Workforce Management – The path to labour cost savings through optimisation

Kylie: [00:00:00] Hi, guys. Hello, everybody. Welcome to today's webinar. We apologize for the delayed start. We were having some technical issues with Zoom, which seemed to be crashing on us, but we're very happy to have you joining us right now. My name is Kylie Spear, and I am delighted to be your host today. Welcome to today's Workforce Management. The Path to Labor Cost Savings through Optimization webinar brought to you by the Access group and HRD. Our intention for today's webinar is for it to be as beneficial and interactive as possible. So just a couple of housekeeping items to begin with. You will notice there are a number of polls incorporated in today's presentation as well as a Q&A session at the very end. I'd like to encourage you all to please participate in the polls and to submit as many questions as you'd like via the Q&A function. Your questions can be anonymous, or if you'd like a shout out, feel free to include your name and organization too. And lastly, just a reminder that today's webinar is being recorded and it will be emailed to you all after its conclusion. The aim of today's webinar is to help you to better understand the mechanics of proactive and compliant rosters, employee scheduling, accurate time and attendance practices, and the need to enhance your workforce to bring out the best in your business. The Access Group is one of the leading providers of business management software to midsize organizations in the UK, Ireland and Asia Pacific. Access People and Payroll Solutions are designed to optimize your most valuable asset, your people, and deliver accurate, compliant and timely payroll every pay cycle, regardless of business size, organizational structure, industry, or complexity of pay conditions. Taking the helm of today's webinar is Roy Mellon, the founder and managing director of Workforce Management and payroll software company Access Definitiv, previously known as Definitiv in the Market. In 2021, Access Definitiv became part of the global software company, the Access Group, and Roy continues to lead the strategic growth of Access Definitiv throughout the Asia Pacific region. Before running a business, Roy's career began within the payroll teams of large enterprises, and he very well understands the frustrations. Payroll and HR personnel can experience when it comes to managing and coordinating large and complex workforces. This was a major motivation for Roy to start access Definitiv to empower his peers with better tools to tackle workforce management outside of access. Definitiv Roy heavily invests his time in the charities and causes he supports. Since 2021, Roy has been a non-executive director for Variety, WA and as a retired veteran. Roy also works closely with a number of veteran focus organizations, including the Prince's Trust Australia Working Spirit and the General Sir Horatio Bell Foundation. Thank you so much, Roy, for being here. It's so great. We've actually got everyone logged on. I'll now hand over to you to begin today's presentation. 

Roy: [00:03:21] Excellent. Thank you very much, Kylie, and welcome everyone across the country and across Asia Pacific. So it's great to be here and apologies again for the technical difficulties. Being a tech company. It's not often that we have that, but it's also very embarrassing when we do. So I'm going to take you through today a generic presentation and a snapshot of how we look at workforce management as the access group and how we help our customers optimize those cost savings, which is the topic for today. Okay. So when we go through the presentation, just to understand where some of our data comes from, the access group basically supports in excess of now 15% of the working population here in Australia alone. We know we're a very, very large organization, including products like the micro pay, we've got the wages at Definitiv fast track, so we've got many products in our suite and our portfolio and this is where our data comes from. We're going to produce to show you some of the statistics and hopefully be quite interactive with some of the polls today. So let's kick this off. So to first understand, I guess, the landscape about workforce management in today's generation and workforce that we work in, you know, we all know about Fair Work. Now with Fair Work, you know, it's a big part of business nowadays. So it is all about trying to keep, you know, the organizations, the C-suite, protect the directors and officers from ending up on the media for the wrong reasons. So what we see here with these statistics is, you know, there's still a very large portion of people accessing, obviously, the Web to access their work to understand their working rights. Now, why this is so important is understanding what this actually costs, not only the government, but you as an organization, when you do happen to go through the Fair Work Commission, when there is a dispute with someone leaving the organization. So to understand this now, this is a government body, you know, that came in back in 2009 when Labor first came back into power. But as of last financial year, the government supported $82 million to fund Fair Work. So it's a very big contribution to a government agency, basically to keep employers honest and also employees to have a channel to speak to. So with this, you know, you can see with these statistics 5.7 million of website hits. Now, that's a considerable amount. Now, there's no one here in HR Payroll that actually thinks modern awards are simplified from what they said. You know, coming down to the 122 modern awards, they are very complex. And back in the day, we all know they used to change once a year. Now it's changing on such a high frequency basis, it can literally be a few times a month depending on what court cases go through and then what rulings will come from those decisions. So it's very important to understand. Now, the reason we cover this is to understand what's actually the trends and happening in the market now with education, both in social media platforms. You know, I'm sad I subscribed to Fair Work on my own social media platforms. But again, this is where knowledge and information comes from of how Fair Work is trying to reach to your employees and educate them about what minimum conditions they're entitled to. So with that, you know, out of all those five plus million hits on the website, you know, it's just over 12,000 was actually in hearings and conferences held. Now, that's not too bad when you consider the working population, but obviously that's costing the government and us all taxpayers, you know, 82 million to run 12,000 plus actual formal complaints. So that's down slightly from last financial year, but over half of the decisions are actually settled at the point of mediation. Now you think, well, that's a pretty good average, not locking up the courts for it. However, the scary number here is what it costs you as an employer. Now, basically, anyone can obviously go to Fair Work and put in a complaint predominantly under the high income threshold. Okay. So being the mass population that will go to Fair Work, now that's costing on average $8,285 per settlement claim. So that's a considerable amount. So sometimes someone's taking you to fair work because it could just be simple as they believe they should be entitled to an extra day, some extra penalties based on the level of notice. It could be as simple as that as the complaint. But that's costing us employ on average $8,285. And this data is all available on the, it's called the transparency portal from the Australian Government. But the last data, which is very odd, being the transparency portal, was only updated for the last financial year being 2019. So very, very ordinary about the transparency there. But why that's important is a lot of employers will fight and at the end of the day, the larger you are as an employer, let's be honest, employees will know that you've got the money to pay. Okay, generally speaking. So you need to be aware you as an organization how you are represented in the community, because regardless whether you're right or wrong, there is going to be a settlement that will come from Fair Work and there is a decision made now on the rarity employers with. And that's the sad truth, you know, so there's always going to come down to a settlement because it's just going to cost you too much to actually take this through the courts or the monetary value of the employee. So it is important to do that when you are negotiating, if you are in the seats and you're negotiating. Heading back to the C-suite on how you resolve a dispute. You need to be commercial about it because the average of the $8,000 for the settlement is the value of settlement, not your time spent on it. So again, if you factor in that cost, it really rakes up very quickly on what an average claim will take you in so cost. So again, this is where you start moving through and you start understanding all these pieces that will cover today. And this is only a small snippet given that we've we're going to try to cover this in about 50 minutes of some of the areas that is material to the organization. Now, when we deep dive in, what are the complaints? Unfair dismissal. Takes the cake. Okay. Everyone knows. You know, generally speaking, if you are in hate jar, some people do feel that they've been let go. Unfair, unfairly so it is important to have good processes in place and make the technology that you have in the workplace the enabler to make sure you got the transparency from an employee and organization level. Today's world we now live in is about covering you as an organization. Had the conversation with that individual. You know, the he says she says kind of comments doesn't fly when it gets into a courtroom. So it is very important that you now start documenting those processes as you lead up to letting people go or people's performance in organizations. Because you can see it's the highest number one complaint that goes to Fair Work. Rights of entry is an important one as well, even though it comes in the in the top five. But, you know, unionized workforces, you know, the right of entry rule. You refuse you know, unions lodge a complaint and again it's cost. It locks you up as an employer in negotiations for letting the unionized sites do it. So, again, it is very important you see that agreements and approvals, these are enterprise agreements and all of those kinds of things, very important factors because they're still quite hot in the market that employers still lean on, you know, to try to simplify how we pay people by using ease, etc.. So that's only dropped