If you’ve ever taken a closer look at the logo on your Levi’s, you’ll have noticed the image of two horses, each tethered to a pair of jeans, and pulling in opposite directions.
As a people manager juggling competing commitments in an environment where the isolated obligations created by ad-hoc legislative changes and various court and tribunal decisions seem to pull against each other, you’d be excused for feeling like you’re the jeans. But just as the logo symbolises the strength of the jeans (rather than the forces being applied to them), our capacity and ability to manage competing obligations is best executed by calling on the culture and systems that create our strength, rather than lamenting the competing directions in which we’re being pulled.
As all of us will have experienced, there are many situations in day-to-day people management where the expectations created by one obligation appears to pull against the expectations created by another obligation. Recently, these situations seem to be on the rise. For example:
Despite the expanding focus and increasing publicity around the obligation to provide flexible work arrangements, the concurrent obligation for employers to do so within the inflexibilities of most awards serve as both a practical and cost barrier.
At the same time, despite the focus and pressures around delivering wage growth and providing above award rates of pay, employers are now dealing with the impact of recent decisions that prevent over-award payments from being used to set-off award obligations in the next, or the previous, pay periods.
Against the expanding focus on the provision of remote work (and potentially its creation as a future legislated right in Victoria), there are increasing discussions around limiting the rights and means of an employer to remotely monitor the work being performed.
Similarly, with the introduction of expanded positive duties to proactively prevent and immediately respond to inappropriate forms of behaviour (including conduct that risks creating a hostile working environment on the grounds of sex, and those which give rise to psychosocial risks), there continues to be inconsistency in where the line is drawn between work and private. At the same time, the pressure to further restrict the forms of proactive compliance monitoring that can be undertaken risks limiting an employer’s practical monitoring to a largely complaint-based regime.
While employees expect autonomy and flexibility when working remotely, there continues to be increase enforcement around the detailed records that employers are required to create and keep in respect of an employee’s specific hours of work.
There also continues to be a focus on the obligation to manage performance and conduct within an environment where the scope and capacity for those who are managed to characterise those efforts as bullying, remains practically unconstrained. At the same time, the available internal processes and external structures designed to resolve such concerns continue to be largely ineffective at delivering quick, positive and final outcomes for all parties.
While at times this all starts to feel a bit hard, successful navigation of these challenges is best achieved by calling on the culture and systems we’ve created. For example:
Ensuring we implement and practice the fundamentals of a High Performance Culture assists us mitigate and manage many of the circumstances that typically lead to allegations of bullying and related disputation.
By continuously managing performance, and not simply managing poor performance, we enable real-time, nuanced conversations that not only have the capacity to deliver more consistent outcomes, but also avoids the unexpected “gear change” conversations that often lead to allegations and periods of personal leave.
By adopting resolution-based complaint processes when appropriate, rather than creating a culture of “complain and investigate”, we can be better placed to shift the focus of grievance processes towards solutions that target constructive future relationships, rather than exacerbating differences through inherently adversarial processes.
By being transparent and educating our people on the purpose and objectives of our grievance processes, we reduce the risk of individuals perceiving those processes as a pathway to challenge, damage or exit those co-workers they don’t like.
By being clear about what good actually looks like, and ensuring our High‑Performance focus spans beyond pure metric based outcomes (and focuses on the specific behaviours and systems that deliver good outcomes), we enable ourselves to more genuinely, fairly and transparently consider and respond to requests for either flexible or remote working arrangements.
While changing focus doesn’t stop it from being hard, it is all a matter of perspective. To quote Jimmy Duggan’s character in A League of Their Own, “The hard is what makes it great.”
