AUSTRALIAN employers who are struggling to deal with the critical skills shortage must embrace flexible work options or lose significant competitive advantage, recent research claims.
AUSTRALIAN employers who are struggling to deal with the critical skills shortage must embrace flexible work options or lose significant competitive advantage, recent research claims.
In order for organisations to ‘leapfrog’ their competitors, the research found that they must actively attract and support the growing number of employees who value a balance between work and life.
“Given the critical skills shortage, the imminent ageing workforce and declining birth rates, the current battle being waged to gain the best talent will have serious implications for the long-term competitiveness of organisations,”said Anne Hatton, CEO of Hudson Australia/New Zealand, which commissioned the research.
“In short, attracting, securing and retaining the best talent will be the most important business issue over the next 20 years, and those organisations that don’t embrace flexible work policies to expand their talent pool will be overtaken by more forward-thinking competitors.”
Work/life balance practices can improve the ‘employee experience’, and the research paper found such practices can help organisations gain access to previously untapped talent such as working mothers, part-time workers, carers and mature age workers.
“In the first year of operation of a six-week maternity leave scheme, Westpac Bank experienced a drop in the resignation rate of women on maternity leave from 40.6 per cent to 17.0 per cent,” the research paper said.
It also highlighted an established link between flexible work options and a reduction in turnover. The cost of staff turnover for Australian businesses is significant, as highlighted in a recent study by global firm Ernst & Young, which found that turnover costs in client service roles average 150 per cent of a departing employee’s annual salary.
According to the research paper, organisational culture plays a key role in the uptake of flexible work/life balance options. Some of the key barriers include: a lack of managerial support; perception of negative career consequences; expectations of the need to work long hours; perceptions that work/life policies are only for women; and resentment from co-workers.
The paper provided a number of recommendations to employers for making work/life balance a reality, such as: acknowledging that employees whose work and personal lives are balanced bring significant flow-on benefits for organisations; changing the perception within the organisation that visibility equals productivity; recognising that employees need to view their work as personally meaningful; ensuring that the actual ‘employee experience’ is consistent with formal policies; and adopting a give and take philosophy.
