KEEPING UP TO DATE

Is your business compliant?

For many people the start of the new year is a time for setting New Year’s Resolutions for ourselves and our businesses. We are ready and willing to do what it takes to create a better us or company but as the weeks creep by, things might slip and suddenly we are back in our old patterns again.

Well, there is always next year, right?

When it comes to your HR foundations, business owners really can’t afford to push them off into the future with a “one day I’ll get around to it.” Described by some as boring or too hard these three little things will give you compliance and peace of mind.

1. Record Keeping

There are so many benefits to keeping accurate and up to date records. You’ll keep a better track of your businesses health, meet your tax and superannuation obligations, manage your cash flow and better be able to demonstrate your financial position to banks and lenders. You must keep records of all transactions related to your business’s tax and superannuation affairs. This includes records that support the information you include in your tax returns and reports.

The ATO requires that:

• records are not changed and are stored securely.
• You keep most records for five years, starting from when you prepared or obtained the records, or completed the transactions (or acts they relate to), whichever is the later.
• You can show the ATO your records if needed.
• Your records must be in English or able to be easily converted to English.

2. Refresh People’s Memory on important Policies

Many businesses have WH&S or Bullying and Harassment policies in place but don’t actually know what these policies say.

It’s important not to be complacent about these vital policies and procedures and to think that just because you have one and saved it onto your system that this will be enough to protect you and your team.

Its important to make sure your team knows about your policies and understands what they mean. You could do this by resending them to your team for them to re-read, issuing a quiz for them to complete to make sure they understand them, you could put them up on your notice board if you have an office space or go through them briefly in team meetings. In some cases, especially WHS and bullying and Harassment it can be useful to engage in some external training to make sure that everyone understands the policy and what is required of them while at work.

Not doing this will limit your ability to performance manage poor behaviour or even terminate employment for non-compliance and that can cost you more than providing training.

3. Confirm what you expect of people in their roles

At the start of the New Year we often hear business owners and managers saying “I’m going to have that difficult conversation that I put off at the end of last year” or “this year I’ll be tougher on people delivering to my expectations”. Now is the time to take a hard look and see whether that has resulted in the change needed and wanted?

No one enjoys managing poor performance, so let’s put that aside just for the moment. Let’s have a conversation about what you need from the person in this position in your business and why. What behaviours would you like to see, what actions and tasks would you like them to do? You might ask them what the problems are with completing the tasks if they are struggling?

The teams position description should guide you through this conversation and the person in the position should be crystal clear about what you want from them going forward. Once everyone is on the same you will have the ability to manage performance more easily and because you have started in this way it isn’t so challenging. Not tackling the poor performance in your business can cost you clients, money and your good team members who can easily find work elsewhere.

Now is the time to dust off those HR resolutions and recommit. This could be your best year ever, but we need to get the foundations in place.

Impact HR can assist you to create the solid HR foundations required to make your business compliant and achieve the goals you have for 2024.