slightly. But the unfair dismissal has dropped quite considerably compared to last financial year. And the reason for that, according to the Fair Work Commission report, is the education piece that Fair Work's been doing both on social media and updating their website with what is unfair dismissal. Now we're going to move into something that's completely different than talking about the Fair Work Commission. Okay. So when we look at technology and organization, a lot of employers since COVID has been the number one agenda on people's boards. What is the technology roadmap to protect the organization as we now live in a workforce that is basically remote for most organizations. So when we look at technology replacements now these can be things like a CRM, it can be an ERP, it can be obviously payroll, workforce management, time and attendance solutions. There's lots of company products that impact your workforce. Now, the common thread when you see technology get introduced into the workplace is the instant, I guess, part on the business case that's always copied. Paste Which is cost savings. Okay, introduce technology. I'm going to get a cost savings here. Now that's great, the great buzzwords, but it's how do you measure the cost savings. But the cost savings is going to come from the utilization of these technologies. Now, you're going to see as we move through the slides, that the technology is quite an important factor about understanding what kind of generations you have in your workplace and what I mean by generations from you, Gen Z to your baby boomers. Now, when we look at our Gen Z, in your baby boomers, everyone knows if I got almost to my workplace in West Perth and I live an hour away from the office and I realize I left my phone at home, I'll probably drive home and go get my phone. I'd rather be late to work to go get my phone because I've got to fill up. I'm going to miss out on something important on social media. But that is the world we live in. Now, the great thing is, you know, with modern cars, as soon as you get in it, you know, if you've got your phone because Pay and Android Pay doesn't work. So it is today's technology. Now, we all know the two major platform is Apple and Google Play or Android. So they are the two platforms that we use the statistics on. And why this slide is very important is when you introduce company products into your organization and you expect the employees to use it on their personal device or even a business device, if you're fortunate enough to have a company phone or company iPad and stuff like that is you have to make sure it is enough for those generations to use it. So if you've got an aging workforce, so in aged care, the average age is a lot higher than something in retail. So you've got to understand the demographics of what you're buying with, because if it's too complicated in the technology or it's clunky, it's old, people won't use it. It's as simple as that. You can have the best technology, but people won't use it. So when you look at technology, the important factor we would say to a customer is make. Or an app available on Apple Store or the Google Play Store. Because most people like to use an app because it uses your face ID to let you in. So you're not remembering the username and password. You know, when you get a new phone, it automatically installs it back in everything from the cloud. It's to user experience is the number one thing here. People forget that the project management of implementing the software is a transactional piece. The change management is the critical one to the success for your business case. Now when we look at generations of the users buy sets, you know, you can see here, you know, 40% of females will use an app compared to the 60% amount. Now is that because there's more males in the workplace than females? Yes, that is a fact. Okay. Now, but it's interesting to see the demographics. Also, when you're looking at technology, you can see iOS or Apple is a bigger usage than Android, despite Android always being most dominant that devices that people use. So it's interesting when you look at it because it is important to understand when someone says it to mobile app versus can I find it on the App Store. Now it's other little things you can do when you're looking at this in the workplace is to understand developers. So like the access group that develops technology across all our portfolios, we can't hide from any customer review on the App Store. So it is important to understand how often is that supplier updating their software. You know, it's great to hear from salespeople that we're innovating and we're doing all the great things, but what is the reality to it? Because the last thing you want is software that's not getting innovated. So Apple's just launched iOS six then. Now unfortunately, it's software developers. That's expensive. Every time there's a new operating system that comes out. So you've got to make sure your product is compatible with that new phone. Because what happened, the first thing that Apple introduced is that Gen Z and Gen Y are lining up to get the new Apple iPhone. Okay? So you need to make sure your business product will still work on those devices. So it's those little pieces that you in hate charge or in parallel need to understand. It's not just a product about what you have to work with, it's about your workforce. So we look at the age groups. It's no secret, right? Anything under 25. The glued to the phone. And also, you know, you can still see that the 35 to 44 still huge uptake. Now, yes, you know, getting over 65, it's a lower uptake on mobile usage. You know, the reality is it's a smaller part of the population in the workforce at that age group. So that also weighs into the statistics. But you can't assume that if again, if you've got an old demographic industry and you've got older generation, you do need to make the technology easy enough that they know how to use. And simple things will say to a customer is, okay, it's great that we've got technology out there that can scan your finger veins instead of fingerprints. Know that's been kicking on ten plus years at technology. But, you know, people nowadays are concerned, well, what happens to my identity? You know, there's court cases that's still going on about an employee has the right to say, I don't want to use the fingerprint reader, I don't want to use face detection in the workplace. You've seen it with Bunnings. It's been in the media for those wrong reasons. With the cameras, they thought great technology had no hands involved on touching it. You just walk into the premises again. This causes company policies to be updated. And also we have working rights of privacy now that we have to deal with. So we have to understand these changes. When we look at technology, how does it impact the workforce and again, understanding demographics. So I've put this little guide up. So again, if you're not sure what generation you belong to, have a quick look here because we're going to start using the slides to break it into these categories as we move through. Now, if you do have questions and one thing we should mention, please put it in the chat, because at the end of this, we're going to answer as many questions as we can and anything we can't, we will reply back after the presentation as well as provide the recording to you guys. All right. So now we've seen the generations. This is an interesting one. The average age group based on sex is 41, so females are living a living the life here. You know, at the average age of 41 versus the males at 43 and unspecified at 