​If you are trying to avoid having to deal with performance issues or misconduct, the best place to start with hiring the right people. Getting the right person for your team is about more than previous experience and qualifications, you need to ensure that they can work with the others in your team and have the right potential.
Thanks to the way modern recruitment work it can be hard to get a really good idea of what someone is like on a day to day basis. First off, you get their application electronically, then you may use a recruitment management system to screen their application based on some criteria such as a visa status, years of experience or qualification. Once you have done that you will look at the CV and maybe the covering letter and might call a few of the most promising applicants. If you are lucky you will catch them off guard and get a glimpse into their real personality but most times you will see the public persona crafted for being a candidate. Then you will invite them to interview with you and you will ask the same questions as everyone else, the candidate will probably give you the answers that you expect to hear. Then you will call their references that have been carefully handpicked by the applicant and may not even be their direct manager or even someone they ever worked with! Then they start their new role with you and you are left wondering why they are nothing like the person you saw at the interview! What a time-consuming waste! But all is not lost … there are ways to make sure that your recruitment process produce better results. I have recruited hundreds of roles from all organisational levels and hired a few of my own duds so have some experience to draw on. Here are my top tips for making your process more robust:
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 Many of my clients ask me questions about managing their people, and I have discovered that many of the questions are the same – here is a summary of the most frequently asked questions.
What happens if my new employee starts before they sign their contract? It is a legislative requirement that all employees have a written contract before they start work, so its best to make sure that they sign before they start. If they start before they accept the terms of the contract it also means that your 90-day trial period is not valid. I want to change my employees’ days and hours of work – how do I do this? Depending on your contract you have one of two ways to do this. If the contract specifies the days and hours they work like Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday from 08:30 to 17:00. You need to do a formal consultation with them – this means inviting them to a meeting, outlining the proposed changes you want to make, why you want to make these changes (what are the business reasons) and giving them time to give you feedback. This should be about 24 to 48 hours. Once you receive the feedback you can them make a final decision and communicate this to the employees. Remember to document their new days and hours in a letter of variation. If the contract only has minimum or maximum hours, you can do an informal consultation. Tell the team what you want to change, why you want to change and ask for their feedback – consider this feedback and give your decision. My new employee has told me that they can’t handle the pressure knowing that they won’t meet the targets set, and they they’re resigning. Can I accept the employee’s resignation on the spot? Yes you can, as long as they aren’t crying or angry – but it is always best to give them 24 hours to think about it first.  Bullying is prevalent in almost every environment including schools, workplaces and at home. It is characterised by repeated and unreasonable behaviour from one person or a group of people towards an individual or group that causes a risk to their health and safety. That’s quite a mouthful! Let us break it down …
Repeated – for an allegation of bullying to be established, the behaviour must be repeated – while a single instance of unreasonable behaviour can be uncomfortable and should be addressed, it does not meet the definition. Unreasonable – this means behaviour that a reasonable person in the same situation would not find reasonable. Many employees think they are being bullied when in fact the business or manager is simply trying to correct a behaviour or performance issue. So, to clarify, let’s look at some examples Max works in sales, he tries hard but struggles to up-sell products. His team has a weekly meeting to discuss their upcoming sales and progress for the week. Today at the meeting, Max is asked by his manager to make an impromptu presentation on why his up-selling technique is so poor. This is bullying, a discussion about Max’s performance should be held in private – asking him to present at a group meeting, will humiliate him and single him out in front of this peers. Mary works in the office, she does some basic accounts work and acts as the personal assistant to her manager. Her colleague falls ill and her manager asks Mary to pick up some of the tasks that the colleague usually does. Mary agrees to help but she is not happy about the extra work. A week later, her manager asks how she is progressing with the tasks he has assigned her, Mary feels that he is picking on her and is upset. This is NOT bullying, employers have a right to manage performance and monitor work done by their employees. As a person conducting a business or undertaking (PCBU) you have obligations to manage workplace bullying, this is part if your risk management in your business and your primary duty of care. Understanding the difference between managing employees and bullying is importantly but it is more important to make sure that you take all allegations seriously. A simple but effective process for investigating a bullying complaint would look like this:
