen how the employee actually performs, their real behaviour should always carry more weight than a prediction made before they began.

  1. Review whether the assessment is working

Compare test results with employees’ subsequent performance, retention and development over time. If the assessment isn’t helping you make better appointments (or if it consistently disadvantages particular groups) you need to reconsider the test or  how you’re using it.

 

Better information, not perfect prediction

Psychometric testing can’t eliminate the risk involved in hiring. No assessment can tell  you with certainty how someone will perform once they’re working inside your  organisation.

Used well, however, it can reveal information you might otherwise miss, challenge assumptions formed during interviews and help you make a more considered decision. The same insights can then support better conversations about communication,  management and development once the successful candidate begins.

The real value isn’t in the test itself, but in how intelligently you use the information it gives you.

 

Want more?

If you’re considering introducing psychometric testing or want to improve your recruitment and onboarding processes, Catalina Consultants can help. Contact us to find out more.

Australia’s government-funded Paid Parental Leave scheme now provides eligible families with up to 26 weeks of pay.

For children born or adopted on or after 1 July 2026, Parental Leave Pay increased from 120 to 130 days. Of those 130 days, 20 – or four working weeks – are generally reserved for the non-primary carer/partner.

On paper, this may seem like a relatively simple expansion of an existing entitlement. In practice, however, it represents something more significant: another deliberate step towards treating the care of a new child as a responsibility to be shared, rather than work that falls primarily to one parent (most often the mother).

But reserving leave for partners doesn’t guarantee they’ll feel comfortable taking it.

 

Instead, for many fathers and other non-birth parents, the decision will still be shaped by workplace expectations rather than any statutory entitlement.

They may fear that taking an extended period away from work will make them appear less committed, disrupt an important project or affect their future opportunities. Similarly, many employers formally support parental leave but continue to treat a partner taking more than a week or two as unusual.

That means the success of the 2026 changes will depend partly on what happens inside individual workplaces. Employers have an opportunity to turn a statutory entitlement into a normal and expected part of working life: and to encourage a more balanced caregiving dynamic that continues long after parental leave ends.

What changed in Australia’s Paid Parental Leave scheme in 2026?

The expansion that took effect from 1 July 2026 is the final stage of a gradual increase in government-funded Parental Leave Pay from 18 to 26 weeks.

For children born or adopted from that date:

The payments can also be taken flexibly within two years of the child’s birth or adoption. This means families don’t necessarily have to divide the entitlement into one uninterrupted block taken by one parent and then the other.

Government Parental Leave Pay is separate from any employer-funded paid parental leave. It’s also different from the unpaid parental leave available to eligible employees under the National Employment Standards.

Depending on their circumstances and workplace policies, parents may be able to combine these different forms of leave.

Having leave available doesn’t mean it will be taken

The four-week reserved portion is intended to give partners a clearer opportunity – and incentive – to spend meaningful time caring for their child. In doing so, it removes one important obstacle to sharing parental leave: those days can no longer simply be absorbed into the birth parent’s entitlement.

But legislation can only go so far. Whether non-birth parents take the leave available to them will also depend on whether their workplace genuinely expects and supports them to do so.

The barriers in this regard generally break down into two key areas:

These concerns may never be stated openly. However, employees notice who takes parental leave, how managers respond and whether senior people genuinely disconnect while they’re away. An organisation can describe itself as family-friendly while its managers continue to assume that mothers will take lengthy periods of leave and fathers will return to work after a week or two, or still be available for calls.

There are, however, some encouraging signs that these expectations are beginning to change.

According to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, men now account for 20% of employees taking primary or universally available employer-funded parental leave – an increase of three percentage points in a year.

Against this, however, almost half of employers still distinguish between “primary” and “secondary” carers in their parental leave policies.

These labels can reinforce the very division the expanded government scheme is intended to challenge by making unequal caregiving the assumed starting point.

The four weeks reserved under the government scheme send a different message: partners aren’t merely there to provide short-term support to the birth parent. They’re parents and caregivers in their own right.

The habits formed during parental leave can last for years

Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows that women continue to perform more unpaid work than men, averaging four hours and 53 minutes a day compared with three hours and 52 minutes for men. And, while encouraging partners to take meaningful periods of parental leave will not eliminate that imbalance by itself, it can help establish shared responsibility from the outset.

After all, how parents divide leave following a child’s birth often influences how they divide care long after both have returned to work.

When one parent spends considerably more time providing care from the beginning, they’re more likely to become the person who knows the child’s routines, manages appointments, communicates with childcare and notices when something needs to be done. This means they tend to become the household’s default caregiver, even if it happens gradually and unconsciously.

The same pattern can then shape whose work gets interrupted when a child is sick, childcare is unavailable or an appointment falls during business hours. Even where both parents are employed, the mother is more likely to be the one expected to rearrange their day or take leave.

This can have consequences that go well beyond the occasional day away from work. Repeated interruptions can affect the projects an employee accepts, their availability for meetings and travel and their employer’s willingness to consider them for advancement.

Over time, an unequal division of care at home can contribute to unequal opportunities and earnings at work.

What employers can do to support shared care

Employers obviously can’t determine exactly how individual families divide their caring responsibilities. They can, however, create a workplace in which taking parental and carer’s leave is treated as a normal part of working life for every parent.

This begins with workplace parental leave policy.

Where possible, you should replace “primary” and “secondary” carer categories with gender-neutral parental leave that gives both parents meaningful time away from work. You should also explain how employer-funded leave interacts with the government scheme, rather than leaving employees to navigate the different entitlements themselves.

Line managers and HR teams have a particularly vital role to play. Conversations about parental leave shouldn’t assume that a non-birth parent plans to take only a week or two. Instead, proactively discuss the options available, ask employees what arrangement they’re considering and plan appropriate cover (without subtly signalling that an extended absence would be inconvenient).

If possible, you should also give your employees some visible examples of the policy in effect. When senior fathers and other non-birth parents take substantial periods of leave, genuinely disconnect and return without a career penalty, they demonstrate that the organisation’s support extends beyond the wording of its policy.

That support should continue after parental leave ends by normalising fathers and other non-birth parents using paid personal/carer’s leave when a child is sick or childcare arrangements unexpectedly fall through. Employees should not be questioned more closely, treated as unusually helpful partners or made to feel that caring for their own child is primarily somebody else’s responsibility.

Other practical steps include:

In short…

This year’s changes provide a timely reason to review both your parental leave policies and everyday practices.

The goal shouldn’t simply be making sure employees know that four weeks have been reserved for partners, but creating a workplace in which those employees can use their entitlement without feeling that they’re placing their careers at risk.

Want more?

Catalina Consultants can help you review and update your parental leave policies, communicate entitlements clearly and equip managers to support shared care in practice.

Get in touch with our HR consultants to discuss your workplace.

In 2026, it seems as though everyone is busy. Our calendars are full, our inboxes are  overflowing and we’re working across multiple projects, each carrying its own deadlines,  meetings and urgent requests. 

Yet despite all this activity, in many organisations a lot of important work keeps falling  behind. 

Leaders often interpret this as a capacity problem: there’s simply too much work and not  enough time to complete it. The only answers are to hire more people or ask the current  people to work even harder. 

Sometimes that diagnosis is correct, but sometimes it’s not – or at least not fully. 

That’s because the more common problem isn’t that an organisation has too much  work, it’s that it has too much work happening at once. And when this happens,  employees get overloaded, becoming less productive, less efficient and more likely to  make errors. 

If you want to know whether that’s happening in your organisation and what you can do  to fix it, read on. 

 

How overload creates even more overload 

Imagine a team responsible for six important projects and, rather than deciding which  projects should take priority, its leaders ask the team to progress all six at the same  time.

Employees then move constantly between them. They leave one task unfinished to  attend a meeting about another. Then a supposedly urgent request arrives, so they  abandon the work they’ve just resumed and move to another project still.  

This leads to a self-reinforcing and inefficient cycle, in which: 

MIT Sloan researchers Nelson Repenning and Donald Kieffer compare the effect to  traffic on a busy highway. Adding more cars initially allows more people to reach their  destinations. But once the road approaches capacity, each additional car makes every  journey slower. Eventually, the road becomes so congested that almost nobody moves. 

The same principle applies to knowledge work. Giving every employee a full workload  may appear efficient but, when the system becomes overloaded, starting more work can  reduce the amount that ultimately gets finished. 

In other words, just as a full road isn’t necessarily a productive road, a completely  occupied workforce isn’t necessarily a productive one either. 

 

The hidden cost of switching between tasks 

Part of the problem is that switching between tasks isn’t instantaneous or cost-free.  Every time we move from one project, client or application to another, we need to work  out where we were, recall the relevant information we might have forgotten and refocus  our attention on the new task. 

Individually, each transition may take only a few moments. But repeated hundreds of  times across a working week, those moments add up. 

A Harvard Business Review study tracked 137 employees across 20 teams at three  Fortune 500 companies for up to five weeks. It found that employees switched between  applications and websites around 1,200 times a day.

The researchers estimated that workers spent almost four hours each week simply  reorienting themselves after these switches: equivalent to around 9% of their total  working time. 

And switching between applications is only the most easily measured form of task  switching. Employees also move constantly between different projects, clients,  meetings, approvals and unexpected requests, often leaving one piece of work  unfinished to deal with another. 

The organisation pays a small productivity cost every time an employee changes  direction even though the cumulative cost can remain largely invisible. 

Instead, the consequences show up elsewhere: in longer completion times, missed  details, avoidable errors and employees who reach the end of a relentlessly busy day  wondering why they made so little meaningful progress. 

 

Why unfinished work follows us into the next task 

Even after we’ve moved to another task, part of our attention can remain fixed on the  work we left behind. 

Professor Sophie Leroy coined the term “attention residue” to describe this effect. Her  research discovered that people have difficulty fully shifting their attention away from an  unfinished task and, as a result, tend to perform less effectively on whatever they do  next.  

Consider an employee who stops writing an important report halfway through to attend  a meeting. During the meeting, they receive an urgent request from a client. They then  leave the meeting, respond to the client and return to the report, pausing along the way  to answer several emails and messages. 

Technically, that employee has worked on several things. But they may not have given  their complete attention to any of them. 

This is why carrying too many active projects creates more than an administrative  burden. Every unfinished task occupies some mental space. The more often people are  required to change direction, the more likely they are to carry thoughts, concerns and  unresolved decisions from one task into the next.

We may move from one piece of work to another without bringing all of our attention  with us. The result is slower thinking, reduced concentration and a greater likelihood of  overlooking important details. 

For some neurodivergent employees – particularly those who experience differences in  executive functioning, working memory or transitioning between tasks – the effects of an  overloaded and unpredictable workplace can often be compounded further. 

 

When everything becomes urgent 

As overloaded teams take longer to complete their work, more projects begin  approaching (or passing) their deadlines. Leaders respond by elevating whichever task  is under the greatest immediate pressure and pulling people away from their existing  work to deal with it. 

This may solve the immediate problem. But it also delays everything those employees  were doing before the latest request arrived. 

Soon, one of those abandoned tasks becomes urgent too. It is pushed to the front of the  queue, interrupting another piece of work and creating another future delay. Priorities  change repeatedly, employees receive competing instructions and the organisation spends increasing amounts of time deciding what should happen next rather than  completing it. 

This can create a workplace in which: 

Urgency can look like responsiveness. The employee who drops everything to rescue a  delayed project appears committed, while the manager who rapidly reallocates  resources appears decisive. 

But when urgent interventions become routine, it’s usually a sign that work is no longer  flowing properly. Each rescue pushes another task closer to crisis, ensuring that the  cycle continues.

When that happens, sustained overload can also become a workplace health and safety  issue. Safe Work Australia identifies high job demands (including having too much to do  in too little time) as a psychosocial hazard when they are severe, prolonged or frequent.  

To prevent this from happening, it recommends redesigning inefficient processes,  planning the workforce appropriately and allowing enough time for difficult tasks to be  completed safely. 

 

Hiring more people may not solve the problem 

When employees are overloaded and deadlines are slipping, hiring additional people  can seem like the obvious solution. And sometimes it is. If your organisation simply has  more work than your workforce can reasonably perform, increasing capacity may be  essential. 

But before you begin recruiting, make sure you identify what’s actually preventing work  from being completed. Broadly, the constraint will usually involve one or more of three  things: 

Recruitment can address the first two problems but it won’t usually fix the third. 

Adding employees to an overloaded system can create more handovers, meetings and  communication. New team members are likely to find themselves managing the same  competing priorities and interruptions as everyone else. Rather than increasing the  organisation’s output, the additional coordination can make an already congested  workflow more complicated. 

This doesn’t mean you should delay necessary recruitment or expect existing  employees to absorb unreasonable workloads. It means hiring decisions should form  part of a broader assessment of how work moves through the organisation. 

If work is stalled everywhere, priorities change constantly and employees are carrying  too many unfinished tasks, the underlying problem is likely to be systemic rather than  the result of any employee or team.

 

Stop starting and start finishing 

One of the most effective ways to relieve overload is to limit the amount of work being  progressed at any one time. 

This can feel counterintuitive. You might begin to worry that delaying the start of a  project means losing momentum or becoming less responsive. But MIT found that  employers who:  

reduced the time required to complete work by as much as 90%. 

Limiting work in progress also makes problems easier to see. When employees are  juggling dozens of active tasks, it can be difficult to distinguish genuine capacity  constraints from confusion and congestion.  

The scale of the problem is reflected in Atlassian’s 2024 State of Teams research.  

In a survey of 5,000 knowledge workers, 64% said their teams were constantly being  pulled in too many directions, while 70% believed they would make better progress with  fewer, more specific goals. 

To overcome this in your organisation, Repenning and Kieffer recommend: 

The difficult part is the need to make genuine choices about what the organisation will – and won’t – work on now.

 

Diagnose the problem before adding more work 

Modern work will always involve competing responsibilities, changing circumstances  and occasional interruptions that impact work/life balance. 

The goal isn’t to eliminate these things or ensure your employees only ever work on one  task at a time. It’s to prevent the amount of simultaneous work from exceeding the  team’s ability to keep it moving. 

So, when deadlines begin slipping and employees appear overwhelmed, resist the  temptation to respond by simply increasing pressure, changing priorities again or  immediately adding more work (and people) to the system. Instead, begin by asking: 

After all, recruitment can increase capacity, but it cannot by itself repair a system that  continually prevents people from completing their work.  

Instead, the answers to the questions above might point to a need for additional  capacity, new capabilities, a redesigned workflow or some combination of the three. 

 

Want more? 

Not sure whether your organisation needs more people, different capabilities or a better  way of managing work? 

Catalina Consultants can help you assess your workforce, priorities and processes,  then develop a practical HR strategy aligned with your organisation’s goals. 

Catalina Consultants can now provide clients with even more practical HR support, after becoming an Employment Hero Certified Partner. 

The partnership expands the practical support we can provide to any organisation looking to simplify their HR and payroll processes, improve workforce visibility and create a more consistent employee experience.

As a certified partner, we can help clients purchase, implement, configure and optimise Employment Hero. Just as importantly, we can provide the advice, training and ongoing support needed to make the system work in the real world.

So if your organisation is considering a new HR information system, or already uses Employment Hero and wants to get more from it, read on.

Why we have partnered with Employment Hero

As organisations grow, managing people usually becomes more complex. 

Employee records often sit across spreadsheets, shared drives and email inboxes. Onboarding involves more paperwork. Leave, timesheets and payroll information move between separate systems. 

These disconnected processes consume time and increase the risk of information being duplicated, missed or handled inconsistently. And managers struggle to find a complete and current view of their workforce.

Employment Hero brings HR, payroll, recruitment and employee management functions together in an integrated platform designed for Australian businesses. Depending on which product you choose, it lets you manage employee records, documents, onboarding, leave, timesheets, performance, learning, certifications, reporting and payroll processes – all in one place.

This can help your organisation establish more consistent HR processes and create a reliable source of data and information to support workforce planning.

Employment Hero also lets employees complete many routine actions themselves, such as updating personal details, accessing payslips and requesting leave. The result is that HR and line managers can reduce the need to handle minor administrative requests while giving employees easier access to the information and tools they need.

Technology is only one part of a successful HRIS implementation

But despite its capabilities, Employment Hero isn’t just “plug-and-play”. Whether or not it does all it is capable of within your organisation depends on how you use it. 

That means making sure your people processes are defined and operating properly. It also means capturing the right information, giving the right people access (and the right level of access) and planning how the new system will fit with payroll and other business processes.

After all, a platform can have every function in the world and still deliver disappointing results if it’s been configured around unclear processes, unreliable data or assumptions that don’t reflect how the organisation actually works.

Another factor you should think about if you’re implementing Employment Hero is change management. Managers and employees need to understand what’s changing, why it’s changing and what they’ll be expected to do differently. 

Meanwhile, administrators need enough confidence to operate the system once implementation support steps away.

And that’s exactly where Catalina Consultants can add value.

How Catalina Consultants can support your Employment Hero journey

Our team understands HR in practice. We can work with your organisation to examine your existing processes, analyse how Employment Hero can help you get more from them, and then configure Employment Hero around your workforce requirements and business goals. 

Because we already work closely with many of our clients, we also understand the broader context: your structure, people priorities, compliance obligations and plans for growth.

Here’s how we can support you at each stage of the process.

1. Discovery and planning

We analyse your workforce, existing systems, pain points and objectives to determine which Employment Hero solution is likely to work best, as well as which processes may need to be streamlined before you implement it. 

2. Implementation and configuration

We can assist with setting up the system, as well as the data migration. This helps align the platform with your organisation’s structure, policies and workflows.

3. Training and adoption

We can train administrators, managers and employees so they understand how to use the platform and the role they play in making sure it always has reliable information and consistent processes to work with.

What an integrated HR and payroll platform can help you improve

While every organisation has different needs, Employment Hero helps businesses improve several common areas of people management, such as:

While these are some of the potential benefits, the most valuable combination will depend on your workforce, priorities and the Employment Hero products you choose. 

Support that continues after implementation

While it’s one thing to plan the perfect system at launch, the reality is that organisations evolve. New employees join, roles change, reporting needs to evolve and HR or payroll processes are refined.

That’s why, after implementation, Catalina Consultants remain your point of contact, providing practical assistance, guidance and troubleshooting. 

For organisations already using Employment Hero, we can also help review how the platform is currently configured and identify opportunities to improve the system capability, adoption or make better use of available functions.

What the partnership with Employment Hero means for Catalina clients

For Catalina clients, our Employment Hero partnership creates a more direct path from identifying a people challenge to addressing it.

And, rather than dealing separately with a software provider, you work with your outsourced HR team that understands both the platform and your organisational context. 

Want more?

Want to see what Catalina Consultants and Employment Hero could do for your organisation? 

Contact Katie Whitehorn at katie@catalinaconsultants.com.au to arrange a demonstration or discuss your requirements.

Most of us like to think of ourselves as curious. We ask questions, explore new ideas and want to understand why things happen the way they do.

In fact, the latest State of Curiosity report from SurveyMonkey found that 95% of workers considered themselves at least somewhat curious, while 60% described themselves as very curious.

But there’s a problem: just 30% said their workplace strongly rewards curiosity and, for employers, that’s a serious issue.

When people stop being curious at work – when they no longer ask questions, challenge assumptions or explore different ways of doing things – organisations become less innovative and less efficient. They also make poorer decisions and spend more time correcting problems they could have easily avoided.

So why is curiosity vital in the workplace? What’s getting in the way of curiosity in many organisations? And, most importantly, what can you do as an employer to create a workplace where people feel able to be curious?

Why curiosity matters in the workplace

Curiosity can sometimes look inefficient. Rather than simply getting on with things, a curious employee will often ask why they’re doing things a certain way in the first place. They’ll challenge assumptions – sometimes foundational ones – that everyone else just accepts. And they’ll spend time exploring an idea that doesn’t seem to produce any measurable result.

But that apparent inefficiency can have real value. In an HBR piece written in 2018, behavioural scientist Francesca Gino argued that curiosity can help organisations respond more effectively to uncertainty, generate more creative solutions and encourage people to think more deeply about the decisions they make. In doing so, they can also help organisations prevent costly mistakes.

These findings were supported by SurveyMonkey’s more recent study. It found that half of the employees it surveyed had been forced to redo work because the right questions weren’t asked at the beginning. Meanwhile, 46% of surveyed employees had seen time or money wasted because assumptions went unchallenged.

In other words, curiosity can operate as a kind of workplace quality-control mechanism.

Questions such as “Why are we doing it this way?”, “What are we assuming?”, “What might we have missed?” or even “Is there a better way?” can uncover issues that otherwise wouldn’t be noticed.

What’s killing workplace curiosity in 2026?

If curiosity is so valuable, why do most employees say their workplaces don’t encourage it? 

SurveyMonkey’s research identified three key forces that can discourage people from asking questions or exploring ideas, even when they’re naturally curious.

1. The pressure to be efficient

As we noted at the beginning of this article, one of the biggest problems with curiosity is that it takes time.

If employees are under constant pressure to move quickly, meet deadlines and demonstrate productivity, asking extra questions can begin to feel like an expensive indulgence.

When that happens, meetings tend to become focused on updates and decisions rather than on exploration and questioning. Employees feel as though they should execute rather than investigate. And managers can send the message (even if it’s unintentional) that the fastest answer is the best one.

SurveyMonkey found that only 38% of employees said most meetings involved genuine open discussion or exploring ideas. 

It concluded that a relentless focus on efficiency could ultimately create inefficiency. If people didn’t have time to question assumptions at the beginning, organisations tended to spend significantly more time fixing problems down the track.

2. Fear of appearing uninformed

By its very nature, curiosity requires a degree of vulnerability. To ask a question, you first have to admit that you don’t know the answer. 

That can be difficult in workplaces where employees feel they’re expected to already understand everything. That’s especially true for people new to a role or early in their careers.

SurveyMonkey found that 44% of workers worried that asking too many questions would make them look incompetent rather than curious.

This encouraged employees to stay silent and pretend they understood. It also meant they usually followed an existing process rather than risk exposing a gap in their knowledge.

Over time, that tended to weaken both organisational learning and decision-making.

3. AI can become the middleman

SurveyMonkey found that Generative AI introduced another potential barrier to workplace curiosity.

Instead of asking a colleague, employees in 2026 often asked ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot for an explanation of workplace issues and received an answer in seconds.

While this could be useful in helping expand understanding quickly, it also led to the risk that AI would become a substitute for the conversations through which junior team members learned how more experienced colleagues thought.

But perhaps even more alarming is that SurveyMonkey found that it was actually business leaders who were more likely to turn to the “AI middleman” for answers. And the more often someone leaned on AI, the more often something went wrong. 

In fact, it concluded that when AI replaced colleagues for understanding, problems became the rule and not the exception.

A key reason for this was that a third of workers who used AI accepted its output either as-is or after only a quick check. This often meant the first answer became the final answer, with AI’s pattern recognition accepted at face value rather than challenged and refined. 

Those employees who tended to use AI more effectively had already partially solved the problem, so they’d done some of the thinking, had an understanding of the issues and could review AI’s output more critically. 

What does losing curiosity cost your organisation?

The consequences of declining curiosity go beyond missed ideas.

When employees stop asking questions, assumptions become embedded – even when they’re not true. Problems remain hidden for longer because no one scratched the surface. Junior employees learn less from experienced colleagues. And teams become more likely to repeat processes simply because “that’s how we’ve always done it”, rather than looking for the best way.

That can have a direct commercial cost. 

As we’ve already noted, SurveyMonkey’s research showed that half of workers had been forced to redo work because the right questions weren’t asked at the outset, while 46% had seen time or money wasted because assumptions went unchallenged.

But there can also be a longer-term cost to organisational capability. Curiosity is one of the ways knowledge moves through a business. It’s how less experienced employees learn judgement, how teams uncover better ways of working and how organisations adapt when circumstances change.

If employees stop asking questions – or increasingly direct those questions only to AI – some of the informal learning that’s so important to both successful organisations and individual career development can simply disappear.

How to encourage more curiosity in your workplace

The good news is that most employees haven’t lost their curiosity. 

SurveyMonkey’s research suggests the bigger issue is that workplaces don’t always give them enough opportunity – or enough psychological safety – to express it.

When employees were asked what would help them be more curious at work, 77% nominated more opportunities for brainstorming, while 70% wanted greater psychological safety to ask questions. 

Employees also ranked stronger cross-team connections, reduced workloads and more unstructured time as solutions for helping foster more curiosity.

So what does this mean for your workplace?

Make it safe to say “I don’t know”

If employees believe asking questions will make them look incompetent, they’re much more likely to stay quiet.

That means leaders need to model curiosity themselves. Ask questions. Admit when you don’t know something. Invite people to challenge assumptions. And make it clear that thoughtful questioning is a strength rather than a weakness.

Psychological safety doesn’t mean every idea has to be accepted. But it does mean people should feel comfortable to raise a concern, ask for clarification when they don’t understand something or suggest a different approach when they think of one – all without worrying that doing so will count against them.

Create space for exploration

Curiosity needs room to breathe. If every meeting is focused purely on status updates, deadlines and decisions, there’s little opportunity for people to explore ideas or ask whether there might be a better way.

Of course, we’re not suggesting you make every catch-up an open-ended brainstorming session. But it could mean that you deliberately set time aside within most meetings for questions, discussion and reflection before moving straight to next steps. 

Encourage people to learn from each other

AI can provide fast answers, but it shouldn’t replace every conversation.

Encouraging employees to ask colleagues how they approached a problem, why they made a particular decision or what they’ve learned from experience can help preserve the informal transfer of knowledge that happens inside good teams.

This is particularly important for junior employees, who often learn judgement from watching and questioning more experienced colleagues.

Reward better questions, not just faster answers

Workplaces tend to reward visible output like decisions made, tasks completed and deadlines met. 

But if employers measure productivity only by speed, employees quickly learn that questioning and exploration are secondary to their job.

Managers can counter this by recognising those team members who uncover risks, challenge assumptions constructively or ask questions that lead to better outcomes.

After all, sometimes the most valuable contribution an employee can make isn’t having the answer but asking the question nobody else thought to ask.

Curiosity as a workplace capability 

Your organisation probably doesn’t have a shortage of curious people, but it may have employees who – consciously or unconsciously – have learned their curiosity isn’t always rewarded.

The challenge for employers, however, is that curiosity can look like the opposite of productivity. It involves stopping, questioning, exploring and occasionally going somewhere that leads nowhere. But that doesn’t make it wasted time.

In many cases, giving employees permission to slow down long enough to ask better questions may actually be what prevents wasted time in the first place, while also minimising poor decisions and unnecessary rework, and generating better business outcomes.

So, if you want a more curious workplace, the starting point should be to make sure your people know that getting things done matters.  

However, understanding why they’re doing them matters just as much.

Want more?

Need help building the practices and frameworks that help generate curiosity in your workplace? Get in touch.

A recruiter contacts a promising candidate about a role. The candidate researches the organisation, prepares for the interview and rearranges their working day to attend. The conversation goes well, and the recruiter promises to provide an update by the end of the week.

And then … silence. 

The promised update never arrives, follow-up emails go unanswered, and the candidate is left to work out what happened.

Alternatively, a candidate stops returning calls, fails to attend confirmed interviews or even accepts a job offer and then disappears before their first day of work.

This is ghosting, and it’s on the rise. We explore why, how it’s hurting businesses as well as candidates, and how you can break the cycle and restore some trust to your organisation’s recruitment process.

 

What is ghosting?

Not every unanswered application necessarily amounts to ghosting. Job ads often make it clear that only shortlisted candidates will be contacted, so failing to contact everyone of the many applicants for a position isn’t really ghosting. It’s just acting in the way you said you would. 

An automated rejection isn’t necessarily ghosting either. It may feel impersonal, especially when it arrives almost immediately, but it at least gives the candidate an answer.

Instead, ghosting occurs when one party suddenly stops communicating without explanation, despite creating a reasonable expectation that the conversation will continue.

In each of these cases, the problem isn’t so much the rejection or a change of mind – those are just natural and largely unavoidable parts of the recruitment process. Nor is the problem necessarily a delay: hiring decisions frequently take longer than expected and candidates’ circumstances can change quickly.

Ghosting happens when reasonable expectations meet unexplained silence: it’s when someone leaves another person to guess what’s gone on after giving them reason to expect an answer.

 

How common is ghosting in recruitment?

Research suggests ghosting is now common on both sides of the recruitment process.

A 2024 survey by hiring platform Greenhouse found that almost 45% of UK candidates had been ghosted by a recruiter after an initial conversation. And, significantly, respondents from historically underrepresented backgrounds were more likely to report being ghosted than white candidates. More recent Greenhouse data puts the figure even higher, with 61% of job seekers now reporting they’ve been ghosted after an interview.

Recruiters and employers are experiencing similar behaviour. In fact, Forbes Magazine reported that Gen Z candidates ghost employers or recruiters about 54% of the time – after already accepting a formal job offer.

The studies involve different groups and measure different behaviour, but together they reveal how easily the behaviour can become self-reinforcing. Candidates who’ve repeatedly been left without an answer conclude that recruiters don’t value their time. Meanwhile, recruiters who’ve been repeatedly ignored or stood up decide there’s little point investing in candidates until they have demonstrated a serious commitment.

Both responses may be understandable, but they lead to a low-trust system in which each party tries to minimise its investment and keep its alternatives open… until ghosting stops looking like a breach of professional courtesy and starts becoming accepted as simply how recruitment works.

 

Why has ghosting become so common?

There’s no single explanation for the rise of ghosting. But changes in how organisations recruit (and how candidates apply) have made the process increasingly impersonal.

Technology allows job seekers to find and apply for more positions, while generative AI can help them produce tailored applications in a fraction of the time. 

This means employers must then process a greater volume of CVs and cover letters. And that, in turn, encourages heavier reliance on applicant tracking systems, automated screening questions and AI-assisted assessments. 

But what happens inside these isn’t always transparent. Candidates often don’t know whether a recruiter considered their application, whether a knockout question excluded them or whether an automated tool ranked their experience poorly. A capable candidate may have relevant or transferable skills but describe them differently from the language the system has been configured to identify.

Over time, this opacity can change how people behave. Candidates who suspect nobody is meaningfully reading their applications become less inclined to invest in each one. This perpetuates their inclination to apply for several positions, use AI to reproduce the language in job advertisements and keep several options open simultaneously.

Employers then receive more formulaic applications from candidates who may have only limited interest in the position. That creates still more pressure to automate screening and reserve personal communication for a small number of applicants.

But technology isn’t the only cause. Hiring priorities change, positions are placed on hold, and recruiters can be left waiting for decisions from hiring managers. Sometimes responsibility for updating candidates is unclear. At other times, people simply avoid the discomfort of delivering a rejection or admitting that a decision has been delayed.

Candidates can be equally reluctant to have an awkward conversation. They might receive a better offer, lose interest in the position or become concerned about something they encountered during the recruitment process. Saying nothing can feel easier than formally withdrawing.

The result is a self-reinforcing cycle: the less human recruitment feels, the less personally responsible people feel for bringing a conversation to a proper end.

 

The damage ghosting does

Ghosting may avoid one uncomfortable conversation, but it usually creates larger problems for everyone involved.

When candidates disappear, recruiters may need to revive an old shortlist or restart the search entirely. Interviews have to be rescheduled, hiring decisions are delayed, and important positions remain vacant for longer. If someone disappears after accepting an offer, it can get worse still – especially if the employer or recruiter has already informed other candidates they were unsuccessful. 

Candidates may find that ghosting cuts out their options for future roles. A recruiter or hiring manager who has been ignored, stood up or left without an employee on the agreed starting date is unlikely to consider that candidate favourably when another opportunity arises.

Finally, for employers, the damage extends beyond the immediate vacancy. Recruitment is often a candidate’s first direct experience of how an organisation operates. Repeated delays, broken promises and unexplained silence can suggest that the organisation is disorganised, indecisive or indifferent to people’s time.

That impression doesn’t necessarily disappear easily: an unsuccessful candidate might later apply for another position, refer someone else, become a customer or influence how others view the organisation. 

Viewed this way, candidate experience isn’t separate from employer brand – it’s part of a wider pattern of recruitment friction that can repel top talent.

 

Who should break the cycle?

Recruiters, employers and job seekers all share responsibility for communicating professionally, but they don’t have equal control over the recruitment process. 

Employers decide how positions are advertised, which technology screens applications, how many interviews candidates must complete and how long decisions take. And that also gives them the greatest ability, and therefore the greatest responsibility, to set a better standard.

Not that this absolves job seekers of their own responsibility to withdraw honestly rather than disappear. But because employers and recruiters hold the most control over the process, breaking the cycle has to start with them.

 

How you can help break the ghosting cycle in your business

People will always change their minds, accept other opportunities and occasionally behave badly. But a well-designed recruitment process can make disappearing less likely and make professional communication easier for everyone.

1. Set expectations from the beginning

Candidates should know what the recruitment process involves, how long it’s likely to take and who will keep them informed.

Recruiters should also ask how candidates prefer to be contacted and encourage them to disclose if they are considering other opportunities or working to another deadline. Candidates, in turn, should be clear about their level of interest and availability.

Neither party should have to guess what happens next.

2. Give people an actual update date

“We’ll be in touch” creates no meaningful expectation. “We will update you by Friday” does.

Sometimes Friday will arrive before the employer has made a decision. That shouldn’t prevent the recruiter from contacting the candidate with a short message explaining that the process has been delayed.

3. Match the communication to the investment

Not every candidate requires the same level of personal attention.

An automated acknowledgement or rejection might be appropriate for someone who has only submitted an initial application. But once a recruiter has spoken to a candidate, communication should become more personal.

Anyone who takes the time to prepare for and attend an interview deserves a clear outcome. Someone who completes several interviews, assessments or reference checks – the kind of multi-stage process a thorough hiring approach involves – deserves a direct conversation and, where possible, useful feedback.

The greater the investment you ask of the candidate, the greater your obligation to bring the process to a proper conclusion.

4. Automate administration, not relationships

Technology can improve the candidate experience when it’s used to acknowledge applications, arrange interviews, issue reminders and prevent people from being forgotten.

Problems arise when automation replaces communication or makes important decisions unnecessarily opaque.

Make sure you understand how your screening systems work and regularly check what kinds of candidates they exclude. A rigid system can overlook valuable transferable experience simply because it is described differently from the language used in the advertisement.

Once a meaningful human exchange has begun, technology should support the relationship rather than providing an excuse to withdraw from it.

5. Make honest withdrawal easy

Candidates sometimes disappear because formally declining an opportunity feels awkward. You can reduce this by providing a simple and stigma-free way to withdraw.

A short email, text message or link in your recruitment platform may be enough. Recruiters should also make clear that circumstances change and that an honest withdrawal will be treated more favourably than silence.

6. Make communication part of the process

Communication shouldn’t depend entirely on individual memory or goodwill.

You can assign responsibility for updates at every stage, establish expected response times and track candidates who’ve not received an outcome – see our guide to streamlining your hiring process in 8 weeks for a practical framework. 

Also, if you find a pattern of ghosting occurring at the same point of your recruitment process, that may be a sign of excessive delays, unclear information, unnecessary assessments or a gap between the advertised position and the role candidates encounter.

Instead of treating every disappearance as evidence that candidates are unreliable, employers should ask whether the recruitment process is contributing to the behaviour.

 

Restoring the lost art of replying

Recruitment will always involve rejection, changed circumstances and difficult conversations. Ghosting avoids none of these things. It simply transfers the uncertainty and discomfort to someone else.

Recruiters and job seekers won’t always have the answer the other person wants but, in most cases, any honest answer is better than silence.

In short, by treating communication as part of the process rather than an afterthought, employers can begin rebuilding trust and hold candidates to the same standard.

The lost art of replying isn’t especially complicated: it begins with recognising that there is still a person waiting at the other end.

 

Want more?

If your organisation needs help creating a more effective recruitment process or finding the right people, contact Catalina Consultants.

When Catalina Consultants expanded into Melbourne last year, we knew we were entering a relationship-driven market where business was built on trust and reputation.

And, while that’s proven to be completely accurate, what we have come to understand is the nuances of the work we’ve been engaged to do.

“Whether it’s education, manufacturing, professional services, transport or hospitality, the main HR challenge we’re helping Melbourne businesses solve in 2026 is navigating the sheer number of issues they face at the same time,” says Rachel Bloom, Catalina Consultant’s Melbourne Principal.

Leaders want a partner, not more data

In 2026, Melbourne’s business and HR leaders have more access to policies, templates, guidance material and more information than ever before.

But all of this knowledge isn’t making their lives any easier. In fact, it often complicates things because it means they face competing priorities on a scale they’ve never had to deal with before.

In 2026, organisations are grappling with legislative change, psychosocial obligations, workforce shortages (at least in some sectors), rising costs, flexible work expectations, rapid technological change and, increasingly, questions about the role AI will play in the future of work. (And by the way, this is not unique to Melbourne!)

Rachel says that, individually, any one of these challenges would demand attention.  However, when taken together, they mean that leadership roles are becoming less about managing day-to-day operations and more about balancing competing priorities.

“Every decision creates consequences somewhere else,” she says.

“A flexible working policy may improve employee engagement but may also create challenges around collaboration and accountability. Cost pressures can cause a company to successfully rethink structure and workload, but damage culture and wellbeing.”

“And AI might present exciting opportunities for productivity and efficiency, but it also raises questions about capability, job design, risk and change management.”

“In other words, no HR or business challenge exists in isolation and the question has increasingly become how to fix one of these challenges without breaking another. That’s a very different problem to solve.”

The rise of the challenger

After speaking with many of Melbourne’s business and HR leaders over the past 12 months, Rachel says what they find more valuable than anything else is someone they can talk these challenges through with.

“They’re often looking for an experienced partner who can challenge assumptions, test ideas, ask difficult questions and help them understand the potential consequences of a decision before they make it,” she says.

“So clients aren’t necessarily buying HR advice, processes or direction. They’re buying an independent partner who can listen without judgement and offer pragmatic opinions when they’re making complex people decisions, or business decisions that will have a people impact.”

Rachel explains that this is one of the most dramatic changes she’s personally observed in recent years – the role of HR moving from responsibility for policies, compliance and processes to a more high-level strategic position. And it’s something Catalina has been providing now for 14 years.

“Often the challenge isn’t understanding the options available. It’s understanding which option is right for a particular organisation, at a particular point in time, with a particular group of people,” Rachel explains.

“That requires a level of judgement, context, experience and strategy that can only be delivered by a trusted thinking partner.”

Three lessons from 12 months in Melbourne

Rachel says that her first 12 months in Melbourne have reinforced three key lessons.

1. Trust still matters (maybe even more than before)

“When we first entered the Melbourne market after many years in business, we knew organisations would choose advisers they trusted rather than simply the provider with the most impressive credentials or largest profile,” Rachel says.

“That assessment proved correct, with many of the strongest opportunities coming through referrals, introductions and existing relationships rather than traditional business development activity.”

When leaders are navigating sensitive people issues, organisational change or difficult decisions, they want an adviser whose views they respect to sit beside them, challenge their thinking and provide practical guidance when things become complicated.

As Rachel puts it: “Technical capability is important and expected and absolutely critical, but trust is what differentiates.”

2. Authenticity beats polish

Rachel says that one thing that surprised her most was how strongly leaders responded to honest conversations about what was really happening inside their organisations.

“Many leaders are dealing with challenges that don’t have simple answers, so they’re cautious about anyone who’s selling easy fixes,” she explains. “They want someone who understands the complexity of the situation and can help them work through it.

Rachel says that, in a world increasingly filled with automated content, curated messaging and carefully managed communication (which often says everything while saying very little at all), genuine conversations have become even more valuable. Catalina has always understood this – in fact, it’s why we’ve always pitched ourselves as the human resources team that’s human!

3. Execution is often the real challenge

Rachel says her most important lesson of all has been that, while most organisations already have a reasonable understanding of what needs to happen, they often struggle to turn their intentions into reality.

“Leaders know they need to develop capability, strengthen culture, improve performance, navigate change and support their people,” she says.

“Where they need help is in working out where to start, what to prioritise and how to execute effectively without creating new problems elsewhere. And ideally someone with the capacity and know-how to carry it through”.

The future of HR is human

When Rachel joined Catalina’s Melbourne office a year ago, she says that her success would depend on establishing a presence, building relationships and proving the model. However, her – and Catalina Consultants’ – ambitions already look quite different.

“Our Founder, Merilyn Speiser never wanted growth for growth’s sake, but was interested most in the HR impact we could have on Melbourne-based businesses,” she says.

“Are we helping leaders make better decisions? Are we strengthening workplaces? Are we building capability that remains long after our engagement has finished?”

These questions aren’t random, but reflect a broader shift occurring across the profession. And HR professionals who understand this will be better placed to have influence and impact.

“For years, HR was often viewed through the lens of policy, compliance and process,” Rachel explains. “Those responsibilities remain important and always will, but increasingly, the greatest value lies in helping leaders and teams navigate complexity, ambiguity and human behaviour.”

“That’s something that still requires judgement, context and experience, and the best results come from having a trusted partner willing to ask the right questions rather than simply provide quick answers.”

Want more?

Looking for a partner to help your organisation make sense of today’s HR and business landscape? Get in touch.

With 1 July just around the corner, now is a great time for employers to get across the key workplace changes coming into effect in the new financial year.

While some updates will require practical changes to your HR and payroll processes, others present an opportunity to review policies and internal procedures. There is also a significant proposed change to Victorian legislation that employers should be aware of, which may impact employees across the state regarding their ability to work from home.

 

Here’s a summary of the key changes coming into effect from 1 July 2026.

 

1. Minimum wage increases 4.75%

The 2026 Annual Wage Review resulted in increases in the National Minimum Wage and minimum wages in Modern Awards from 1 July 2026.

The National Minimum Wage will increase to $26.44 per hour (or $1,004.90 per week based on a 38 hour work week). Casual rates will attract a 25% loading to this rate.

Minimum wages under all Modern Awards will increase by 4.75%. This also brings increases to penalties and allowances.

 

What you need to do:

 

2. Payday Super

From 1 July 2026, employers are required to remit superannuation guarantee contributions on the same day that payroll is processed, so that super contributions reach an employee’s chosen superfund within 7 days.

There is a grace period for payment of a new employee’s first contribution, which allows for their payment to be made within 20 days of their first pay date.

Non-compliance with the new payment rules will result in penalties through an updated super guarantee charge, which will be payable from the next calendar day and attract interest on a daily basis.

 

What you need to do:

 

3. Superannuation contribution thresholds

As super contributions must now be paid at each pay period, the maximum contribution base for FY27 is an annual amount of $270,830 (previously it was a quarterly figure), which results in a maximum SG contribution of $32,499.60 in this financial year.

The maximum contribution base is the maximum base salary that an employee earns on which their employer is required to pay the SG contribution. The employer is not required to pay super on any earnings over this amount in the financial year.

The general superannuation concessional contribution cap for FY27 is $32,500. This is the maximum amount of super you can contribute (from employer contributions, salary sacrifice contributions and personal contributions for tax deductions) to your fund without incurring extra tax at the marginal rate.

 

What you need to do:

 

4. Expansion of parental leave obligations

The government-funded paid parental leave will increase to 26 weeks (130 days) for any babies born or adopted on or after 1 July 2026. This is final stage of the government’s reform to the paid parental leave scheme and provides an increase of 2 weeks on last year’s provision.

Of the 26 weeks, each parent has at least 4 weeks reserved for them, which will be forfeited if unused.

As part of the reform, the government will also directly pay a 12% super contribution on any government-funded parental leave payment to eligible parents.

 

What you need to do:

 

5. High income threshold to be updated

From 1 July 2026, the high income threshold is an annual base salary of $190,100.

The high income threshold indicates the maximum earnings that an individual can earn to be eligible for unfair dismissal protections from the FWC. Any employee earning at or above the threshold cannot file unfair dismissal claims, but can still apply for general protections claims (exceptions to the access to unfair dismissal claims may be applicable for some Award or enterprise agreement covered employees).

Maximum compensation for an unfair dismissal claim is 6 months’ salary – which, for someone earning the maximum amount before reaching the threshold, is $95,000.

 

What you need to do:

 

6. Redundancy tax-free threshold and ETP caps

The tax-free threshold for redundancy payments in FY27 is $13,598, plus $6,801 for every full year of service.

The cap for employment termination payments (ETP) taxed at the concessional rate is increasing to $270,000. Any amount in excess of this cap is taxed at the top marginal rate.

 

What you need to do:

 

7. Laws restricting NDAs in sexual harassment cases (VIC)

Effective 1 July 2026, the Victorian government has introduced a law that restricts the use of NDAs when dealing with workplace sexual harassment disputes to protect Victorian workers who have experienced workplace sexual harassment. This law prevents employers from covering up cases or silencing victims, and from influencing a worker to sign a NDA.

 

What you need to do:

 

8. The right to work from home (VIC)

On 16 June 2026, the Victorian government presented a new legislation to the Victorian Parliament that provides for the right to work from home under the state’s anti-discrimination laws, within the Equal Opportunity Act 2010 (VIC).

If passed, the new law will provide eligible employees in Victoria with the right to work from home for up to 2 days per week, and be effective as of 1 September 2026 in all public and private businesses in Victoria. However, for small businesses (fewer than 15 employees), this law will come into effect on 1 July 2027 to allow time for any necessary adjustments in their business operations.

This legislation will be applicable for employees who can reasonably perform their roles remotely, including part-time and regular casual employees, but excludes roles that require a physical presence to fulfil their primary function.

This legislation is significant, as this is the first time that working from home would become a statutory right in any Australian state. Moreover, the fact that this law sits within state anti-discrimination legislation, and not under the Fair Work Act, positions the provision as an issue of equal opportunity, with more scrutiny likely to be applied to disputes and enforcement. Any disputes will handled by the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission (VEOHRC) and the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT).

Details are still yet to be finalised through Parliament and further updates will be released prior to commencement.

 

What you need to do:

 

Are you FY27 ready?

As FY27 begins, there are plenty of HR-related changes that businesses need to be on top of.

If you have any questions regarding the changes or are keen to find out how they could impact you or your business, speak with one of the Catalina Consultant team members today.

Catalina Consultants has just been certified as a Great Place to Work for the third consecutive year, with 90% of our employees saying this is a great place to work, compared to 60% at a typical Australian company.

But the result we learned the most from wasn’t this year’s score. It was the year our results went backwards.

That’s because, instead of explaining it away, we decided to take a hard look at why and how we could fix it.

Here’s what we did, and what we think businesses of every size can take from our experience.

A flying start and then a dip… 

When we first went through the Great Place to Work certification process in 2024, we came out swinging. Overall scores were overwhelmingly positive across virtually every category.

It felt validating. We’d worked hard to build a collaborative and supportive culture and the survey suggested our people genuinely experienced it that way.

Which made year two more confronting.

Because, when we repeated the survey in 2025, our scores came back lower. Not dramatically – we were still certified and well above average – but still noticeably enough to give us pause. 

The easy thing would have been to explain them away, which is what a lot of businesses do with feedback they don’t want to hear. 

When scores dip, managers often scramble to work out why. Then someone points out that the sample size was small or that it was a tough period or that the questions weren’t quite right – and that becomes the narrative that everyone begins to adopt. 

Before you know it, the results get filed away and nothing changes.

The more courageous – and ultimately more beneficial – path is to take on the feedback people have taken the time to give you.

That’s why we decided to put last year’s result under the microscope and see how we could turn it into a positive for our people and our business.

What we actually did with the 2025 results

Rather than look at the results at a high level, we went deep, examining the areas where we’d scored lower in granular detail. Then we convened a focus group.

A small team went through the results item by item and identified around 22 distinct actions they thought would turn things around. And, most importantly, over the next year we put them all into play before taking the survey again.

The result was that our score moved back into the 90s once again.

Two things that made the biggest difference

While there may have been 22 recommendations all up, we noticed most of the changes fundamentally  came down to addressing two key things within the business. 

1. Rethinking flexibility

Since COVID, flexibility has become one of the most important issues to many workers, with surveys revealing as many as three-quarters of employees want to work away from their office some or all of the time.

Our workplace was no different, and the 2025 questionnaire surveys showed there was a strong preference among many of our people for an arrangement that allowed for two-days-from-home, three-days-in-office arrangement – the same model that had become common across many professional services firms.

But when we took that request to the focus group, a more nuanced picture emerged. For an HR consulting firm, working from a client site is central to the job. Two days away from the office didn’t just mean two days at home, it also often meant two days’ less availability to our clients. 

And that was fundamentally in tension with our commitment to providing clients with the very best service available.

So instead of simply adopting a blanket remote work policy, we asked a different question: what does flexibility actually mean to people here?

When we analysed it, we found the answer was that flexibility meant different things to different people. For some, flexibility meant location. For others, it meant control over start and finish times, school pickup arrangements, appointments, or having greater autonomy over how work fit into life. 

We also found that some level of flexibility was already partly built into how we worked. 

Catalina employees have a core commitment of 38 hours a week, but how and when those hours are worked has significant latitude.

We’ve long offered flexible start and finish times (from 7:30am through to a 6pm finish) plus a weekly flex arrangement that allowed people to build up hours and take a shorter day at some stage during the week. 

But the main issue was that people didn’t feel comfortable taking advantage of it. So, what we added was visibility, creating a dedicated Teams channel where people actively communicated how they were flexing their hours.

This normalised the use of flexibility that was already available, rather than leaving it to individuals to figure out on their own.

And, as a result, our flexibility scores went up significantly.

2. Explaining the money

The second major change was about financial transparency – specifically, helping people within the business understand its incentive structure.

Catalina has had a bonus and KPI plan in place for several years and the mechanics of it aren’t complicated. But in practice, not many people were hitting it. 

When we got into the detail, however, we found that this wasn’t because the targets were unreachable, it was because the connection between individual effort and business outcome hadn’t been made clear.

So we took the time to provide education to all employees around how we make money as a business. This led into how each person’s contribution fitted into the overall picture. It then became relatively straightforward to see how you could earn a bonus, and why you would work towards one – if that’s what motivated you.

This prompted a significant shift in the way people worked. In the following period, the number of people who reached their KPIs and achieved a bonus went up by more than 300%. 

Other team members were honest that they preferred to focus on their work without tracking against commercial targets, and that was fine too. But the people who wanted to engage with it found they now could, and that it made sense both to where the business was headed and their own career goals.

Beyond the incentive plan, we also worked hard to provide the team with more visibility into what the business spends money on and why, including training budgets, offsite programs, wellbeing initiatives. Understanding that these were conscious investments rather than unexplained expenditures made a difference to how people felt about the organisation’s priorities.

What your business can learn from our experience 

The reality is that, while earning recognition might make you feel great, the true value  of any engagement survey – whether it’s Great Place to Work, something you’ve designed internally or something that you ask us to provide – is almost entirely determined by what you do with it afterwards.

In other words, never take a survey if you’re not prepared to accept the feedback within it. If you’re just after a sticker or a stamp to put on your website, don’t bother. The whole point is to hear what your people actually think.

And, if you do score well, that’s valuable too. Understanding your strengths is invaluable when it comes to things like recruitment, retention, and branding. It gives you something verifiable to say about what your business is known for, and what your people actually experience working there.

The other dimension, which is increasingly important in 2026, is psychosocial safety. Workplace psychological safety obligations have become considerably more onerous in recent years. A good engagement survey provides one of the most direct, evidence-based ways to verify that your people feel safe and supported at work. So, in that sense, it’s like doing due diligence on your workplace practices.

Should your business get certified?

Just as it was two years ago, the short answer is yes – so long as clear eyes about what you’re signing up for.

Certification through Great Place to Work provides an externally validated benchmark. It carries weight with candidates, clients and the broader market in ways that self-reported culture claims simply don’t. And it gives you a consistent measurement tool that allows you to track genuine progress over time, including when things go backwards.

If you’d like something more tailored to your business, our outsourced HR team can design and run an engagement survey process that fits your size, industry and goals. 

But always remember that undertaking a survey or gaining certification is only the start. The businesses that get the most from it are the ones that treat any results as information to act on.

That’s what we did here at Catalina. Twenty-two actions, one focus group, and a 300% increase in people hitting their KPIs… 

The results didn’t just speak for themselves, they gave us something worth saying. 

Want more?

Interested in running an engagement survey for your business or exploring what Great Place to Work certification could mean for your organisation? Talk to the Catalina team today.

You can also read our original article on how we first became Great Place to Work certified, or visit the Great Place to Work website for more on the certification process.

Faza Wulandari first encountered Catalina not as an employee, but as a client. Fresh out of university and into her first full-time role, she found herself on the receiving end of Catalina’s HR advisory services: sitting in coaching sessions, watching how the team worked… and quietly taking notes.

This early exposure stayed with her. Over the years that followed, through roles at a boutique consultancy and later inside one of the big four consulting firms, Faza kept in touch with Catalina founder Merilyn Speiser. So, when the opportunity came to join the team properly in 2021, it felt less like a leap and more like an arrival.

Five years later, Faza has just stepped into a newly created General Manager role. It’s a significant moment, both for Catalina and for Faza. And for someone who approaches everything with genuine curiosity, the fact that it’s uncharted territory is genuinely exciting stuff.

Starting from the client side

After leaving Sydney University in 2015 with a degree in Health Science and Business Management, Faza obtained a Certificate IV in Human Resources before landing her first full time role. 

That job threw her straight into the deep end: she worked alongside a manager who was building out the company’s HR function from scratch. 

“To help me learn quickly, they arranged some mentoring from Catalina”, Faza recalls. “I had regular coaching sessions from one of their senior advisors and I had the opportunity to work with Merilyn on various initiatives and matters as well. So, I like to say they’ve known me since I was a baby”.

The relationship didn’t end when Faza moved on.  Working through a small consulting firm that was subsequently absorbed into a larger group, she found herself working closely with internal consulting teams and developing an appetite for the kind of variety and client exposure that in-house roles rarely offer. 

So, when she and Merilyn reconnected, the timing was right.

“When I was given the opportunity to work directly for Catalina, I jumped at it,” she says. 

Why consulting accelerates everything

Ask Faza what distinguishes Catalina from a conventional in-house HR role and she doesn’t hesitate: the most important difference is the sheer breadth of exposure.

“On any one day, you’re working with multiple different clients and stakeholders, and you really need to be able to adapt very quickly,” Faza explains. “The way you’ll advise  a professional services client is going to be different to the way you advise a hospitality client. The documents you’re working on, the situations, the employees – they’re all quite different.”

This, she acknowledges, can be demanding in its own way, and Faza says that the ability to context switch matters just as much as technical knowledge. Add in the kind of genuine time management discipline that professional services firms require, and you have a more demanding environment than most in-house roles, but also what Faza believes can be a far richer one. 

“You get to see situations that you wouldn’t see otherwise, or that you might only encounter once or twice in your career if you were working in-house in a large HR department”, she says. “It’s really enriching in that sense.”

It’s also, she notes, the reason Catalina is an attractive proposition for candidates. “I always tell people: you can accelerate your learning here in a way that’s genuinely hard to replicate elsewhere.”

A new role, a new chapter

Catalina has grown considerably in the five years since Faza first walked through the doors as an employee. When she joined in 2021, the team numbered around 10 people. Today it’s closer to 24, with plans for further growth.

But, Faza notes, as any business scales, the less that can be run by just one person. On this front, Merilyn had been managing Catalina’s internal operations while simultaneously carrying a substantial client load of her own. The solution was to create a dedicated General Manager role that could focus on the operational health of the business, support the team’s development, and free Merilyn up to focus on what she does best. 

Faza put her hand up.

“It was something I was interested in exploring in the future”, she admits. “Much later on. But Merilyn is a huge proponent of internal career growth, and I was fortunate that she believed I was capable of the job. She was the one who said, ‘Come back from maternity leave and I’ll teach you as you go’.”

Faza is also candid about the complexity of this kind of transition. In her previous role as an HR Consultant, she had watched several founder-led organisations grapple with the changed dynamic that comes when operational responsibilities shift to someone new –  when institutional knowledge has to be shared, priorities communicated and trust built in both directions. 

“One of the hardest things I’ve seen my client stakeholders go through is when they’ve brought in someone new to take the reins on part of the business,” she says. “It’s learning about the person’s personality and dynamic with the organisation’s leaders as well as their working style. And you can’t teach someone a personality.”

The fact that she and Merilyn already knew each other well – and that the chemistry and communication were already established – removed what she considers the hardest variable from the equation. 

The technical skills, Faza says, are teachable. The rest is harder to manufacture.

What makes a great General Manager?

When asked what defines a great General Manager, Faza also draws on five years of observation as an HR Consultant as much as her five weeks in the job.

People management sits at the centre – not in the administrative sense, she says, but in the genuine, relationship-building sense. 

“Having been in that client-facing consulting role, I’ve lived what our team goes through every day,” Faza explains. “You need to understand what the people around you need, and be able to bring them along.”

Alongside that is being able to communicate in a way that aligns people with where the business is headed, especially through periods of change.

Then there’s the balance between strategic thinking and practical execution. “The ability to take that commercial, strategic perspective and translate it into the operational pieces is vital,” Faza says. “So you’re problem-solving in a way that actually gets results, rather than getting bogged down in the day-to-day.”

Looking ahead

Five weeks into the role, Faza is clear about what excites her: the fact that this is genuinely new territory.

“It’s a new role, and I’m excited to see the impact it can make – not just on Merilyn’s workload, but on the team,” she explains. 

Her focus in the near term is on understanding the full picture of how Catalina operates, earning Merilyn’s trust on the decisions she brings forward, and creating tangible improvements in the systems and processes that support the team’s work.

She also sees this as a story about what Catalina stands for more broadly. 

“Merilyn giving me this opportunity is a testament to the commitment to internal career growth that exists here,” Faza says. “People with HR backgrounds don’t often move into operational general manager roles. I think that’s worth changing.”

It’s a perspective shaped by someone who understands, from the inside, what it means to build a career through genuine development rather than simply moving from one job title to the next.

And, for someone who describes no two days as the same, a role that’s never been done before at a business she’s known since the beginning might just be the perfect fit.

Want more?

Faza Wulandari is General Manager at Catalina Consultants. 

If you’d like to know more about careers at Catalina or how we can help your business, get in touch.

When it comes to ROI on HR spend, most teams are being asked to do more than ever: lift performance, improve retention, implement AI, stay compliant, support leaders, strengthen culture…. all while budgets are under increasing pressure.

In response, many are trying desperately to stretch what they have, spreading their money across multiple initiatives, while hoping somehow they’ll be able lift their performance in each of them. 

But if you’re looking to optimise your return on investment for HR this year, it pays to remember this: a relatively small number of HR decisions drive a disproportionate share of outcomes. By focusing your investment on these, rather than across everything, you really will give yourself a chance of doing more with less. 

Here’s how.

1. Start with the outcome, not the activity 

Most organisations build their HR budgets around activity rather than outcomes, committing to a cocktail of training programs, systems, engagement initiatives and wellbeing efforts. But, while each of these may have a reasonable case behind them, they’re often funded without a clear link to a specific issue the business is trying to solve.

When this happens, budgets begin to lose their impact. If the underlying objective isn’t clearly defined, every initiative begins to feel equally important and spend gets allocated to activities that are broadly worthwhile but low priority from a business point of view.

That’s why your starting point should be to define, in concrete terms, what needs to change. Is it turnover within a particular team? Persistent underperformance in a critical role? The time and cost of hiring? A gap in leadership capability. In most organisations, the real pressure points are far narrower and more specific than their list of HR initiatives suggests.

Until you’ve clearly identified outcomes, there’s no reliable way to determine where investment will have the greatest effect. Without that, it is almost impossible to isolate the relatively small number of decisions that will drive the majority of results.

2. Focus on the small number of decisions that drive most outcomes

Pareto’s principle – that roughly 80% of results come from 20% of effort – applies to HR just as it does to most things we do in life. So, once you’ve nailed down the outcomes you’re after, identify the high-impact 20% of your HR activities and decisions that drive the outcomes you want. 

For example, if your goal is to reduce turnover in a critical team, the most valuable investment may sit with one manager, one role design issue or one broken process. If the issue is underperformance, the answer is probably not going to be another generic training program. It’s far more likely to involve looking at how expectations are set, how feedback is given and how performance is managed day to day.

And if the issue is productivity, could you cure this by providing your leadership with targeted training on how to get more out of their teams? After all, research from McKinsey shows that organisational health, including management practices and how work is actually run day to day, is one of the strongest predictors of long-term performance outcomes.

Across organisations, the same themes tend to recur. The quality of hiring decisions, the effectiveness of managers, the way roles are structured and the ability to retain key people consistently have an outsized influence on outcomes. These aren’t always the most visible or well-funded parts of the HR budget, but they’re often the ones that matter most.

Rather than trying to improve everything incrementally, focus on identifying and investing in the small number of areas that will make the biggest difference. 

3. Where HR budgets get wasted

Once you start looking at HR spend through this lens, the areas where value is lost become much easier to spot.

One of the most common cash-sucks is broad, generic training programs. These are often rolled out across entire teams or organisations, regardless of whether they’re relevant or whether the underlying issue is capability, accountability or something else entirely. 

Another is investing in systems or platforms which don’t lead to a corresponding change in behaviour. New HR technology can be valuable, but only if it’s adopted and used in a way that improves efficiency or productivity in decision-making or day-to-day management. In many cases, the system is implemented, but the underlying habits remain unchanged, leaving the return on that investment marginal at best.

Employer branding and engagement initiatives can also fall into this category. Organisations invest in how they present themselves to the market or measure employee sentiment, but then do little to address the underlying issues those efforts are meant to surface. 

A similar pattern shows up in the use of perks and benefits. These are often introduced as a way to improve retention or engagement, but they rarely address the specific reasons people leave or disengage (which often has more to do with people feeling their employers don’t make use of their skills). As a result, they add to the cost base without materially shifting outcomes.

That doesn’t mean these initiatives have no value – they often can, especially if the process above has been followed. However, when they’re funded as part of a broad, evenly distributed budget, they tend to absorb resources without delivering meaningful change. When they’re tied to a clearly defined outcome and applied selectively, they can be very effective.

4. Small changes that deliver disproportionate impact

After you’ve set your priorities, the next step shouldn’t be to launch more initiatives, but to make targeted changes that directly address the issue at hand. In many cases, that’s likely to mean making relatively contained adjustments to improve how work is structured and managed day to day.

For example, where hiring is a constraint, tightening role definition and selection criteria can have a significant impact on outcomes. A clearer brief, better alignment on what “good” looks like and more disciplined decision-making will usually do more than adding additional sourcing channels.

Where retention is the issue, the most effective intervention is often focused on a small group of people rather than your entire workforce. Understanding why key individuals or teams are at risk, and addressing those specific factors, is far more effective than introducing broad-based benefits that apply to everyone but resonate with few.

In environments where performance is inconsistent, the shift tends to come from how expectations are set and managed. Regular, specific feedback, combined with clear consequences where standards are not met, will typically outperform more formal or infrequent performance processes.

Even relatively simple changes to onboarding can have an outsized effect. Ensuring from the outset that new hires understand their role, priorities and how success will be measured both reduces time to productivity and lowers the risk of early attrition.

What these examples have in common is focus: they are directed at a defined problem, applied in a targeted way and designed to actually change behaviour rather than simply signal intent.

The real key: deliberateness

Optimising HR spend is not about doing more with less in a general sense, it’s about making more deliberate decisions about where effort and budget are applied.

In most organisations, a small number of factors will account for the majority of outcomes. The challenge is identifying those factors early and being prepared to prioritise them over a broader set of well-intentioned initiatives.

That often means funding fewer things, but funding them properly. It also means being clear about what success looks like and measuring whether investment is actually shifting the outcome it was intended to address.

When HR budgets are treated this way, the conversation should move away from activity and towards impact, and from blanket coverage towards focus.

In a constrained environment, that shift is what allows HR to deliver meaningful results without a meaningful spend. 

Want more?

Thinking about building a graduate hiring strategy that works for your business? Talk to us.

In 2026, graduate hiring is in trouble, and the numbers aren’t subtle about it. 

Australian graduate job postings had already fallen 24% in 2024 compared to the year before, and were tracking a further 16% lower in early 2025. By December 2025, just 9% of Australian SMEs were actively hiring graduates, down from 19% two months earlier. 

But the trend isn’t confined to our shores: globally, entry-level hiring has fallen an estimated 29% since January 2024.

In short, many businesses are no longer hiring recent graduates at all. 

On one hand, it’s understandable employers have become frustrated by graduate work-readiness (more than half now say graduates don’t meet expectations on self-awareness). They’re also concerned about their resilience and written communication, you’d be excused for thinking that there was little point bucking the trend.

And yet, despite all of this, there’s still a strong case for hiring graduates. Here’s why. 

What the best employers are doing when it comes to hiring grads in 2026

Despite the widespread cuts, 91% of large employers globally are still recruiting graduates, even if many of them are trimming at the margins. In Australia, the companies most serious about long-term performance have never wavered from their policies about hiring lots of graduates. 

As smaller businesses cut back, year after year, through boom and contraction alike, the world’s largest organisations run structured graduate programs. In doing so, they invest in onboarding, mentoring and rotation and, above all, they compete hard with one another for the best candidates.

These aren’t naive operators ignoring the numbers and sticking to what they’ve always done. They’re the most analytically sophisticated employers in the country who’ve taken the view that the pipeline matters too much to interrupt.

There’s a reason for this too: experienced hires don’t appear from nowhere. The senior consultant you need in four years is the graduate you hire today. The organisations that understand this think about their talent pipeline the way good businesses think about any long-term investment, i.e. not quarter to quarter, but across a cycle.

So what the current pullback mostly reflects isn’t a rational reassessment of graduate value. It’s short-term budget pressure producing long-term consequences that won’t become visible for years. 

And, by the time they do, it will be too late to do much about them. That’s because the cost of cutting graduate recruitment gets deferred.

The pipeline doesn’t send you a warning email

When employers froze graduate intake during the GFC, the consequences weren’t immediate. Initially. budgets looked better and headcount was leaner, but when the recovery came the mid-level talent that should have been there ready to move the business forward simply wasn’t. 

A Hudson survey of more than 600 Australian and New Zealand employers taken in the aftermath of the GFC found that 84% regretted making too many redundancies during the crisis. Because, while the cuts had looked rational at the time, the consequences arrived later, quietly, in the form of capability gaps and recovery plans that took longer and cost more than anticipated.

Meanwhile, US employers who cut graduate hiring by 22% in 2009 later told the National Association of Colleges and Employers they wouldn’t do it again, because reducing graduate recruitment during the downturn had created a measurable disadvantage when the economy eventually recovered. 

The same principles applied to training junior staff. When the GFC hit, training budgets were among the first things cut and economists have since argued that this systematic underinvestment in developing employees was partially responsible for the talent shortages that followed. 

Put simply, of you don’t hire graduates in year one, by year three or four, you won’t have the junior-to-mid talent you need to service growth, deliver on projects or backfill senior roles vacated by people moving up or moving on. 

You then have to go to market for experienced hires, and you pay a significant premium for people who are, in many cases, doing the job your unhired graduates would have been doing by now.

This isn’t a new pattern. Research into the wave of training and development programme cuts in the 1980s found the same dynamic playing out over a longer timeframe: no immediate impact, then a skills drought a decade later, as the generation that wasn’t developed failed to materialise in mid-level roles. 

The wrong conclusion from the right data

Of course, none of this helps overcome the very genuine work-readiness concerns many employers have today. These are genuine observations from experienced hiring managers across a wide range of industries.

But there’s a logical leap happening between the evidence and the response, and it’s worth naming.

Graduates needing development is not a new phenomenon. It is, and has always been, the entire premise of a graduate programme. The question has never been whether graduates arrive ready because they don’t, and nobody seriously expected them to. The question is whether the investment in bringing them up to speed pays off. 

And on that question, the evidence consistently says it does.

What’s changed is not that graduates are less valuable. It’s that the post-pandemic cohort of students – who completed significant portions of their education in lockdown – tended to receive less work experience, less face-to-face feedback and less exposure to professional environments. This means they often need more deliberate onboarding than their predecessors.

The appropriate response isn’t to stop hiring, but to provide more structured support. After all, the work-readiness gap doesn’t close itself, it closes when employers invest in closing it. And organisations that understand this are turning a market-wide concern into a hiring advantage. 

Which brings us to what they’re actually doing differently… 

The organisations that keep hiring are pulling ahead

When graduate hiring contracts across a market – just as it’s doing now – the employers who maintain structured programmes actually improve their position against competitors. 

They’re recruiting from a larger pool of candidates competing for fewer spots and paying less of a premium to do so. They’re also shaping those hires around their own culture and way of working at precisely the moment when their competitors have stepped back.

The Big Four professional services firms understand this arithmetic instinctively. So do Commonwealth Bank, Macquarie, Canva and the major government departments. They run structured graduate programs not out of a sense of social obligation but because they’ve done the maths on what it costs to buy experienced talent on the open market versus growing it internally and the internal number wins, consistently and by a significant margin.

The cost of hiring an experienced employee in Australia has more than doubled since 2020, now averaging nearly $24,000 per hire. And that’s before salary premiums for mid-level experience are factored in. Growing that talent internally, from graduate level, is demonstrably cheaper. 

But the same logic extends well beyond large organisations. 

Any business that competes for mid-level talent (which is most businesses) is affected by the same pipeline dynamics. The experienced hire you need in three years doesn’t materialise from nowhere. They come, in most cases, from a graduate program somewhere. If that program is yours, you’ve shaped them. If it isn’t, you’re bidding against everyone else for a finite pool of people who were shaped by someone else’s priorities.

There’s also a timing argument that doesn’t get made often enough. A contracting graduate market is one of the few moments when the balance of power in early-career recruitment genuinely shifts toward the employer. Application volumes are up – the ISE data shows employers receiving record numbers of applications despite fewer roles. The candidates are there while the competition for them, from other employers, is reduced. 

Running a serious graduate program right now, when others aren’t, is about as close to a buyer’s market as this space ever gets.

What a good structured graduate program looks like (if you’re not in the Big Four)

A structured graduate programme doesn’t require a dedicated team, a branded cohort experience or a rotation schedule. For most Australian businesses, it needs just four things.

 

The difference between graduate hiring that works and graduate hiring that doesn’t is rarely about the quality of the graduates. It’s almost always about the presence or absence of those four things.

The organisations pulling ahead right now are those running intentional programs in a market where application volumes are at record highs and competition for graduate talent among employers has softened. 

After all, the window to do this well (and cheaply) is  open right now. But it won’t stay open for long.

Want more?

Thinking about building a graduate hiring strategy that works for your business? Talk to our team of HR experts.

In many workplaces, the people who make the most noise also get the most attention. Team meetings reward quick thinking and confident contributions. Brainstorming sessions favour those who are comfortable speaking up. And workplace culture frequently equates visibility – and vocalness – with value.

When that happens, organisations risk hearing the fastest ideas rather than the best ones.

Introverted employees tend to process ideas differently, often keeping a lower profile and rarely drawing the spotlight onto themselves. Rather than thinking out loud, they usually reflect, analyse and develop ideas internally before sharing them. As a result, their contributions often arrive more fully-formed but aren’t suited at all to fast-moving discussions.

This dynamic can mean that some of the most thoughtful and insightful employees get overlooked, so that their skills and potential are never fully realised.

Given that between one-third and one-half of all employees identify as introverted, this raises an important question for your organisation: are you missing valuable ideas simply because the people who hold them are quieter?

Quiet doesn’t mean disengaged

One common misconception in many workplaces is that quiet employees are less engaged or less interested in contributing. However, research on workplace personality traits suggests introverts often excel in areas such as deep focus, careful analysis and thoughtful decision-making. 

As writer and researcher Susan Cain argues in Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, quieter individuals often bring strengths such as careful thinking, creativity and the ability to work deeply on complex problems.

These qualities can be particularly valuable in roles that require sustained concentration, strategic thinking or complex problem-solving.

Introverts also tend to be strong listeners. Studies show that in team environments, this ability can help improve collaboration and reduce the risk of groupthink – that is, the tendency for teams to converge quickly around the most dominant or confident voices rather than the strongest ideas.

Despite these strengths, many workplace structures unintentionally favour extroverted behaviour. Research discussed in Harvard Business Review suggests that more outspoken employees are frequently perceived as more passionate, confident or capable than introverts – even when they’re not.

Over time, this dynamic can create a subtle bias where quieter employees are simply heard less. Their insights may emerge later, or in different forms, but if organisations rely heavily on fast-moving discussions, those perspectives can easily be overlooked.

For organisations, this presents a significant missed opportunity.

The benefits of tapping into quieter voices

When business leaders and managers actively seek input from quieter team members, it can bring genuine benefits to the organisation.

Better reasoned thinking

Organisational psychologist Adam Grant from the Wharton School and colleagues at Harvard Business School, conducted research which found introverted employees often bring strengths that are particularly valuable in roles requiring sustained concentration, careful analysis and complex problem-solving. Because they tend to reflect before speaking, their contributions can be more considered and analytical. 

This kind of deliberate thinking can improve decision quality, especially when organisations are dealing with complex problems or strategic choices.

More collaborative decision making

Another key advantage is listening. Introverts are often strong listeners, which can help teams surface different perspectives and avoid premature consensus. In group discussions, this can lead to more balanced conversations and better-informed decisions.

Greater productivity and innovation 

Grant’s evidence also found that quieter leadership styles can improve team performance. In fact, when employees were proactive, an introverted leader made them 28% more productive on average. One reason for this was that introverted leaders were more likely to listen to their team members and trust them so that their ideas helped shape decisions too.

In environments where innovation and problem-solving are important, these dynamics can be particularly valuable. That’s because, when leaders create space for a wider range of voices to contribute, teams are more likely to challenge assumptions, explore alternative solutions and develop stronger ideas.

How leaders can create space for quiet voices

If you’re looking to get more out introverted employees in your workplace, you might begin with rethinking how ideas are shared within your team. 

Many workplace structures unintentionally favour people who are comfortable thinking out loud, but relatively small changes can make discussions more inclusive of different communication styles.

One simple step is to give people more time to prepare. Sharing meeting agendas or discussion topics in advance allows employees to reflect on the issues being discussed so they can let that information simmer and develop their ideas before the conversation begins. This can make it easier for those who prefer to think carefully before speaking to contribute more confidently.

Leaders can also encourage written input alongside verbal discussion. Digital collaboration tools, shared documents or pre-meeting idea submissions can help capture insights that might not emerge during fast-moving conversations.

Structuring discussions can also make a difference. In many meetings, a small number of participants dominate the conversation while others remain silent. Actively inviting input from different team members or using structured rounds of discussion can ensure a broader range of perspectives is heard.

Finally, you could focus on building psychological safety within your team environment. Research from Google’s well-known Project Aristotle found that creating an atmosphere where people can share ideas without fear of embarrassment or negative consequences was one of the strongest predictors of team effectiveness.

When introverted employees feel comfortable speaking up, they’re far more likely to contribute their ideas and perspectives.

It always pays to remember…

The loudest voice in the room is not always the most insightful. Yet many workplace structures unintentionally reward those who are quickest to speak rather than those who have taken the time to think deeply about a problem.

By creating environments where different communication styles are recognised and valued, leaders can unlock a broader range of ideas, perspectives and insights within their teams.

Given how many employees identify as introverted, tapping into quieter voices is not simply a matter of personality or inclusion. It’s a practical leadership strategy that can improve decision-making, strengthen collaboration and ultimately help your organisation perform better.

After all, sometimes, the most valuable ideas come from the people who speak the least.

Want more?

If you’re looking to unlock the full potential of your workforce and build stronger, more effective teams, get in touch.

In recent years, Gen Z has changed the conversation from work-life balance to work-life architecture. For many younger employees, that increasingly means taking extended career breaks known as “micro-retirements” to reassess priorities, address burnout or pursue personal goals before eventually returning to the workforce – often after several months or even years.

But, while the headline coverage often frames this as a lifestyle trend, the implications for employers are very real. Here’s what you need to know about what’s driving “micro-retirements” and how your organisation can adapt its policies, culture and talent strategies to respond. 

What is a “micro-retirement” and how is it different from other career breaks?

A micro-retirement isn’t simply annual leave, unpaid leave or a sabbatical in disguise. It’s a deliberately planned, extended break from paid employment that lasts several months or even years. It’s also taken early-to-mid career.

Like traditional retirement, it’s usually preceded by a resignation; but unlike traditional retirement, it’s a temporary state of affairs. The “micro-retiree” intends to return to work at some point. 

Beyond that, it differs from traditional retirement – or even career breaks – in three key ways. 

In practical terms, this means employees may resign from stable roles not because they’re disengaged, but because they want to experience travel, undertake personal projects, further their education, reassess their career direction or even just have a mental health reset. And, for employers, this creates a different dynamic than traditional turnover.

A micro-retirement isn’t always a rejection of your organisation (although it can be). It may instead reflect a generational recalibration of how an employee’s work fits into their life.

The question is therefore not simply, “How do we stop this?”, it’s “How do we respond to a workforce that no longer sees careers as linear?”

Structural burnout, financial calculus and why this isn’t just “young people quitting”

Some managers may be tempted to think of micro-retirements as lifestyle indulgence. However, reporting from Australia and overseas consistently links extended career breaks with burnout, changing life priorities and a desire for Gen Z employees to find a “sustainable” career rhythm. 

In other words, micro-retirement isn’t simply about occasional time-off, but a response to evolving work-life expectations among younger workers, including: 

But there’s another factor at play: financial psychology. Previous generations often deferred breaks because career progression was relatively linear and long-term employment more stable. 

However, Gen Z entered a workforce shaped by pandemic disruption, layoffs, automation anxiety and casualisation. For many, the messages that have come out of this have been that:

So, when stability feels uncertain, there’s little opportunity cost involved in taking six months off.

What employers should actually do about it

If micro-retirements are emerging as a response to burnout and shifting career expectations, the instinctive response for some organisations may be to clamp down on it. We think that would be a mistake.

Treating extended breaks as disloyalty or immaturity doesn’t eliminate the underlying drivers and is more likely to accelerate permanent turnover. (Something that can be exceptionally costly to any organisation.) Instead, we believe employers need to think in three directions: prevention, containment and re-engagement. 

Here’s how you can do just that.

A. Prevention: Design work that doesn’t require escape

Before building policies around career breaks, employers should think about how to reduce the conditions that lead to “structural burnout. Ask yourself: 

These are the kind of scenarios that increase psychological pressure on young employees and make micro-retirement a very attractive preposition – not least because they’re likely to feel that resigning is one of the few ways they can actually regain control.

B. Containment: Formalise career break frameworks

That said, not all micro-retirements are a result of employer-induced burnout; and – by the same token – not every employee who wants a break should need to resign.

Organisations that introduce structured career break policies are likely to be able to retain talent that would otherwise walk out the door forever.  So consider whether you might update your policies to include:

As always, the key here is to formalise any policies or procedures. Not only will this help with your workforce planning, it will also overcome the fact that informal arrangements often lead to inconsistency and resentment.

C. Re-engagement: Make return viable

Many employers underestimate the reputational risk that comes from handling micro-retirements poorly. 

If an employee resigns for a micro-retirement and returns nine months later to a competitor because they feel unwelcome, the cost is likely to compound. 

So, instead of thinking in terms of linear career progression, consider switching to the concept of “talent ecosystems”. This involves keeping a close network of people you know can help your organisation succeed, but who don’t want a role with you right now.

You can do this by:

In doing so, you’ll be able to potentially re-engage high-performing micro-retirees when they do return from their break, or even further down the line.

The workforce planning test most businesses aren’t doing

Micro-retirements also raise a harder question for leadership teams. What happens if one of your strongest early-career performers resigns for nine months?

Many organisations are more dependent on individual employees than they realise. For instance, institutional knowledge can sit within one employee’s inbox or client relationships can depend on one trusted contact. 

The truth is that, if your business can’t absorb the temporary departure of a capable employee without serious disruption, that’s not a Gen Z issue, it’s an organisational one. 

In this sense, the rise of micro-retirement may be the perfect excuse for a little bit of organisational re-design. Perhaps it’s time for a proper audit to work out where informal knowledge sits, and to get it into a format that can be shared more broadly. 

It could also be a signal to examine client relationships to make sure they’re not just sitting with a single individual, and that you have proper succession plans in place across the business – not just for the management team.

Think of micro-retirements as a stress test that exposes how concentrated ability is across your organisation and how prepared you are for volatility in early-to-mid career talent.

Viewed this way, the issue shifts from wellbeing or generational change to governance, continuity and commercial risk. And these, really, are leadership questions, as well as HR ones.

The truth about micro-retirements

Micro-retirements may not yet be common, but the thinking behind them is spreading. Younger employees are questioning whether relentless intensity is the only path to success, and whether a career has to be uninterrupted to be meaningful.

That should prompt uncomfortable questions for your leadership team: If capable people feel they need to resign in order to recover, what does that say about how work is designed in your organisations? And how do you build the structures to keep talent here for the long term, even if employees decide they need a temporary break. 

OIncreasingly, organisations that answer these questions constructively will give themselves a good chance of keeping their best employees over the long-term, even if not for the near-term. Those that don’t – or who mistake exhaustion for disloyalty – may pay the price in higher staff turnover and constant recruitment costs.

Want more?

Want to minimise the loss of talent through micro-retirements in your workforce? Get in touch to discover how Catalina Consultants can help. 

“If you want something done right, do it yourself”. It’s the mantra of many seemingly high-performing people – and from the outside, it can seem to be true. 

Think of the successful professionals or managers you know who always instil confidence when they take the reins. They’re the ones who are always a steady of pair of hands, the ones who’ll put in the time and effort to do a good job, the ones who you want working on your side.

But research shows that while this approach might be good in the early stages of a business or enterprise, after a point, it begins to hold it back. It prevents organisations from scaling and promotes ‘key person’ risk. It also often sows the seeds of dissatisfaction among staff and eventually leads to the burnout of the non-delegator. 

After all, there are only so many hours in the day, so without delegation, being successful will also mean sacrificing free time, weekends, and sleep.  

What’s more, when you delegate, you free yourself up to focus on high-value strategic activities and foster a positive work culture where people feel empowered to do a good job.

As author John C Maxwell puts it in Developing the Leaders Around You: 

“If you want to do a few small things right, do them yourself. If you want to do great things and make a big impact, learn to delegate.”

So, if you’re struggling with delegation, here are our tips for letting go.

Delegate to the right person

A recent article in HBR suggested that when they’re choosing to delegate a task, most leaders immediately think of “who can do it” and assign it accordingly. 

That’s the wrong approach. 

If you want to build capability in your organisation and create a culture of high performance, you should be asking yourself, “Who’ll get the most out of it”? In other words, who’s likely to be most energised, acquire the most skills, and grow the most from performing the task? 

That’s the person to choose, not the one who could do it in their sleep.

Define the task clearly

A lot of delegation falls down because we can’t be bothered to think the task through properly. What needs to be done, and in what timeframe? Where do the limits lie? What’s outside of scope? What does success look like? Too often, this gets overlooked. By working this out at the start and communicating it clearly, you’re far more likely to get a successful result.

In fact, at this point, I suggest putting together a brief for the task—in just the same way you’d brief an external agency or contractor. That way, you have a single source of truth that you can both go back to and make sure you’re both – quite literally – on the same page.

Give proper deadlines

There’s a tendency within most organisations to want everything yesterday. And, if someone is trying to impress with their performance, there’s also often a tendency to commit to delivering yesterday, too. So, while we’re on the topic of setting parameters, you also need to think of realistic timeframes and deadlines for delivery. You don’t want your delegation to take a load off your desk only to weigh down someone else’s

Provide the right resources

If you’re setting up someone for success, you need to give them the resources and support they need to do the job well. If you want them to use particular data or research, specify this upfront. Similarly, if you don’t want them using particular information or specifically don’t want something done a certain way, include this in your brief.

Check in regularly

There’s nothing worse in a project than a big ‘reveal’ that goes wrong. 

All of that wasted time and energy that someone has put in, only to miss the mark entirely. 

Check in regularly to ensure everything is on track, both time-wise and quality-wise. Agree upfront when that will be, and if you find things going a little off piste, meet even more regularly. Make “no surprises” your mantra.

Trust them

That said, delegation is also about trust. You have to trust in the person’s ability to deliver a good job, so don’t nitpick or micromanage when it’s not warranted. By giving them a sense of ownership and autonomy, they’re more likely to be engaged and productive.

Celebrate success (and follow up)

If the person you’ve delegated does a great job, let them know – even acknowledge them more widely if you need to. This can be great for motivation and cohesion. Also, have a proper debrief session. Talk about what went well and what you think could be improved next time. Most importantly, ask them how they found the experience and what they learned.

In short…

I know it can be hard to let go, but delegation is a vital skill – one that will make your life easier and set you up for business success. 

If you’d like to know more about how to set up your business’s systems and processes to delegate work more effectively, contact us. 

Employees have gained the ‘right to disconnect’ and casual and gig workers look to have won new protections, under changes that will be introduced by the Closing Loopholes Bill (No 2).

The Bill, which passed through the Senate on 8 February, also provides a new legislative definition for ‘employee’, and gives unions the right to enter a workplace within 24 hours where they reasonably believe a worker is being underpaid.

While the Bill will return to the House of Representatives for approval, it seems likely to become law given Labor’s majority.

With that in mind, we look at some of the key changes Closing Loopholes 2 will bring to your workplace.

1. The right to disconnect

Perhaps the most headline-worthy reform the Bill will introduce is the ‘right to disconnect’, which will be enshrined in the Fair Work Act’s General Protections provisions. This new rule allows employees to refuse to respond to – or even monitor their email and phone calls – outside of working hours, unless it’s unreasonable to do so. They can also ignore attempts from a client or customer to get in touch.

Whether or not an employer’s attempts to contact an employee outside of hours is reasonable or unreasonable will depend on several factors, including:

While the Bill says that any breach should first be dealt with at the workplace level, the right to disconnect’s status as a General Protection means that an employee could potentially bring an adverse action claim in the Fair Work Commission. They can also bring a claim asking for a ‘stop’ order against an employer contravening this right.

2. New definition of ‘employee’

One of the biggest issues in employment law over the past decade has been determining a worker’s true status – including whether someone is truly an employee or contractor. The Closing Loopholes Bill No 2 looks to overcome this by introducing new definitions of employee and employer into the Fair Work Act.

The definitions say that the “real substance, practical reality and true nature of the relationship” must now be considered – putting to rest recent High Court decisions that gave primacy to the employment contract.

That said, contractors who earn over a ‘high income’ threshold ($167,500) can opt out of the test. Conversely, contractors who earn under the same threshold will be able to bring an unfair contracts claim in the FWC, something that currently must be done formally in court.

3. Casual workers

A new definition of ‘casual worker’ will also be included, under which an employee will only be deemed casual if they’re entitled to a casual loading and the employer makes no ‘firm advance commitment’ to continuing, indefinite work.

Again, the Bill says that whether or not an employer makes a ‘firm advance commitment’ can only be answered by examining the practical reality, real substance and true nature of the relationship.

The Bill also introduces new ‘casual conversion’ provisions, which will place the onus on employees to request becoming a permanent member of staff. Once the employee has hit certain milestones, including working for six (or sometimes 12) months, an employer can refuse only in particular circumstances, including on ‘fair and reasonable operational grounds’.

4. Intractable bargaining

In 2022, the government introduced changes that gave the FWC the authority to make an ‘intractable bargaining declaration’. This effectively gave unions a mechanism for winning pay rises without having to reach an agreement with an employer.

The Bill effectively changes these provisions so that any arbitrated outcome can’t be less favourable to an employee or union covered by an existing workplace agreement.

5. Underpaying workers

Another area the Bill covers is worker underpayment – something that was already centre stage in the original Closing Loopholes Bill, which introduced a new crime for wage theft.

Under Closing Loopholes 2, the penalties for wage theft will be increased to a maximum of 10 years prison and a $7.825 million fine.

The Bill will also allow unions to apply to the FWC for exemption from the usual 24 hours’ notice to enter a workplace, if they reasonably suspect a member of their organisation is being underpaid.

6. Gig workers

Finally, the Bill introduces new minimum entitlements around pay and conditions for workers in Australia’s expanding gig economy. Perhaps the most interesting of these is the right for workers on a digital platform to apply to the FWC where they have been ‘deactivated’ or removed from an app.

These changes are being introduced to protect what the government believes are some of the most vulnerable workers in today’s economy.

 

In short…

While the Closing Loopholes Bill No 1 introduced sweeping new protections for Australia’s employees, Bill No 2 goes further still. Employers should make sure they’re across any changes and they don’t inadvertently fall foul of them.

Want more?

If you’d like to know more about how the changing trends in HR impact your business, get in touch.

Many businesses are allowing employees to work remotely, at least sometimes. But how often should you be making your employees come into the office – if at all? 

The reality is that the perfect answer will vary sector by sector and business-by-business. With that in mind, this guide looks at how to work out how often you should let employees work remotely and how often you should make sure they come into the workplace.

 

Be guided by your own needs

The starting point for working out how often people should come into the office should always be why you need them in the office in the first place. 

Sometimes, that will be dictated by the nature of the work itself. Obviously, frontline retail or hospitality workers need to be physically present. But for other sectors, it can be a bit more nuanced. 

That said, there will often be collaborative tasks that are best performed in person. Being together can also be great, even necessary, for team bonding. Then, of course, there are client meetings or inter-company meetings, where face-to-face contact gives people a better feel for reading the room through body language and other nuances.

In fact, MIT’s Human Dynamic Labs invested heavily in exploring this very topic. It found that the most valuable communication was unequivocally done in-person. It also found that up to 35% of variation in team performance came down to how often team members spoke face to face. 

That’s something you should keep in mind when working out how often to bring employees into the workplace.

Employee satisfaction is important too

On the other hand, all of the research shows that happy employees are also productive employees. So, weighing against MIT’s findings is the fact that most employees enjoy working at least some of the time from home. 

McKinsey research showed 65% of employees would choose to always work from home if it were possible. It also found that employees offered the opportunity to work flexibly almost always took up the opportunity. Those who didn’t tended to be older or on lower incomes. 

But even many of those who wanted to work from home full-time often reported there were obstacles in the way of becoming fully productive. 

 

Choose the model that suits you 

With that in mind, hybrid work – where an employee is at home sometimes and in the office others – seems to be the logical solution for many workplaces. And last month, we wrote about the three types of hybrid working: the fixed model, flexible model and the office-first model. These differ in the following ways:

To some extent, the model you choose will also dictate how many days a week you insist your employees come into the office.

 

How your business can answer the question 

As this shows, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to the question of how often employees should be in the office. The ideal balance varies based on the type of work you do and the type of office you run. 

A good starting point is always to spend some time working out which critical tasks require in-person collaboration and which can be carried out just as effectively from outside the workplace. Then, factor in the creativity and value that come from face-to-face interactions.

For instance, if you find that 40% of your workplace tasks are best performed face to face, you may find that three days a week lets you get these done but also allows for some informal interaction. Alternatively, if you want a less rigid structure, you could decide to ask employees to be in the office for two set days and then decide whether they want to come in at other times. 

Given how rapidly workplaces are transforming, more than anything, it’s adaptability that’s key. So, embrace change, listen to your employees, and stay open to finding the balance that fosters both productivity and job satisfaction. 

After all, in the end, it’s not just about how often your employees are in the office—it’s about creating an environment where they can thrive, no matter where they work.

 

Want more?

If you’d like to know more about implementing an office-first approach in your workplace, get in touch. 

Can an employer legally ask an employee to take a pay cut? It’s a question I get asked by employers all the time. That’s not usually because they want to be mean or claw back money from their staff; it’s often down to a matter of survival. In many sectors, business currently isn’t what it was a year ago, and some companies simply can’t continue to pay out the same wage levels they have been.

With that in mind, this article looks at the legalities of whether or not you can ask an employee to work for less pay. 

 

The baseline: An employer can’t cut pay without an employee’s consent

At a basic level, it’s illegal for employers in Australia to unilaterally cut an employee’s pay without their consent. In other words, you can ask, but they don’t have to accept – and there’s not much you can do about it.  

Generally, you’ll always need the employee to agree. And you’ll need them to do this in writing. Otherwise, you’ll be breaking your contract with the employee and face the prospect of an unfair dismissal or redundancy claim – something that could prove far costlier than keeping the employee on at their current pay rate.

With that in mind, here’s how you should go about it, if need to cut your wages bill. 

 

Don’t cut below the minimum rates

You always need to be mindful of an employee’s minimum pay. As a starting point every Australian employee is entitled to the National Minimum Wage (currently $23.23 an hour – the highest rate in the world). Beyond that, however, you also need to make sure you’re complying with the minimum conditions of any Award or agreement applying to your staff. 

Go below these rates and you’re likely to face serious legal issues, including the prospect of heavy fines. 

 

What about bonuses?

Bonuses are often a different matter. That’s because they usually come down to meeting key performance indicators. It’s always sensible to draft bonus agreements so that an element of it, is tied to the performance of the business or business unit, as well as the individual. That way, if times are genuinely tight and you haven’t met your business objectives, you’re not liable to pay out. 

 

Reduce hours rather than pay

One way that could keep everyone happy is to reduce hours rather than pay. For instance, when the COVID pandemic first struck, it was quite common for employers to ask employees to work a three or four day week. Some employees actually preferred this arrangement, and remain on the same conditions today.

But, again, as with pay cuts, reducing the working hours of permanent employees, wouldn’t usually have been possible without their consent. If an employee had said, no – there was little an employer could do except dismiss them for operational reasons (and potentially face the cost of redundancy pay).

Many employees, however, decided to accept a four day working week, or reduced hours, rather than be without a job. 

 

Can you cut a casual worker’s pay? 

Casual workers have their minimum wages set in exactly the same way as permanent staff – i.e. through the National Minimum Standards, as well as Awards and Agreements. They also enjoy the same protections around pay rates. That said, the nature of their employment means they’re paid by the hour, rather than via a salary.

A genuine casual employee has no reasonable expectation of ongoing, regular work. That means you can usually vary their hours without their consent – something many employers will do when times are tough. The exception, however, is long-term casual employees. That’s someone who has been working the same pattern of hours over the past year or more. 

 

Be upfront with employees

Whatever action you want to take, it’s always important that you communicate your situation to your staff to get your employees’ consent. In fact, many Awards and Agreements have formal consultation provisions that you’ll need to follow whenever you’re attempting to change an employees working conditions – sometimes even if it’s as much as changing their roster of hours. 

Our experience is that most employees want what’s best in the long-term. If your business is suffering and you legitimately can’t keep paying the same rates, many employees will agree to having their employment conditions modified. The key, however, is to be upfront. Explain what is happening and why you need to take action. And work with the employees themselves to come up with a solution. You may be surprised by what you can achieve.

 

Want more?

If you’d like to know more about implementing an office-first approach in your workplace, get in touch.

AI is starting to carry out many HR tasks traditionally performed by humans – and it’s likely to add many more to the list over the next few years. 

We explore whether your organisation should take the ‘human’ out of human resources and opt for AI instead.

How can you use AI in Human Resources?

There are many obvious areas where AI can make a real difference to human resources – and, in many cases, already is. This is especially true of those parts of the HR process that require continual repetitive tasks and processes.

For instance, Clara offers to be a virtual assistant, handling all your scheduling. Applications like Jemini promise to take care of payroll processing. Even accounting software such as Xero uses AI to time track, roster and interpret Awards and Agreements, making sure employees receive their entitlements and employers meet all their obligations. 

In these functions, AI can help take the pain out of work, recognising patterns and performing functions that automate what are generally mundane tasks. In turn, this frees HR professionals to focus on more strategic, human-centric aspects of their roles.

But there are some not-so-obvious ways AI could potentially begin to help in the human resources space, too.

So, do we need humans in HR at all?

With AI now capable – or likely to soon be capable – of so much, it’s tempting to ask whether we need humans in human resources anymore at all. But, for the moment, here are a few areas where I think people can still outperform the robots.

 

Humans v AI: not an all-or-nothing choice

While the discussion around AI in HR often falls into a binary narrative, it’s not necessarily an ‘either/or’ choice. Instead, it’s more likely that the future of HR for most organisations involves a mixture of humans and machines. 

AI is likely to be used to handle data-driven and repetitive tasks, freeing humans up to focus on the more strategic, interpersonal and complex side of HR. Rather than substituting humans altogether, it can provide valuable and often hidden insights that allow a human resources professional to interpret them in light of the organisation’s broader goals and ambitions. It can also handle most of the run-of-the-mill and low-level inquiries that take up a large part of many HR professional’s days.   

As the role of AI changes, so will the role of HR. Those organisations that carefully assess and invest in AI to complement human-based services are the ones most likely to succeed. 

 

Want more?

If you’d like to know more about how AI can complement and support your HR function, get in touch. 

We’re living longer than ever before. In fact, the number of Australians over the age of 85 has more than doubled in the past 20 years.  But could our long lives have real implications for the future of work? 

We explore what Australia’s growing longevity could mean for the future of work.

 

How much longer are we living?

When Australia first introduced a national age pension in 1908, it paid a living allowance to many (but not all) people after they’d reached the age of 65 and stopped working.* It was, of course, means-tested, but to be eligible, you also had to meet race requirements and be ‘of good character’. 

At the time the pension was introduced, the life expectancy for Australian women was short of 56, and for men, it was less than 51. In other words, most people didn’t even come close to living to pension age.

Fast forward to today, and although the pension age has been lifted to 67, most of us make it well beyond this.  Today in Australia, life expectancy is over 81 for men and over 85 for women – close to 30 years longer than when retirement age became enshrined in Australian law. 

The number of people who make it way beyond this is growing faster still. Between 2000 and 2020, the number of Australians over 85 grew by 110%.  And this is going to become more extreme very quickly: a baby girl born today has a 40% chance of reaching 100. 

Let that sink in for a minute…

 

Should we be working longer just because we’re living longer?

As life expectancy increases dramatically, many argue we should be working longer too. 

One main reason for this is economic: how can we expect to fund longer retirements without making the working-age population pay? Many also point to the many benefits that working brings when it comes to both mental and physical health. The mental stimulation, social engagement and sense of purpose that come from paid and meaningful employment have all been proven to contribute to both happiness and healthiness and that, in turn, contribute to, well, an even longer life still.

On the flip side, those who argue we shouldn’t be working longer often tend to say that, in the coming years, increased automation and the rise of AI will mean less human labour will be required to produce the same output. 

There’s also a reasonable argument that a long retirement and fewer working hours could mean people begin to enjoy a better quality of life.

 

Let’s assume, for the moment, we may be working longer…

Despite the pension age being 67 (and the preservation age for super being 60), we’re still retiring at an average of around 55 for women and 59 for men. If we assume a symmetrical distribution for that average, that means for every man who retires at 65, there’s one who retires at 53. And for every woman who retires at 65, there’s one who retires at 45.

But, if this changes, and we need to accommodate a growing number of older workers, what kind of changes are we likely to have to make? 

 

The future is flexible: gig, remote and part-time work

As more people begin to work past traditional retirement age, we’re likely to see non-traditional work models surge.  

For instance, flexible working may have already taken off during the pandemic, but if we’re to accommodate an ageing workforce, we’ll probably have to become more flexible still. 

More and more workers are likely to want to carry out at least some of their work remotely. Others will want to work reduced hours, dropping from the traditional five-day week to four or three.

We’re also likely to see the gig economy become important for older workers, with project-based work and short-term engagements – particularly in the most skilled occupations – becoming the norm.

As this happens, we could well see a real rise in productivity as we move more towards project or results-based rather than time-based work. The increased autonomy associated with flexible working could also mean people stay happier and therefore more productive until much later in life.  

 

Workplace redesign: making space for every age

Not all work will be carried out from home, however. And there are genuine advantages to having people in the office – at least some of the time.

However, a multigenerational workforce will mean a multigenerational workplace. And achieving this won’t just be limited to installing better lighting and ergonomic chairs.

Instead, expect flex spaces to become the norm. Having the freedom to switch between various work settings has been proven to reduce physical and mental fatigue. This is especially beneficial for older workers who may find the traditional nine-to-five desk setup draining. Quiet rooms can serve as temporary relief spaces for those who might need a break from the standard office hustle.

Older employees are also more likely to have specific health requirements. This could lead to a new emphasis on creating a healthy workplace, with features such as standing desks and high-quality air filters becoming more common. Larger organisations could well begin to offer in-office health services. (Some already do.)

 

Lifelong learning to become the new norm

We’re already past the days of learning a trade or profession and sticking with it for life. But if the workforce gets older, ongoing education is likely to take on even greater importance. In fact, older workers are likely to have to upskill and reskill and learn new skills continually as technology changes.

Much of this is likely to take place online, and we could see a real uplift in the digital workplace educational sector.  Ongoing education could take on greater importance in the employment contract, potentially becoming a condition of work for many of us across the board.

On the flip side, having older workers in the workplace will also mean more potential mentors and role models in the workplace. So younger workers are likely to be learning just as much too.

 

Automation and AI

Technology such as automation and AI are also likely to play a vital role in helping us work longer and more productively. In physical sectors, such as manufacturing, it could take some of the strain, allowing us to stay employed for longer. It could also help make the working day more efficient, suggesting ways to cut down on unnecessary movement (for instance, in the context of a warehouse or delivery vehicle), thereby helping reduce fatigue.

In a more white-collar setting, AI and automation can potentially reduce the need for repetitive work, allowing older workers to focus their efforts on where they bring the most value – to the high-value brain work.

 

Workplace policies

Finally, an older workplace is also likely to mean a new emphasis on anti-agism policies, both at a legislative and organisational level.

This may include age-sensitivity training sessions aimed at combatting age-related stereotypes to encourage a more inclusive environment. We’re also likely to see greater emphasis on work/life balance – something crucial for older workers. This could mean fewer working days or curtailed hours for everyone, not just older workers.

 

Want more?

The fact we’re living longer is likely to mean many of us will choose to work longer too. And that’s likely to shake up the workplace in some interesting ways. 

If you’d like to know more about the impact this is likely to have on your workplace, get in touch. 

 

* In 1910, the pension age for women was reduced to 60 on the grounds that, despite living longer than men, they tended to be “incapacitated for regular work at an earlier age”. 

Hybrid work isn’t just a trend—it’s becoming the new norm. But offices still matter, especially when it comes to collaboration. 

One European study, the Okta Hybrid Work Report 2023, found that despite going hybrid, many companies aren’t cutting back on their office space. Instead, they’re redesigning it to make it capitalise on the benefits that can come from being together.

In an age where people expect productivity to matter more than presenteeism, they’re also adopting an ‘office first’ approach to hybrid working that gives employees some degree of flexibility but also captures the many benefits that can come from working with colleagues face-to-face  

With that in mind, we look at whether ‘office first’ should become the new normal for Australia’s workplaces, including yours.  

Three types of hybrid work models

The Okra report found that hybrid working now generally broke down into three models.

Fixed Model

In this model, remote working follows predictable patterns. Employees have set days where they work from the office and also days where they work from home. For instance, many employees work every Monday and Tuesday at the office desk and remotely the rest of the week. This schedule doesn’t change; it’s fixed. 

This model is great for planning but can also be a bit restrictive for those employees who favour variety and flexibility. It’s a model that’s favoured by organisations with more traditional views on work-life balance, including many of Australia’s large corporates. 

Flexible Model

In this less prescriptive setup, employees get to pick where they work each day, depending on what they feel suits them best. Got a day of deep work? Stay home. Need to collaborate? Head to the office. This model suits people who like to control their own schedule, but it demands a high level of self-management and requires very high levels of trust.

It’s often favoured in highly skilled professional settings, where productivity can be easily measured through methods such as billable hours. 

Office-First Model

Under this model, employees are expected to be in the office most of the time, but they can still choose to work from home for a portion of their time, maybe a day or two each week. It’s not as prescriptive as the fixed model, though – if an employee doesn’t have to be at the office on a set day to do collaborative work, they can choose to be at home. 

The goal of the office-first approach is often to keep teams aligned and maintain company culture. If management says it’s a day for everyone to be in the office, employees need to be there.

 

The case for Office First

In the post-pandemic world, the report found that it’s the office-first model that was gaining the most traction among Europe’s employers. That’s because it tends to make collaboration easier and more spontaneous. 

If an employee is stuck on a project, they don’t always have to schedule a video call or wait for an email reply. They can instead simply walk over to a colleague’s desk for quick help. This face-to-face interaction can not only solve problems faster but also foster a sense of community and team cohesion. Having everyone in the same space reinforces company culture, something that can get diluted when people are scattered remotely.

The report found that another advantage was that mentoring and career development often thrive in the office environment in a way that’s just not possible online. In-person interactions give employees a chance to observe how their leaders manage challenges or even just run a meeting. These subtle, everyday learnings can be hard to pick up in a remote setting. 

For those new to a field or looking to climb the ladder, being physically present can offer invaluable lessons and networking opportunities.

 

The broader organisational impact of choosing a hybrid work model

The report noted that in European organisations, choosing the right work model is often a collective, board-level decision involving multiple stakeholders, not just a matter for HR.  

This C-suite collaboration makes it essential for various departments to align their objectives and challenges and to reach some agreement on what is going to work best in the interests of the whole organisation.

In doing so, many take the view that employee wellbeing comes first. And this doesn’t necessarily mean allowing employees to work remotely whenever they feel like it. Instead, the emphasis on collaboration that comes from an office-first approach can significantly enhance team dynamics and overall productivity. This, in turn, offers a well-rounded employee experience that prioritises both wellbeing and work outcomes.

 

How to decide if office-first is right for you

Every workplace now has to choose which model suits the kind of work they do. For some, such as manufacturing, hospitality or retail, the nature of the work means that face-to-face has to happen. For others, though, it’s more subtle. 

Before jumping on the office-first bandwagon, we recommend considering several factors and how they impact your business.

By weighing these factors, you’ll get a clearer picture of whether an office-first model benefits you.

 

Implementing an Office-First approach

If people are used to having the freedom to choose, they might find some resistance to moving to office first. If that’s the case, here are our tips for transitioning effectively. 

Announcement: Clearly communicate the shift to an office-first model and the rationale behind it.

Transition Period: Offer a grace period for the team to adjust to the new setup.

Office Layout: Redesign the office space to maximise the benefits of in-person collaboration. Show everyone why being in the office matters so much. 

Flexibility Clauses: Despite being office-first, consider built-in flexibility for special circumstances.

Review: Periodically assess the effectiveness of the new model. Make tweaks as needed.

Implementing office-first isn’t just a policy change. It’s a cultural shift that demands clear communication and a thoughtful approach. By considering the nuances and involving your team in the decision-making process, you can make the shift as seamless as possible.

 

Want more?

If you’d like to know more about implementing an office-first approach in your workplace, get in touch. 

The ‘Closing Loopholes’ Bill could be about to change Australia’s workplace laws in the most significant way since the Fair Work Act was introduced. 

If the Bill passes through both houses, the Albanese government will be able to implement its workplace relations agenda, changing everything from the rights of casual workers to the laws around industrial manslaughter and from minimum employment conditions through to the definition of employment itself.

We explore how the Closing Loopholes Bill will impact your organisation if it becomes law.

 

What is the Closing Loopholes Bill?

The Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes) Bill 2023 aims to introduce some of Labor’s workplace relations-based pre-election promises, as well as some of the outcomes agreed at last year’s Jobs and Skills Summit. 

While the Bill may not be law yet, it will likely pass through parliament in some form after February next year, after a Senate Committee Report. (Although independent Senator David Pocock, whose vote is likely to be needed, supports splitting the Bill). 

That means all organisations should start preparing now. Here are some of the key provisions you need to know about. 

 

A re-written (and more onerous) definition of casual workers

Over the past couple of years, several high-profile court cases attempted to define what constitutes a casual employee. Then, in early 2021, the Morrison government stepped in, legislating that the written contract – rather than the patterns of behaviour – should be paramount.

The Albanese government wants to change this – by introducing a new test that considers the totality of the relationship between employer and employee. The idea behind this is to end what the government calls “the permanent casual” to look at “what’s really going on”. If passed, the test will require employers to continually assess their workforce and the nature of the way they engage employees to make sure they are genuine casuals.

This could impose a real burden on employers in sectors that rely heavily on a casual workforce, such as retail and hospitality.

 

A new definition of employment itself?

Another area the government is targeting is the distinction between employer/employee and principal/contractor. Again, this has been a long-litigated and contentious area of employment law.

Under the government’s proposed definition, we’ll see a return to a test based on many factors, effectively expanding the definition of who counts as an employee. This also reverses recent High Court authority, including WorkPac Pty Ltd v Rossato [2021] HCA 23 and Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union v Personnel Contracting Pty Ltd [2022] HCA 1, both of which adopted a narrow definition of who was an employee.

Tied in with this are new ‘same job, same pay’ provisions. These give the Fair Work Commission authority to make orders preventing employers from undercutting the wage provisions of enterprise agreements by using labour-hire workers.

If passed, the new provisions could also impact several sectors, especially those that rely heavily on contractors.

 

Stronger penalties for underpayment

New ‘wage theft’ provisions in the Closing Loopholes Bill will make deliberately underpaying employees a criminal offence. 

The Fair Work Ombudsman will handle any initial investigation and has the power to make ‘snap’ entries. If they find something amiss, the Commonwealth DPP can take legal action based on information from the Australian Federal Police. Prosecutions can start up to six years after the alleged offence, and the penalties are severe – up to 10 years in jail for individuals and fines that could go as high as $7.8 million for companies.

But there is a safety net. The FWO is offering a “cooperation agreement” for businesses that self-report wage theft. This agreement serves as a ‘safe harbour,’ protecting you from further prosecution. 

So, while the Bill brings more accountability and stringent rules, it also provides an avenue for rectification for those businesses and individuals that find they have breached the Act.

 

Greater protections for gig economy workers

The FWC will also be able to set fair minimum standards for ‘employee-like’ workers, such as those working through ride-sharing and food delivery apps. They’ll also be able to hear claims concerning unfair deactivation or termination from a service.

This further regulates one of the most controversial and vulnerable workplace sectors and one that is growing more important to the overall economy. 

 

New rights for union workplace delegates

There are new rules around workplace delegates’ rights and protections, including in employer disputes. Workplace delegates will be allowed ‘reasonable access’ to workplace facilities, as well as to communicate with current and potential union members about industrial matters. 

A general protection will also apply to workplace delegates. This includes preventing employers from unreasonably refusing to deal with them. Employers are also prevented from obstructing workplace delegates or misleading them.

Workplace delegates also receive paid time off for training in their role, unless they’re employed by a small business.

 

Tougher anti-discrimination laws

Stronger protections will apply to workers who face discrimination as a result of family or domestic violence. This aims to bring the Fair Work Act into line with federal anti-discrimination legislation.

 

Industrial manslaughter

Industrial manslaughter laws already exist at the State level. The Closing Loopholes Bill will introduce a federal industrial manslaughter office that could land an individual 25 years in jail. Meanwhile, companies could face fines of up to $18 million if they’re found to be reckless or grossly negligent. 

 

In short…

These are just some of the changes that the Closing Loopholes Bill aims to introduce. If enacted, it will bring about new responsibilities for most employers and change the definition of many workplace tests.

That’s why it’s vital you stay on top of the legislation, especially if you have a high number of contractors or casual staff. 

If you’d like to know more about the impact this is likely to have on your workplace, get in touch. 

Employers often use restraints of trade to try to stop employees from taking their confidential information to a competitor and gaining an unfair advantage over them. But just how enforceable are they? 

A recent New South Wales Court of Appeal (NSWCA) found that whether a restraint of trade is enforceable depends on whether you’re trying to protect a legitimate interest, as well as factors such as their duration and an employee’s seniority.

The background to the case

The case started with a familiar scenario – a senior sales manager left his employer to work for a competitor. However, his employment contract contained three clauses: a confidentiality clause, an ‘exclusive employment clause’ (this said he must devote his time and attention to the employer during business hours and promote its best interests), and a restraint of trade.

The restraint of trade clause was one of the typical ‘cascading’ ones that employers sometimes use that allow for ‘12 months’, ‘9 months’, ‘6 months’, etc, in the hope that a court will enforce the most reasonable duration.

When the employee left and worked for a competitor, the employer alleged he broke all three of these clauses in his contract. 

He then failed to comply with the notice of termination clause of the contract, which provided for three months that he would not work in direct competition. Instead, he started working for the competitor within four weeks of leaving. He also helped the competitor poach a more junior employee who was subject to a similar restraint of trade clause. 

The proceedings

The former employer brought proceedings in the Supreme Court of NSW (the NSWSC)  alleging the employee – and the employee he poached – had breached their employment contracts. It received interlocutory orders (that is, temporary orders), which prevented the employees from working for the competitor until the court decided the case.

The court eventually handed down a decision in the employer’s favour. It found:

The employee appealed the NSWSC’s decision in the NSW Court of Appeal. 

The appeal: Are restraints of trade enforceable? 

The Court of Appeal noted that restraints were only enforceable insofar as they protected an employer’s reasonable interests for a reasonable amount of time.

In this case, the employer had a legitimate interest in protecting its confidential information from a competitor, including its marketing plans and potential weaknesses in its product. As the employee was senior and privy to this information, it was, therefore, reasonable to restrain him from a competitor for nine months.

However, it also noted that the employee he helped poach was more junior and did not have any awareness of the company’s confidential information. It wasn’t reasonable to restrain him from working for a competitor because he could not damage its legitimate interest. 

The Court of Appeal also found that the employee breached his notice of termination provision. He had also breached his contractual and fiduciary duties to his former employer when he helped poach the employee.

The Court of Appeal also found that because the competitor had encouraged the employee to breach his fiduciary duty, it, too, was liable.

What the case means for you as an employer

There are times you can rely on restraints of trade to protect your confidential information, but they need to be proportionate, and they can’t be used as a ‘catch all’ to try to limit who employees can work for. You’re also far more likely to find they’re enforceable against senior employees.  

It’s always a good idea to have restraints drafted properly by your legal adviser. It’s also often a good idea to use ‘cascading’ clauses – based both on duration and geography – so that a court will enforce appropriate terms rather than ‘striking out’ an unreasonable restraint. 

Also. if you’re hiring an employee from a competitor and they have a restraint, proceed with caution. If possible, have your legal adviser check their restraint over before you sign them up.

Want more?

If you’d like to know more about restraints of trade, get in touch.

Alternatively, you can read the full decision here. 

 

Labour shortages and rising wages mean employers need to do more with less. So, if you’re one of the many business owners who find they have too many HR tasks and not enough staff to complete them, here are six HR tasks we think you can automate, outsource or eliminate.

1. Managing leave

Many employers still rely on an employee to stay on top of everyone’s leave entitlements. But these days, managing leave entitlements – including sick leave, annual leave, carer’s leave and long service leave – can all be automated. 

When it comes to sick leave, some of today’s HR software can automatically follow up with employees, make sure they’ve submitted a doctor’s certificate (which they can do via their phone) and then notify team leaders and managers of their absence.

Best of all, modern HR software can let you identify trends in people’s sick leave – which can be great for identifying mental health issues and minimising potential psychological harm to employees.

Using an automated system to track annual leave can also give you complete visibility over when people will be absent. It can also reveal when you’re likely to be short-staffed, based on your workflow – and even potentially recommend critical times employees should be encouraged to take leave. 

Not only is there no need to have someone doing this all manually anymore, but by automating, you could eliminate risk while also giving yourself a strategic advantage.

2. Timesheets and payroll 

If you have someone processing timesheets and payroll manually, now’s the time to rethink your approach. 

There’s excellent software out there that will do this for you much more efficiently and cost-effectively. It will automatically ensure you’re complying with relevant tax, superannuation and employment laws, submit what you need to the ATO, and generally make your life as easy as possible.

Or, if you want a more comprehensive offering involving a human touch, you could outsource it. 

3. Hiring new employees

Hiring new employees is a function we often fundamentally associate with HR, but it could be one best performed by someone else. After all, it’s something that’s vital to your business and its ongoing success, but it also requires specific skills and processes. And depending on the size of your business, it can chew up a lot of your resources.

These high-impact, low-volume tasks are often the very best ones to outsource. There are specialists, such as recruitment companies or a virtual HR provider like ours, who can tap into their network, offer impartiality, and help you select the best candidate. We can even work with you to develop a strategic plan for attracting and retaining talent for the long term, so that you know what you need ahead of time.

4. Performance reviews

Performance reviews have traditionally been another fundamental part of the HR process – and a part that can take an extraordinary amount of time. They’re also one aspect of the relationship between management and employee that can be sensitive, fraught with risk, and carry long-term implications for workplace productivity and culture. 

That’s why this is another part of the HR process that often makes sense to eliminate from your in-house function and outsource, saving time and money. 

5. Compliance

Making sure your organisation complies with employment and HR laws can be complex. It can also be something that can consume your HR professionals, keeping them away from the areas in which they excel. 

The good news is that these days, HR software will make sure you’re complying with some of the rules and regulations you need to. And, for a high-level, or strategic view, you can always outsource.

6. Writing policies and procedures

Again, writing policies and procedures is laborious, and it’s also easy to get things wrong – potentially opening your organisation up to legal exposure. And yet, writing complex, sometimes specialist policies and procedures often falls to generalist HR professionals. A better approach is often to outsource this work to people who specialise in the area so that you know you’re following best practice and setting yourself up for success.

Looking for ways to eliminate more HR functions?

HR covers a range of functions from the strategic through to the detailed, and it’s often virtually impossible to hire people with all the skills you need. By outsourcing some of the tasks and automating others, you can make sure you’re always running the most efficient and cost-effective HR function possible. 

Want more?

If you’d like to know more about how these changes specifically impact your workplace, get in touch. 

A growing number of employers are introducing ‘life leave’ for employees. Should your organisation be doing the same?

We explore what is how, how it works and the potential benefits (and disadvantages) of introducing it into your workplace.

What is life leave?

Life leave is a broad type of leave that lets employees have time off simply to do non-work related things. This could be anything from being at home so that work can be done on your property, having a day off for your birthday or even just taking a mental health day. 

Different types of life leave

There’s no single template available which means different employers implement it differently. 

For instance, EY Australia introduced unpaid life leave for its employees in 2019, giving them between six and 12 weeks to ‘explore interests’ outside of work, such as travel or study. In contrast, in 2020, CBA introduced three days’ paid life leave for its employees. 

CBA’s policy had its critics because, at the same time, some employees’ sick leave entitlements were reduced from 15 days to 12 days. CBA also only allowed employees to take the life leave entitlement if they’d used up their entire annual leave entitlement of previous 12 months and had less than a total 20 days’ accrued annual leave. 

Still, an internal survey released by CBA showed an overwhelming majority of employees – as many as 80% – welcomed the move. 

Why wouldn’t you just increase annual leave?

Annual leave is different from life leave because it is a statutory entitlement for all employees regulated by the National Employment Standards (NES). 

That means the NES provide for the situations under which an employee is entitled to annual leave and outline the minimum employers must provide. Importantly, they also specify that it ‘accumulates’ – something which isn’t necessarily the case for life leave. Also, under many Awards and Agreements, employees are entitled to a leave loading when they take annual leave. 

By introducing this new type of leave, employers have greater flexibility and can stipulate whether it accumulates, whether it’s paid or unpaid and whether leave loading applies. 

The pros and cons

The advantages of introducing life leave into your workplace include the following.

There could, however, be some downsides to introducing life leave too.

What alternatives are there?

If it all seems a bridge too far for your workplace but you want some of its benefits, you could always introduce more paid – or unpaid – annual leave. Alternatively, a lot of workplaces we work with have perks such as a day off for a birthday, a day off for family commitments, an extra long weekend or two a year or flexible public holidays. Some even offer unlimited leave.

Should your workplace introduce life leave?

Whether or not you should introduce life leave at your workplace depends on a number of factors, not least of which is the type of work you do. After all, while life leave lends itself to service-based jobs – such as accounting or financial services – it would be a much trickier proposition in industries that require someone to be present – such as manufacturing or retail.

That said, the flexibility that comes with life leave – both from an employer and employee perspective – makes it an increasingly attractive proposition.

If you’d like to know more about introducing it into your workplace, get in touch.

Since COVID, more people than ever are working from home. In fact, it’s probably the single most important impact the pandemic has had on the workplace. But even before the pandemic struck, the Fair Work Act gave many employees the right to request flexible working and employers were obliged to consider that request. In my experience, some employers though are still reluctant to allow flexible working fearing that it leaves employees productive. So if you’re one of them – or if you’re an employee looking to prove your productivity when working from home – here are our tips for greater productivity.

Get off email (and other forms of communication)

Email is one of the main tools that has allowed many people to work effectively away from the workplace. More recently, it’s been joined by a host of other communication apps and methods, including Slack, Zoom, Teams, Jabber and more.

The problem is that the same tools that let us do our job are often the very same ones that distract us from it. 

How often do you find yourself giving up work momentarily to answer a message that’s probably not that urgent or just consistently checking it to see if anything interesting has come in?

One of the keys to productivity is simply to stop checking your messages. Instead, set aside a few times a day where you read and answer them in one batch. 

And, if you’re an employer looking to increase productivity in your workforce, either stop expecting an instant response or set aside a limited time each day (say 1 pm-3 pm) where people need to be available. Otherwise, try to let them get on with their work.

Structure your day

When we’re at the workplace, we have the external cues for when we should be doing certain things. We arrive and leave at set times, usually go on our lunch break at the same time others are taking lunch, and even chat around the proverbial water cooler or take our coffee breaks at a similar time each day. While imposing the same kind of regimentation on our homelife may not seem natural, routine is actually one of the real keys to being productive, healthy and even creative.

So, if your workplace hasn’t set a schedule for when you need to get work done, set one yourself. 

Give yourself a set time for when you’ll take lunch, when you’ll start and finish and when you’ll have scheduled breaks. Then stick to it. You’ll be surprised by how much more you’re likely to get done. 

Make to-do lists

One real key to productivity is to write to-do lists. But these shouldn’t just be spur-of-the-moment notes that focus only on what’s at hand. They should be strategic tools for setting out your monthly, weekly and daily goals.  

That said, you should be careful not to make your lists too long or too onerous: otherwise, you’re going to put yourself under too much pressure and feel like you’re failing when you can’t meet them. 

While it’s true that most of us have to-do lists in the office, in many ways, they become even more important at home. After all, remote working is all about keeping up your productivity to make sure the work still gets done.

If you’re an employer or manager worried about productivity, you could even have your employees submit their weekly to-do lists to you and then check them off.

Eat the frog

‘Eating the frog’ is a productivity technique that involves choosing the most important (and often unpleasant) task on your to-do list and making it your priority when you start the day. The reasoning is that by getting the thing that needs to be achieved done first, you’ll be devoting your best brain power to it and then leaving less important tasks for when you’re not quite as switched on. You’ll also have the sense of accomplishment that comes from knocking over your big task first.

If you’re an employer, you can encourage your remote employees to become more productive by having them identify their ‘frogs’ and then devote each morning to them.

Get time management technique

Beyond this, there are so many different ways you can organise your day to become more productive. A popular one is the Pomodoro (tomato) technique, whereby you break your day into 30-minute ‘pomodoros’ that involve 25 minutes of work and a five-minute break. You then take a longer break after four pomodoros – or after every two hours.

Another popular time management technique – and the favourite of Benjamin Franklin – is ‘time blocking’. Slightly less onerous than the Pomodoro technique, it involves breaking your day into blocks and then assigning work you’ll complete within them. By providing yourself with your deadlines this way, you should help overcome procrastination and get more done. (Although you will need a certain degree of flexibility, as even Franklin himself admitted.)

There are so many potential ways to organise your day for productivity, and we even found this quiz that can help you find which one’s right for you. And, if you’re an employer worried about your employees’ time management when working from home, why not train them in time management first? 

Want more?

If you’d like to know more about setting up your workplace for productive remote working, get in touch. 

It’s hard for us to believe that Catalina Consultants is now a decade old. It has been an incredible 10 years, with the business growing and evolving from just one person to a multi-skilled team servicing clients around the country. We sat down with founder and Principal Merilyn Speiser to ask her about the highlights of the past decade, as well as what’s in store for the next 10 years.

So, Merilyn, can you cast your mind back 10 years and tell us how you came to start Catalina Consultants in the first place?

I was a partner at a major accounting firm, which gave me exposure to the way lots of businesses worked and I saw the difference between those businesses that had access to quality human resources advice and an HR function and those that didn’t. 

In particular, I saw some good businesses that weren’t large enough to afford a full HR team and had to make a choice about where they spent their money and where they didn’t. This meant they always had gaps in their HR department and this would always cost them one way or another. I thought to myself ‘wouldn’t it be great if all businesses could have access to a full HR department regardless of their size’. That was when the concept for Catalina Consultants was born.

When you started, you were the only employee. How were those early days and when did things start changing?

At the start, I thought I had a good idea but I wasn’t sure what the appetite for it would be. There wasn’t really the same knowledge of outsourcing core business functions, such as HR, as there is now. Most of my work was coming from my accounting and personal network. I had to do everything myself and a lot of the work was more consulting style. I was doing a lot of leadership training, performance and engagement-related work. This was great but it was just a part of what I wanted to do.

Everything changed when I was approached by a national architecture firm that wanted Catalina Consultants to run its entire HR function. They didn’t just want strategic advice or high-level work done. They wanted a provider who could do the admin and keep the lights on as well. There was no way I could do it all by myself and I realised that if I wanted to play in this space I needed to hire someone to help out, even if I couldn’t really afford it yet. 

The next client we took on was an IT company and it was even bigger still. They had four offices and 120 employees and we were asked to oversee everything HR-related, so I hired again. It was such a good decision and everything started growing from there.

I’m really very grateful for those early clients. Without them, there’s no way we would be here today.

What has been the key to your success?

I think we’ve always offered a very different proposition from other outsourced HR businesses. HR comprises many functions and you need employees at a whole range of levels. That’s what we offer. A lot of others simply have mid-to-senior level employees who they place, say, a day a week with a client. I think that’s entirely the wrong approach because it says ‘HR only happens on a Monday’. With us, we’re always with our clients – they know they can contact us whenever they need help no matter what it is. 

That said, we also offer a level of flexibility, so some clients like us to come in and be visible in their workplaces, like a traditional HR practice. Others want only part of our services, such as offering advice that will facilitate the success of their managers. Whatever it is, we can make it work.  

What are the main things you’ve seen change in your business and also in HR over the past decade?

One of the real changes over the past decade is the understanding of what can be achieved remotely. Obviously, COVID played a big part in that, when most professional staff had to work from home. But there was a growing understanding of remote working before that too. It means the conversations I’m having now are very different from the ones I had in the start because I no longer have to convince people that we don’t have to be always physically present to do a great job – although sometimes we are.

Another big change has been that, in the early years, businesses often saw supporting their HR function as a discretionary spend. Now, even small start-ups tend to understand the need for strong HR right from the outset. That can be anything from strategic C-suite advice and guiding the leadership team through to creating the right culture or wellbeing engagement, or even having the right retention strategy in place. 

Finally, I’d say that the rise and use of technology and data have really changed HR and made it more affordable for everyone to understand their drivers and make better decisions. We’re able to now provide even smaller clients with quite a sophisticated data-driven HR function for a reasonable price. 

10 years is quite an achievement. What lies ahead for Catalina Consultants over the next decade?

We’re still growing and evolving and we have so much planned. We’re going to be expanding into Melbourne shortly. The mix of businesses tends to be very different there – with more manufacturing – and our model really lends itself to that sector.

Beyond that, we have plans to start a recruitment arm and a legal arm, as well as IT. These are adjacent services to what we already offer and there is a real synergy between them and what we do already.  Watch this space!

Finally, looking back a decade ago, what is the one thing that you really got right with the benefit of hindsight?

I think the main thing was putting trust in others. When I began hiring people the salaries I had to pay were higher than what the business was earning from contracts but I knew if Catalina Consultants was ever going to get off the ground, it had to be more than me. Every time I hired someone it was a real turning point. There is real strength in numbers in any workplace and everything we did together was far better than I could have ever achieved on my own. For any business, your people really are your biggest asset! That’s ultimately what HR is about.

Many employers see probation periods as something of an insurance policy when it comes to recruiting staff. If things don’t work out in the first six months, they potentially give you the option of ending the employment relationship without incurring significant costs or facing lengthy legal action. 

But with labour shortages, wage rises and mass resignations a feature of the employment landscape in 2022, do employers need to be a little more circumspect when it comes to terminating a probationary employee’s employment? We explore everything you need to know about probation periods in 2022.

The case against terminating employment

Let’s begin by looking at when terminating isn’t the best path. 

Hiring and firing employees is an expensive business. In 2019, I wrote about how to terminate employment when someone is on probation. Back then I noted that one US study found that the cost of losing a staff member and re-hiring generally equates to around a third of their income. In other words, if you need to fire and re-hire someone on $60,000 a year, expect it to set your business back $20,000. 

That study was made in a very different labour market than the current one too. Today, the costs are likely to be much higher, given just how difficult it is to find good employees.

That means terminating someone’s employment – even when they’re on probation – isn’t something you’d do lightly. 

But, still, there are times you really should dismiss an employee, especially where the cost of their continuing underperformance will be much bigger in the long run. 

How do probationary periods work? 

Even when you’ve done all the right things in the recruitment process, you’ll sometimes make mistakes. After all, you can’t be 100% certain about anyone’s work – or how they fit into your organisation – until you actually see it for yourself. Probationary periods are designed to get around this, letting you use an employee’s early time with you – usually between three and six months – to assess whether they’re right. 

If they’re not, well, you have the opportunity to end the employment relationship without the same legal obligations you’d have towards a more long-standing employee. 

That said, an employee still has some entitlements during probation. For instance, they’re still entitled to the 10 National Employment Standards and some of the protections contained in the Fair Work Act 2009. 

This means you’ll have to provide them with a week’s notice of termination (or at least payment in lieu of this notice period). They’ll also be entitled to be paid for any annual leave they’ve accrued. 

What they usually won’t be entitled to do, is to bring an unfair dismissal claim in the Fair Work Commission.  However, under the Fair Work Act 2009, employees can’t bring an unfair dismissal for the first six months of their employment anyway – or 12 months where the employer has less than 15 employees.

The key: An effective probation period

The key to getting probation right – especially in today’s environment – is to run an effective probation period. This means not just giving your employee the opportunity to prove themselves but also helping equip them with the skills they need to be a good employee. 

Here’s how I think you should do that in 2022.

Read more here about getting the first six months of employment right.

Can you extend a probationary period?

With labour in short supply, you might be tempted to extend an employee’s probationary period, effectively giving them a second chance. But are you allowed to do this?

The answer is that it depends on what the contract of employment says. Some employment contracts will provide that the employer can extend probation in certain situations. If the employee is covered by an Award or Agreement, you also need to be mindful of this too.

At the same time, always remember that the employment laws, most notably the Fair Work Act 2009, still apply. That means, that if you extend an employee’s contract beyond the statutory probation period, they will have the right to bring an unfair dismissal claim, as well as to all the other entitlements of other employees. 

With that in mind, there may be little point in attempting to extend a probationary period because the employee will have all the same rights as other permanent staff members.  

How to terminate an employee when they’re on probation

While you can terminate a probationary employee’s employment without having to go through some of the requirements of a permanent employee, you can’t just dismiss a probationary employee for any reason you like. 

Even if they can’t access unfair dismissal remedies, probationary employees can access unlawful termination remedies from the moment they start working for you. That means you can’t terminate their employment for a prohibited reason, such as temporary absence from work, union membership, making a complaint or on the basis of race, gender or pregnancy.   

If you are terminating employment for a legitimate reason, you don’t have to wait until the end of the probationary period before dismissing them. When you’ve done your best and you really have reached the point of no return, my view is to act now and begin the process of hiring someone to replace them.

Want more? 

Terminating a worker’s employment can be fraught, even when they’re on probation. And never has there been more at stake than right now. Get in touch if you’re unsure about one of your new employees and need a guiding hand.

Research shows having people from different backgrounds and different points of view can be great for any workplace. As McKinsey noted in its groundbreaking 2014 Diversity Matters study: 

“The unequal performance of companies in the same industry and country suggests that gender, racial, and ethnic diversity are competitive differentiators: more diverse companies lure better talent and improve their decision making, customer orientation, and employee satisfaction.”

But recruiting a diverse team isn’t necessarily as easy as it seems. Even most organisations’ best efforts fall short of hiring for true workplace diversity. 

With that in mind here are our four tips for successfully recruiting for diversity. 

1. Look outside your networks

The traditional way businesses have worked was that people tended to recruit through personal networks, or if they didn’t, they tended to hire people just like themselves. If someone knew you or knew your friends, went to the same university as you or grew up in the same area, you could trust them, right?

One of the main problems with this is that unnecessarily limited the pool of talent available. This restricted the types of ideas and perspectives that came from employees. And that, in turn, restricted the number of people a business would appeal to. 

So, the first step in hiring for diversity is to look beyond your immediate networks. That means advertising publicly – or through an independent party – for any job vacancy.

2. Be objective

“A vast body of research shows that the hiring process is biased and unfair,” says the Harvard Business Review. That’s not just because hirers tend to favour people who think and act like themselves without even realising it, it’s also because they tend to be drawn to charisma rather than skill. The sweet-talker who performs well in an interview usually gets hired ahead of the more reserved – and often more competent – candidate.  

One way to help get around this is to create a list of attributes and skills you’re looking for in your new hire and to focus on these rather than on factors that don’t actually relate to how well someone is going to perform a job. 

If you’re carrying out the recruiting process internally, you should also try to pull together a diverse team of people to carry out the hiring process.

Better still, why not create your list of skills and attributes and then give it to someone external so that your own biases play no part in the recruitment process at all?

3. Go blind and hold a test

It’s not just in the job interview that bias can take hold. One place that it can often kick in – and reduce diversity in the workplace – is during the initial CV check. 

A way to get around this could be to have someone remove names and other obvious identifiers from applicants’ CVs before you do a cull. 

Even when you’ve narrowed it down, you don’t necessarily have to go straight to a face-to-face job interview. Depending on the type of role you’re hiring for, you could ask people to perform a work test or to provide a sample of something they’ve done. 

That way your first port of call will be on someone’s quality of work rather than on their background.      

4. Work on your own culture

Sometimes workplaces end up lacking diversity because the culture simply doesn’t attract people from various backgrounds or with different points of view. If that’s your organisation, you need to find ways to make your workplace more inclusive. 

Educate your employees on diversity and its merits and introduce diversity training for your managers. Set diversity goals and hold people to account for meeting them. Introduce workplace activities that appeal to a cross-section of people, not simply one narrow group. 

To make your workplace truly diverse, you need to look within as well as without.

Want more? 

You can read about how we recruit here at Catalina Consultants in this article.

Alternatively, if you’d like to know more about creating a more diverse workplace through your recruitment strategies, get in touch.

There is little doubt wage rises are coming in 2022. With inflation surging and the cost of living taking centre stage this federal election, there’s now little doubt your employees will be seeking a pay rise in 2022. However, a lot of business owners feel ill-equipped to deal with higher incomes, with some telling me they’re already losing staff to competitors willing to offer more.

That’s why I thought it was time to look at non-financial benefits, or what you can do when you can’t afford a pay rise.

Reduced hours/increased time off

If you can’t afford to pay someone more, what about asking them to work less? The opportunity to take more holidays, leave work earlier or have a Flexi day each fortnight holds real appeal for many employees. That means it could be a good way to keep them on board without needing to offer more money.

If you’re worried about the impact this might have on your business’s productivity, you don’t necessarily have to be. A comprehensive Icelandic study found that there was no reduction in an organisation’s level of service when its employees went from working five days a week to four days a week. In fact, many indicators of service provision and productivity actually rose. At the same time, employees’ happiness and well-being improved dramatically.

If you’re going to go down this path though, it helps to make sure that your employees actually want to work less. For some workers, cutting hours may feel like a demotion or backwards step in their career rather than a benefit.

Other flexible working options

It’s not just time off that many employees want, it’s also the opportunity to work autonomously. During the COVID lockdowns, many of us got very used to working our own way. We often also had the opportunity to fit in more time with our families, on hobbies and just generally looking after ourselves. Now, as things return to normal, it can be a difficult thing to go back to the feeling that we always need to be in the office.

By continuing to offer some degree of flexible working even after COVID, your workplace could continue to appeal to employees even without a pay rise – especially if competitors aren’t doing the same.

Providing recognition

One of the main things employees want out of their work is the recognition for a job well done or at least the feeling that they’re not being taken for granted.  Too many employers forget this and expect their employees to keep working their best and remaining loyal, without ever letting them know how much they mean.

Don’t fall into this boat. Make sure you tell your staff how much you value them even if you can’t afford to pay more. Throw after work drinks or regular dinners to celebrate their achievements and acknowledge how they contribute.

Career mapping

While some employees are tempted to move by a short-term windfall, many look to the longer term. If you can offer a genuine and fulfilling career path, they’ll have much more incentive to stay with you. This could be a good time to sit down with the staff you want to keep to find out exactly what they want from their careers and how you can help facilitate it. By following through, you’ll be giving them more reason to stay than just pay.

Know where you stand

Finally, before you say no to a pay rise, you need to do your homework and find out exactly where you stand. If your employees are covered by Awards or Agreements and these provide for a pay increase, you may have no option but to pay more.

You should also review your bottom line, to work out how much is coming in and what’s going out. If you find that you need to increase pay, it may be time to increase your prices…

Want more?

If you’d like to know more about how to get non-financial benefits work for your business, get in touch.