45. Okay. So that's the average across our full portfolio. And when we did this just on the Definitiv client base, just under 100,000 users, again, that's how we got to these data. All right. So we talked about the workplace. So what is the gender diversity split as we look here by sex? And again, you can see males are the dominant workforce and the reality is covering 62% of the workforce. So important to understand, you know, we're not the sharpest tools are males when it comes to technology. So, again, we need it to be simple. We need it to be easy. We hate reading instructions, let's be honest. So again, it's important to understand what your generation is in your workplace because this all comes together when you start seeing the cost and you'll see it in a moment. So again, that's just to break it down. I'm sure that's not going to come to a surprise. The Gen Z is going to be our new baby boomers, Gen Y, Z, new Gen X and Gen Z. God help us all. But they're coming through, right? So you can't prevent it. It's common. So again, it's adapting to the workforce that's upon us. All right. This is a really interesting one. So when we look at the average hours worked by generation. All right. Who was surprised that the males. Okay, I told you we weren't the sharpest tool. So it takes us a little longer a day to get the same outcome you females need. Alright. So again, you can see our average hours is 9.6, 4 hours. Now, when we look at this data, it's also interesting to understand we're not very dominant in one industry over the other. This data was looked at over 30 different industries in our portfolio. So again, it gives you a great average and also benchmark. So other independent reports that say the big four have done. Has Done all those kind of firms. Okay. So it is a very accurate baseline to understand. Now why is this important? You know, if you've got a waste type of workforce, you know, you generally speaking, you're paying by the hour. Okay. It's quite important to understand that versus an annualized salary white collar industry where generally speaking, you're capped at your annualized salary, excluding all the things to do with outer limits. Okay. Now why is that important? So we've got costs associated to that. We've also got fatigue management that gets kicked into place. So when insurances are looking at this, it's not just looking at the dollar value of your pay. Now nowadays it's looking at the fatigue management element of what your culture is. Now, when we talk about culture, that can drive many things in a workplace that drives utilization, that can drive your turnover and its cost, and you're going to see this on slides as we move through. There's big cost as we start turning over employees on average. Okay. So, again, it is important to understand how do we get to the 1 to 2% of the labor cost savings without actually making people redundant? Okay. The easiest thing, you know, the old school mentality is, well, we'll just make people redundant. We'll get the 1 to 2% of labor costs. Yeah, that's great. If you've got old dead wood and you know you're not a growing business. That's certainly a mechanism to use. However, in most cases we all know anything we go order. So your own, your own businesses or even things that we deal with on a day to day basis. Everyone's got a backlog. No one has enough resources. So we're going. People are picking up additional hours. And it's important to understand what that means for your business, because if we all rewind pre-COVID and what we thought was the baseline in the globe of hours, this average hours has actually spiked compared to pre-COVID days. Okay. Why? Because we work from home. People can jump onto the computer now at 630, save a commute of an hour. But that's still in the mentality. I'll just finish it normally at five. Okay. But they've actually picking up extra hours. And this is where hate is getting in trouble, because if you're not capturing the real hours, people are working. When you have people on annualized salaries, that's where you have the leakage on the outer limits because you're not realizing they're doing more than the contractual hours outside the reasonable additional overtime. Okay. So again, everything starts to come together and makes more sense. All right. So as we move through, so we look, I went back inside the average user service. Why is this important for saving costs. Okay. This is important for your long service life. Okay. That's the number one thing in Australia. So Australia is still kicking on with long service leave. And let's be honest, we could barely agree. Daylight savings in this country. So it's not going away. Long service leave, but long service leave was originally actually for those who don't know, was actually invented in Australia for people to go back to the motherland in the UK on ship. Okay, so they could have a break and because it took so long to get back and that's what long service life was for. Now what is long service leave now being recognized as years of service. You've done, you've done your ten years. Thank you so much. Here's your actual 8.67 weeks or whatever it is, per your state or territory. So when we look at this, if you're an ASX company, you're reporting your financials to your shareholders, Okay. Now, this doesn't just immune to a listed entity's global or domestic, but this is where people can get in trouble. So if you don't understand your demographic on your your workplace, you might be provisioning too much of your long service leave accrual, which is ruining your profit line, which ruins your share price. Okay, let's be honest. You don't make money. Your share price is not going to look great unless you're Tesla. And you know how to make a market cap out of no profit. So but that's on the territory, the unicorns, right? So what's important is the C-suite needs to understand what is my age is a service by generation, because that's going to give me the vision of what's reality for my business, not an average on what's in the market. That's irrelevant because your culture might be burnt and turn your staff. You know, if you're in labor hire or you've got younger generation workforces, you know, your turnover is naturally going to be higher. So the industries would dictate that, you know, pace workers versus retail their high turnover organizations. So your provisions for your long service leave doesn't need to be there. Okay. So it is important to understand that generally speaking, you know, we've all got the accounting standards and it's not to go into too much financials, but again, you need to understand what worked for your business, how you justify it to the auditors and those kind of things. It also links into a lot of wellness plans. So a lot of organizations, it's all about retention of employees now. So it's great to come up with company policies to say, okay, well if you stay for five years, you get you get a black ten, that's great, but the population might be 2%, so it looks great on paper, but the reality is you're not having that workplace stay there. Okay? So you're not actually rewarding anyone at that point in time. So you've got to start looking at how do your benefits that you introduce into the Organisation for Retention now actually corresponds to your years of service. Okay. And again, understand your generations understand the data. Sorry whole time. Okay, so the polls are going to come up and the poll is about which sex takes the most sexually. Let's see what happens here. I just remember. I'm going to get unsure even though I know the answer. Right. And we got the results there, Kylie. 