 When you need to make a change to your business and this change may effect an employee, you have obligations towards those employees. There is a lot of employment case law on how to run and conduct a fair and reasonable redundancy process. Here is a summary of the points you need to consider:
Making people redundant is certainly one of the most difficult parts of being a manager but making sure that you have a plan and speak openly and honestly with employees can make it easier. See our Redundancy Checklist for more information or call if you need some help! Download the Redundancy Checklist  On 28th June, Style Hairdressing was ordered to pay $16,000 by the Employment Relations Authority for failure to keep wage and time records, failure to pay an employee as per their employment agreement and for breaches of the Wages Protection Act. The law requires all employers to keep wage and time records that are easily accessed or in other words read and understood. In this case the employer did not have any time records for the employee in question. There had also been verbal variations to the employment agreement but the parties could not agree on what was agreed! So, you probably want to know what you need to do to avoid getting fine for something that seems so trivial? Here are some guidelines:
These requirements can seem quite onerous if you are a small business owner and keeping up to date with all the changes in employment agreements can be hard. We suggest that you keep a diary of employment matters – conversations, hours worked, good and bad performance, days absent – so you have a record to rely on. If you need a hand with any of these matters or need help designing a system to manager employee records, give us a call today.  Most managers dread getting a legal letter from a current or past employee. Employment lawyers like to quote legislation and use emotive words to make you doubt your decision making and actions. Almost all managers I have worked with in the past have an emotional reaction to these types of letters and most are anxious or worried about what it means. We have all see the news headlines about companies paying out thousands of dollars to employees after losing a personal grievance claim. Just this month Ballance Agri-nutrients was ordered to pay a previous employee around $30,000 in compensation for an unfair dismissal. In reality about 90% of personal grievances are settled in mediation and do not make the papers. So, you’ve got the legal letter, what do you do now? The first step is to take deep breath and look at the facts of the letter, then gather the evidence you may have relating to their employment or what happened. Write down your version of events with as much detail as you can remember. If you have the time you can research the law and see what may have gone wrong, but most people just want someone else to help. It will usually only take us between 3 to 4 hours to research and respond to a personal grievance in the first instance. The earlier you get help, the quicker the matter can be resolved. Call us today to see what we can do for you.  As a small business owner, making the wrong call when hiring someone can have a big impact on your business. You can lose productivity, disrupt your team and even damage your reputation with your customers! This is where a solid 90 trial period clause in your employment agreement can help.
Sometimes a new hire won’t do anything that will warrant instant dismissal rather they will simply not meet your performance expectations. Rather than starting a lengthy performance management process or risking a personal grievance by letting them go without a process, a 90 day trial clause allows you 3 months to assess their performance in the job and decide if you are happy! If you terminate someone under the 90 day trial period clause, they can’t raise a personal grievance for being fired. There are a few things you need to make sure about:
 In a recent case in the Employment Relation Authority, an employer was found to have unjustifiably dismissed an employee after a work incident. The employee in question had a verbal altercation with a colleague during a shift, the argument was heated and resulted in the supervisor sending the employee home. The employee mistakenly believed that she had been dismissed.
The Authority member who heard the case outlined in her judgement that the onus was on the company to contact the employee after this incident. The employer was ordered to pay the employee 3 months lost wages and hurt and humiliation compensation of $7,000 reduced by 50% for the employee’s contribution. So, how can you get it right?
Don’t assume that an employee that doesn’t come to work has resigned and never suggest resignation to an employee in any circumstances. If you have any questions, or need advice, give us a call we would love to help.  Managing people can be tough, especially when you have employees on work visas. There are many different types of visas and it can be hard to know whether or not someone can legally work for you. With the government’s latest update to the penalties for breaching visa conditions it is even more risky! [Click here to see the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment's advice]. Here are some basic guidelines that everyone should know:
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