Staying ahead of the Game: Understanding the new workplace reforms


The Fair Work reforms are the realisation of the Labor Government’s 2007 election policy, Forward with Fairness, bringing changes to the workplace relations system and regulations in Australia to create a uniform, national industrial relations system.  The Government believes the reforms “meet the needs of employees, unions and employers, while still allowing Australia to be competitive and prosperous”.

The Fair Work Act 2009 (FW Act) came into force on 1 July 2009, although some provisions do not come into effect until 1 January 2010.  

With similar coverage to Work Choices, the new legislation applies to all national system employers and their employees. The legislation covers approximately 85 per cent of the workforce in Australia. 

TechnologyOne is committed to identifying ways to prepare your organisation for any potential policy changes and ensuring you are recording and managing all relevant employee information in order to ‘act fairly’.

This Whitepaper explains the central tenets of the new legislation with the changes explored in relation to the employment lifecycle – recruitment, establishing the employee relationship, managing relationships with industrial bodies, and managing performance and separation.  Additionally, where applicable, a comparison between changes introduced in the transitional period and wholesale departures from Work Choices are also available. 

To provide practical assistance to managers and Human Resource practitioners, this paper recommends tactics to ensure the implementation of the reforms are made as seamlessly as possible. In order to stay ahead of the game, the establishment of pre-determined policies around the new legislation, and sound and reliable record keeping are key.  To minimise any potential for additional burden, organisations need to rely upon automated Human Resource Management systems to be able to deal with the extensive requirements regarding employee information. 

 Ready for the Rebound 


Over the past two decades, global growth has been unprecedented.  There seemed no end to our desire for goods and services, particularly from developing countries.  The ensuing growth in employment was also staggering - the labour force worldwide increased one third by 731 million jobs, to 2.98 billion jobs.  Faced with this growth, Human Resource (HR) practitioners faced unprecedented challenges, including the massive growth in jobs, overseas skills migration, ensuing skills shortages, managing Generation Y, and lack of quality talent at home.

Yet, over the past twelve months the global financial markets experienced their worst crisis since the Great Depression forcing many economies into recession with a resultant contraction of labour markets.  The United Nations agency, the International Labour Organisation has predicted a loss of 24 million to 52 million jobs worldwide in 2009 (refer to 1).  

This is the fundamental cyclical nature of global economies, and we can learn from the past if we want to ensure that the effects of a recession are less drastic and that the human cost is  contained.  HR practitioners now need a sharper focus, to ensure that their organisation can survive the downturn and is better positioned to grow when the global economy rebounds.

Accordingly HR practitioners are facing a new set of challenges in a vastly different demand/supply landscape and need to focus on the following to be ready for the rebound:

• Ensuring strategic planning of human capital requirements - in search of active retention strategies rather than the passive methods employed during past recession
• Ensuring strong leadership and focus aligns with the core business and human capital requirements 
• Managing proactively to obtain the very best productivity from the staff who remain, including a key emphasis on training so they are fit and keen to compete, and without danger of burn-out 
• Addressing the skills shortage when the economy is re-stimulated  
• Becoming technologically savvy by ensuring organisations can make better use of what is available technically to update people-dependent systems     

This is the first in a series of whitepapers published by TechnologyOne Human Resource & Payroll, designed to help HR practitioners and business unit managers understand the financial crisis and prepare their own solutions.

1. Economist Intelligence Unit, Country Data, 16 April 2009.

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