Kylie: [00:28:03] We do. Roy Well, the results of the poll. There you go. So our respondents have said female, 50% unsure, which I think you were going for with 16 and males, 34%. Is that. How close are they to the to the to the research that you have? 

Roy: [00:28:22] Yeah. That is really interesting. All right. Sorry. We think the females are the weakest link. Well, those people are wrong, so let's kick it. 

Kylie: [00:28:32] There you go. 

Roy: [00:28:33] So on average, now they are accounting for 62% of all personnel, even a business. Now, of course, the male population is higher, right? But it is consistent. When you look at the male population for female, it is a consistent percentage between the 37 and 62. But here's what's interesting. Why generation? We get a sniffle, we're out, right? You know, we account for that utilization. We want to be out on sick leave right now. We if you could see there, that's 26.55% in males versus 16.9% for Gen Y in the female category. Now, what's also very interesting, females like to take personal leave on Tuesday versus males gets the hump day Wednesday and we like to take it off right now. Why is that important? Okay, so this is important from the labor cost point of view is depending on your workplace will determine, you know, if you've got like teachers, for example, and you've got relief staff coming through or casual workplaces, you need to understand what that does to your labor costs. Now, what I mean by that is we all know we get ten days per year. Whether you're full time or part time, you still get your ten days. Okay. Now, with those ten days. If you're in a workplace, in accounting, generally speaking, that works. Waiting for you to get back. Okay. Or someone else in your team is picking that work up. But if I'm in manufacturing and I'm making, you know, pies, you know, those production lines can't stop. They can't turn off. If I'm on a mine site, they can't turn off. So those kind of things need to keep still turning. So what happens? You're either calling casuals to cover that labor cost to keep the machine turning, or you use external contractors. And again, there's cost utilization, and you'll be amazed how many people don't look at it from that at length, because that is real leakage, real cost. And here's a little fun fact. Every year over the last let's call it ten years in business, we've always paid for our staff to get a flu vaccination. So we get the nurse in, jab everyone in the way. We've got minimal cost to the business to to provide that benefit. Now, one year we forgot to organize that. So we went, Oh, well, it's a bit late in the flu season, don't worry about it. When we looked at our data and our trends that sickly that year spike through the roof three times higher than we had on average, all for the sake of less than 30 bucks, you haven't paid when they are. So one person taken personally was the cost of that whole exercise and we spike three. Now, that hurt us, right? That hurt us that season because our business can't stop. We've still got to support the clients we still got to implement. So our utilization took a hit. So then what we had to do was then we had to get our existing staff to pick up that work. So again, what that cost us over time. So again, you start seeing the trend here is you've got to understand how you can and how to put benefits in place. You know, for simple things like a flu vaccination, we saw in the COVID period, a lot of employers knew what the cost of personal life will do to their business. So when you got COVID, so we saw a lot of corporate organizations that I used to work corporates because they're the ones that had the bigger wallets at that time that paid incentives for people to go get the double vaccination. Okay. Huge spot, right? We were thinking once all these little incentive increases going through because they went, it is cheaper for me to pay $500 for someone to go get a double their double vaccination then for them to be off. Okay, isn't that crazy? When you start looking at the data from that different lens and you see how they do it? So it is very, very important to understand that that trend and all that. Now I know why people would have probably said female carers leave. Okay, when you deep dive into the data of females, when you compare it to males, females are always the higher proportion is not actually sickly, it's carers. Okay. So again, understanding families, right? Who's the one that's actually going to pick up the child when they're sick? Okay. So again, it impacts work because you need to understand what your front line is delivering the utilization to your business. All right. The other one annual leave that everyone loves to type who didn't think Friday was going to be the most common day off. Okay, So again, both generations, both generations and sex always lives for adults. So, again, it's a clear winner across the board. Who doesn't like a long weekend? But why is it important? Look at this again. Gen Y wants that twenty day. They want time off. They want to get on that cruise ship. They want to go on the beach. So it is very, very important to understand the trends and pattern of who's actually going to be there around Christmas when you start doing your workforce planning because you're probably not counting on y gen here again. Okay, we're winning in the wrong way. So again, it is important to understand the data. What does it mean to your organization when you start mapping out your planning? Okay. So again, very, very important because if you don't understand this, you'll see it in the next few slides. What it does to your business from the PNL point of view. Okay. So as we move forward, the leave taken. Okay. So leave taken in days. Why this is so, so important to understand this recipe here. So on average, we've got here 9.84 days by females of annual leave and 12.7 of personally sorry from males. Now, we all know it's 20 days a year that we're getting here. Okay. So I did some little numbers here to try be a bit scientific. So on average, taking the females and males, that equates to 11.29 days on average of annual leave taken in your business regardless of sex. So that's an 8.71 carry over on your balance sheet. Okay. What does that mean, Liability to the business? Okay. So and again, personally liability to the business you're carrying over 5.76. Very important because some organizations don't actually. Most organizations, I should say, won't provision for personally unless there's a reason to pay it out. But it's a utilization cost and an impact. So now we look at this and we look at we're going to look at a slide for the average rate of what employees get paid. Okay. But not to be a spoiler, but the average rate and for those who have Googled it before, read the report. It's $46.36 on turn out is the average right, regardless of generation or or sex. Okay. So if we use that same basis and we say, right, take that 8.71, does this go down to 7.6, our date being the 38 hour week on average. So 66 hours we're going to carry over every year. That equates to $3,069 a year of every single individual. Now, our average sized customer in our portfolio is 500 employees on average. I rounded it down to 500 on average. So what does that do to the business? That's a 1.5 mil carry that you've done by just rolling the anniversary. Okay. So, yeah, 1.5 mil on that sized workforce. Now, on an average, the size workforce of 500 employees, on average, your wage goes, roughly speaking, 45 million. Okay. So, again, to understand what that's doing, that's already half a percent of your cost that you can save of that 1%. So you're halfway there by just looking at annual leave and you haven't even looked at the personal life already. So you see, by just looking at these major factors, this is where your cost savings is. Too many people look at it in isolation with the blinkers on. They will look at it and go, okay, well, the boss told me I need to save cost, so I'm going to make this person part time. So I saved a grand here. I saved $500 a year. That's not going to move a needle when you're paying all your wage bills  $45 million. It's just not going to do it. But if you shift the culture and go, okay, I can't afford to carry over one and a half million dollars a year by doing nothing. Right. Just following general behavior. So we've seen policies and the access group were very big into love, work, love life. So one of our incentives to ask all our staff members hours is these wellness days. So our wellness days came up with this policy and said, right, we expect everyone to take the 20 days a year. And for you doing that, you'll get an extra five days a year. So 25 days off or the easiest way to look at it is you basically get a month off the year 11, 11 months utilization is how we got to it. Okay. Now, that sounds awesome, but what does that do? Now you start taking 25 days off your utilization. And right now the average is 11 days on average. Someone's taking you're asking them to take nine days to get to the 20 plus another five out of the business. So how many more resources do I need to now cater for that? So these policies can't be done just by hate jar. It needs to be worked with finance and operation people because what does it do? It impacts utilization. If everyone just took 25 days off. In a perfect world, that would be amazing. You know, you would have such a high pace workplace because everyone will be very charged. But sometimes you've got to be realistic of what do you do to allow for those benefits to be incurred. But what it has done is it has shifted. Our culture is our motto from our founder is love, work, love, life. So we want people to be recharged. We want utilization. So our sick leave has dropped because people are recharged. They're not burnt out. So while it's on paper, in theory, it's hurting us, but it's not. It's actually giving us a better utilization and a better service to our customers because we haven't got burnt out staff. So it is interesting when you look at it because you can do all this data and analytics on the piece of paper, but what is the moving needle in your business? Personally. We've seen here what the average day is off in the previous slide is. But again, we can see here, Miles, we get the sniffle. We're always off. Right. But again, we're taking 60% of the personal leave entitlement. So, again, if you multiply, you've got a workplace of permanent employees, 500 employees, and then you suddenly take five days of utilization out plus your 20 days of annual leave that you're expecting. Or if we're just using all averages, we're still getting close to 20 days of utilization of an employee on average not working in the business. So again, there's no mutual movement. It's just an entitlement they're entitled to. And again, that impacts you. So you have to understand what budgets do. I need to put behind casuals if that's a requirement or contractors. Very, very important to understand that. So and also why this is important. When you carry balances over most organizations, generally speaking, and I'm generalizing, this would do a salary once a year, especially of late in the last couple of years, because no one can get people. One of the simplest ways is to just pay more and I'll retire. Okay. Not that it's a long term strategy, but certainly a short term strategy for many organization. So suddenly the average CPI in the last 12 months from June, so June to July last year was 6.1%. That's $93,000 on that average of using that 1.5 mil list. Again, all you've done is just introduce your salary increases of 6% on average. Now, if you've got enterprise agreements, what do people forget? All those agreements, whether it's three years, five years, whatever the negotiation period is, has fixed salary increases in it. They need to be part of your model when you're looking at it. Okay. They're very, very important to understand the trends and what the impact is to the business because people just look too much on face value of going, okay, well, ten days, but we probably only have people take on average two days. That might be correct, but understand what that does. We used to see a big trend in people paying out personally. So whatever you don't use, you get back at basically a savings plan bonus or being really healthy kind of employee. The theory is great, but the reality is it hurts the business even more in some organizations because people are sick, but they know that they're relying on that funds to be paid for their bonus or Christmas, so they'll come to work sick and make other people sick. So again, it becomes a ripple effect of what you try to do as a benefit, as an incentive sometimes ends up in as a consequence to the organization that hurts you more. So just be conscious of how you package these things together and what is actually the motive of what you're trying to achieve here. All right. It's poll time again. Okay, So this is a really interesting one. Do you believe the salary gap is closing between the sexes? Okay, so. You know, there's a lot of contentious over this. Some of you won't be surprised by the number. But it is very important also to understand. I'm going to also pretend. I don't know. And I know Kylie's sitting there going, I wonder if I'm going to get a pay increase. I can see it. 

Kylie: [00:43:09] I think I know the answer too. Let's see what our attendees think. We're getting there. Well, we can see the. Here we go. It's no 68% clear Winner. No. Isn't that a. 

Roy: [00:43:26] Winner? Yeah. 

Kylie: [00:43:28] I'm sure. Yes, 20. 

Roy: [00:43:32] So here we go. Now no one get upset, okay? Because this is unfortunately the reality to the numbers. This is real numbers. Now, when we look at these numbers and how do we get to these pirates? Because some people go, Oh, that's insulation. I did the same, which is that's a high pay rate. Now, I don't know how accurate this data is. The way we've done the data is we've taken the data on payments. So what do you physically pay to someone? And then we've divided everything equally by 38. Okay. 38 hours a week to get to the hourly rate. Okay. So we had to normalize it somewhere down the line. So we've taken obviously 38 hours and we brought everyone back. Whatever is the total value you get paid in a year. Divide that by 52, divide that by 38. There's our hourly rate. Okay, so not a perfect site, but that is exactly the averages there. So when you look at this, as I mentioned, a total average is $46.36. So just over $90,000, which was very close to the ATO report. So ours was like 91,000. This was like just under 90. And everyone went, That's ridiculous. Don't believe it. But the reality. Now, what's very scary about this stat is from Gen Z. Look at the difference already. Okay. That's a workplace coming in now. So, you know, our sons, our daughters come into the workplace. Females are already penalized already at that age before. You've even moved up. So it is really interesting to see now. I've yet to meet a person going into equipment saying, okay, I've got two candidates, male females. Wow. The males, the females are going to be cheaper. Never heard that from a conversation point of view, but the data is very clear. Okay, so why is this important? So a lot of organizations will put it out on social media, the closed end of gender diversity, all of that. But the reality is do the exercise, see what the reality is and how you actually shifting it, because the Gen Z is the scary one for me because I go, how can you have such a big difference at such a young age already in discrimination? You know, we understand that. Sure. As you move into Gen Y as a Gen X, you know, most of the Gen Y's, you know, having babies, leaving the workplace, coming back to a couple of years behind on salary increases, sure. But doesn't make sense in Gen Z. So again, you can't use those same arguments. So but it is important when you start modeling out what does a workplace look like? You know, if we hear constantly people going through growth mode in the business and again, if you know what the demographics of attraction is. So you know, you always attract, particularly Gen Y, it's an attractive business from that point or not. We generally get more the Gen X understand what the average is going to cost you when you're doing your modeling, because it is very important to also benchmark this slide to how your business is operating and obviously understanding your industry Now, industries will be miles apart. We did this same slide on government clients. We've got a lot of government clients in our portfolio and that was absolute mind boggling to see the difference in salaries compared to the corporate world. We also did it with non for profits compared to corporate wealth. Again, huge disadvantage being in government and not for profits. Okay. So it is very interesting and you know, it can be a hot topic, but again, hopefully you understand the reality now is this is the real data. So why is this next slide so important? Okay. The rest of the world, as many of you know that's been in the air space, payroll space basically pays monthly. Okay. Australia and New Zealand were quite unique. We kick on, obviously we're very unique. Australia, we love weekly. Okay. It's a very legacy thing. It's not and it's the thing that still kick in on nearly 15%. So why this is important? Okay, so the ATO came out and they just broke it into three categories. Okay, so the industry standards actually from the STP, the ATO, and saying basically 44% of the workplace is on weekly, 40% fortnightly and monthly at 14%. So it is very different to US statistics, but obviously the ATO can see a lot more data across the total workforce in Australia. So why is this important? If you as an organization are looking at outsourcing your payroll? You know, the thing we always say to a customer, you know, when people say, Oh, can we get a discount, right? Our first reaction with tongue in cheek is okay. Weekly we'll go to fortnightly. Are you ready? You've already saved half the cost because outsourcing, generally speaking, is charged per patient, generally speaking, as the way the industry works. So why is this important when you go through a negotiation, especially with enterprise agreements, get off weekly because the burden that you're doing to the business is not just to the payroll department and HR department, it's to operations as well, because then they have to do their approvals more often. They have to make sure things are up to date, that you start seeing non utilization time spent on ADM. Okay. But why put the hassle of going weekly? There is lots of technologies out there for those who live, pay by pay where they can borrow instantly through the apps and it only costs an ATM fee to get a payment in the vet. Now I'll say that's a great culture, but there is a lot of technologies that mitigates that admin burden. Also, the cost savings it provides to the business by getting in, you're never going to get, generally speaking, a blue collar industry on a monthly pay. You'll get your corpus, but you're not going to get your enterprise agreements, but you 100% can get them to a fortnightly. You just got to know your negotiation skills. Okay. Weekly Look, it's a dying one. People do want people off weekly, but sometimes people say, well, that's an attraction to the to the workforce that I have into my business. So they love to be paid weekly. Now, the common theory there is all my taxing is different. Taxing is no. On any tie cycle. It's all been worked out by the ATO and the payroll software. So that's don't even acknowledge those kind of debates. It's all the same taxing. You get the same money in net cash at the end of the month, regardless of pay cycle. So it is important just to understand why when you do negotiations with enterprise agreements, try and get them off weekly ideally and get them to fortnightly, you know, monthly, obviously even easier. Okay. Now, fortnightly from a finance point of view, it can be a pain because you've got accruals where they fall over the month or fall short on a month. But again, they're just little admin burdens. Technology can automate that stuff, but the cost savings here is all about if you're outsourcing to I get off weekly because it's going to be cheaper negotiations and burden for the overheads or the the admins and the management less because you're only doing that once a fortnight, but every week. So just ponder that as you go through it. All right. We'll move forward before we run out of time. So terminations versus hires, why this is important is to understand what it costs to basically have staff turnover. Okay. So a report was done and announced the average cost was 5500 last year, last financial year, Australian dollars to onboard a new employee, and that was physical cost, not utilization depending on the occupation and what it takes to onboard someone in our business, minimum of 3 to 6 months on average to get someone to the level that we expect them to be at before they touch a client we call it. So again, our turnover, if we're just losing people, it's a huge impact to existing staff because you're carrying load not for all but the person. It's good to go. It's I've got the person now I've got to cut my utilization down to train that new person. So when you start looking at your turnover report, that's the way you should be looking at. It is, okay, you want to keep the average. So an average percentage in the industry is currently 21% last year, like last financial year of staff turnover. So that's ask a suitable 20% of your workforce is new faces basically leaving and coming into the business. Now you can see here an uptick in female hires compared to terminations. So people have probably seen the data now going well, females are just more reliable. So again, you know, you've seen the uptake. I don't think that's a fact, but in the sense in that way. But again, you can see an uptick that females are coming back into the workplace as new incentives are trying to get people into the workplace. And also older generations, as you've seen with the government, there's incentives there to get them back into the workplace to deal with the skills shortage. So that is important when you look at it, the cost of the new hire versus losing an employee. Now, when you look at this data, there is our move to that next slide. Why are people leaving organizations again after resignations? Right. It's the resignation city at the moment where people are just going, Wow, I'm just offered so much more cash to go there and they'll leave it as a nation. So it's gone up 3.74% just in the financial year dismissals. So that's an interesting one that's really spiked. Okay. That's a lot to spike in dismissals if you look at the trend over time. So, again, companies are now going, right. We're not going to tolerate this. You know, we're going to move people on to not meeting the benchmark requirements. Okay. And when you see redundancies again, you saw a huge spike. Obviously, COVID was still hot. Redundancies were hot. And then it's it's come off now. So redundancies because let's be honest, you can't get people. So why would you be making people redundant? So again, you can see that's come down. Resignations have gone up. So. Okay. So very, very important to understand your business and how that impacts because it all comes back to how do we save you that 1 to 2% of your labor costs. Okay. There's going to be culture change. There's going to be technology improvements in the organization. But the key one here, you've got to understand the data to understand the change management required. All right, Kylie, handing it back to you for some questions. 

Kylie: [00:54:40] Thank you so much, Roy, That was so helpful and informative and entertaining and also slightly frustrating as a woman in the workforce as I'm sure you can appreciate. And thank you to our audience as well for your participation in the polls. Clearly, you would not have been what it was without your input. We are a little bit over time, but we do have some questions that have come through that we will happily answer. And just want to remind you all too, if you can hang around for a few more minutes and you have some questions to ask Roy, please utilize his incredible experience and expertise. And feel free to put any question that you may have into the Q&A function or in the chat function. The first question I have for you, Roy, is how can I see this data across my organization? 

Roy: [00:55:25] So depending on the technologies you've got, generally speaking, they're going to come from two sources. It's going to come from your HR solution if you've got one in place and if you don't have one in place, it's obviously the defaults going to be payroll. Now, payroll in our terminology is payroll and workforce management. So your time and attendance solutions as well. So they would be three products, but obviously payroll workforce management is one and the other. 

Kylie: [00:55:53] Next question is how can a salaried workforce save on labor costs? 

Roy: [00:56:00] That's a really good question. So a lot of people think it's only the wage employees kind of workforces, the blue collars that you can save because you can control overtime. Now, with salaried employees, you know, we've talked about the personal, we've talked about the annual carryovers, the utilizations. Are you getting and working too many hours expecting the world from it when the contractual hours is throw out for example. So again it's about understanding you know having time in lieu policies are great and nice incentives to give back, but sometimes the liability starts increasing because you can't actually get that employed to take any of that time off of that balance. So it is important to understand that sure, you've got fixed costs, generally speaking, but you still got the salary component that you need to understand the outer limits of what people's utilizations are. 

Kylie: [00:56:51] The next question is why is it important to monitor fatigue management? 

Roy: [00:56:58] So as a director and as an officer of a business, you know, I don't want to be in the media for the wrong reasons. And, you know, as a as a director, you want to make sure that you're protecting your employees and doing the right thing. So a classic example. Most white collar industries will not get insurances to protect the staff greater than 12 hours. It's too much hours for one individual to work in a day. Now, we know in HR and payroll we can sometimes work more than those. But the reality is, is that individual left your premises at the office and it's now 8:00 at night and they were in at 7 a.m. and then they crashed or had a car accident. You know that fatigue management. Obviously, the incident is a big issue in itself, but what it does to the business is you're not covered because you've burnt that employee out. So you've got to have tools that manage this. And that's where the workforce management, real time reporting, you know, good culture to understand the work is going to be there tomorrow. And if it's not, then how do you resource up for it? Okay. So yeah, very important to fatigue management because it also drives overtime. 

Kylie: [00:58:06] Next question we have is how do you manage your different workforce groups, age, skill level, etc. when it comes to change management? 

Roy: [00:58:17] So the thing we like to say is always you've got to find out if all your different generations or your culture groups, the champion in each one of those groups. You've got to have a champion in each one. So you get that focus group if that's required, and then you make sure that they understand what the change is and why it's important to the business for this change. So you've got to get that by it. Once you've understand that and then the business communicates that to the wider audience, then they're your champions. To echo that, to not think that corporate's just making a change for the sake of it. Okay. And that will really shift culture. If you also understand we talked about the baby boomers of the Gen Z, Our Gen Z is going to be able to pick up an app, download it without even giving them instructions. They'll know how to do it. You've got to understand, if you've got an ageing workforce, you know, to find where the app stores now hidden on iOS, you know, it's a little bit of ninja skills nowadays using the search bit. So again, you've got to put videos. People love videos because they can watch it, pause it, rewind it versus reading a document which mouses hate to read instructions. 

Kylie: [00:59:22] Okay, we've got time for maybe one more question. How would you recommend I position a business case for implementing a new solution to manage these aspects? 

Roy: [00:59:35] So when you do business case, I think when I read, you know, reports coming to us and, you know, new incentives that people want to put into the workplace, the first thing I want to understand is what is the return on investment? You know, I'm very transactional, so I like to know what's the return on investment first, right? Now, if you say I'm going to save $1,000,000, the first thing I would say is I want to know how, because that's a big dollar value that you're going to save with introducing it. And you might be saying, oh, we're going to cost 20 grand or a hundred grand and I'm going to save $1,000,000. It's a big, bold statement with blue sky behind it. So you need to understand when you write a business case, what is the actual underlying facts behind that. So what is your baseline then? How are you going to measure that cost savings when that technology is getting rolled out? What are the risks involving rolling that out? Because if you've only got one person that's a champion of rolling that out and that person gets covered or sick or leaves the organization, does that $1 million investment just suddenly disappear because that was the champion that was running it. So make sure you understand the baseline so you know how to write. Well, this is where we're at. This is where we're going to go. And this is the return of investment. But this is how we're going to get there and how we're going to measure it and be accountable through the business. There's no point. You know, it's the C-suite. It's not buying into something then that's never going to get pushed down properly in the organization. So you need to make sure accountability is not just down on the person that's the Project lead or the sponsor, but also at the C-suite that they've got by. 

Kylie: [01:01:11] Well, thank you, Roy, for those great answers. And once again, for such a truly informative and thought provoking presentation today. And to our audience, thank you for joining us and for your valuable participation once again. It would not have been the success that it was without it. And just a reminder, of course, to you all that the entire webinar will be emailed after its conclusion. In the meantime, on behalf of the access group, and I hope you all have a wonderful rest of the day and we hope to see you again soon. Thank you so much. Bye. 

Roy: [01:01:39] Thank you, everyone. Bye bye.