Becoming an Employer of Choice in Your Health Practice with Cecilia White
About the Episode
In this episode of the Health Practice Insights Podcast, host Wallace Long interviews Cecilia White, HR Consultant and Director at Perks People Solutions.
Cecilia explores the evolving expectations of both new and existing staff, offering actionable strategies for employers to adapt and thrive in today’s competitive environment. The discussion covers how to become an employer of choice by focusing on organisational culture, values, and leadership, and highlights the importance of having robust HR policies in place.
Cecilia White
Cecilia White is a Human Resources Consultant and Director at Perks People Solutions – a leading provider of outsourced HR and recruitment services. Cecilia has 25 years’ experience in human resources and employment law.
Cecilia White
HR Consultant, Director
Perks People Solutions
(08) 8273 7804
cwhite@ppsconsulting.com.au
www.ppsconsulting.com.au
Disclaimer
This podcast is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the hosts and guests, and does not constitute professional advice. We make no representations or warranties regarding the accuracy, completeness, or applicability of the content. You should consult your professional advisers for specific advice relating to your situation.
Key Takeaways
-
Ongoing Talent Shortage
Finding high-quality staff is increasingly difficult across the health sector, with heightened competition and rising salary expectations, especially among early career professionals -
Evolving Workplace Laws and Compliance
Employers face more complex workplace relations and legal obligations, including new psychosocial hazard and sexual harassment laws that require proactive, preventative measures -
Health Sector-Specific Challenges
The health sector faces unique issues such as the ‘brain drain’, competition with public sector and interstate salaries, and difficulty accessing reliable salary benchmarking data -
Burnout as a Major Risk
Burnout is a significant concern for health professionals, driven by long hours, high stress, and workplace pressures, making retention a challenge for employers -
Flexibility is Essential
Flexible work arrangements – including four-day work weeks, flexible hours, additional leave, and work-from-home options – are now expected and can help attract and retain staff -
Leadership and Culture Matter
Strong, emotionally intelligent leadership and a positive, inclusive workplace culture are critical for staff engagement and long-term retention -
Building a Strong Employee Value Proposition
Employers should define and promote their unique value proposition, focusing on culture, compensation, flexibility, and career development opportunities to stand out as an employer of choice -
Importance of Solid HR Policies
Clear, compliant, and contemporary HR policies signal professionalism and help attract quality candidates while supporting a positive workplace environment
Resources
Use this link to request the following resources
- Ep 2. Becoming an Employer of Choice, Cecila White – