Queensland Leaders Update May 2022

On Thursday 12^th May, Ben and I attended the Queensland Leaders monthly event at Brisbane City Hall.

This time before getting stuck into the Expert Mentoring Sessions, Ben was tasked with delivering one of the three Industry Expert Workshops. He presented some great insights into the concept of Sustainable Culture and provided a quick but very useful Self Audit for the attendees to go through and find out where they sit against the parameters of a ‘Sustainable Culture‘. If you want to learn more about this, please read here.

Download our free Self Audit Sheet below.

The first mentoring session was with Katie and Tristan from Resurge Digital, we discussed some of the ‘growing pain’ challenges they were experiencing. The second session was pleasantly refreshing as we spoke with Kathryn and Mark Lang from Lang’s Gourmet about their manufacturing success story. They have fantastic boutique handmade sauces, jams, mustards, and relishes made of 100% Australian locally sourced ingredients! They shared with us that their products are about to get onto your Woolies shelves so keep an eye out!

Below are some of the common trends we have been experiencing with our clients, and we shared stories about them on the night.

Hybrid working

Unfortunately attracting and/or retaining talent without offering the flexibility to work from home a few days per week has become almost impossible. In our experience, hybrid working is achievable only where trust underpins the working relationship and the business has in place a HR Strategy, Employee Performance Framework and Management Action that is timely, consistent and documented.

Rising Salaries

Remuneration expectations have continued to grow since the beginning of the pandemic when border closures and high levels of uncertainty led to a significant shortage of talent available. We have had a surge in recruitment assignments since March this year and we believe there has been a 20-30% increase in salary expectations at all levels but particularly in the lower level shared functions such as accounts administration, marketing, sales administration, and service desk and HR. A junior person (recent graduate and/or someone with 1-2 years experience in the workforce) who was typically expecting a salary around $45,000-50,000 is now asking a minimum of $60,000 per annum, plus super!

Mental Health
Everyone knows the impact that the pandemic had on everyone globally. And everyone knows how it resulted in a spike in mental health problems. Our Senior Consultant and Mental Health Expert Clint Adams was interviewed on the topic by 4BC Station you can listen to what he said here.

What everyone is still trying to figure out is how to deal with employees who have mental health issues when you run a small business on limited resources – that fine balance between doing everything you can to support the individual and ensuring your business remains viable and continues to pay salaries, suppliers, bills, taxes, super and the rest that comes with it! Once again establishing a sustainable culture will come in handy in these circumstances but the key to a successful outcome is empathy above all!

We look forward to the June’s event!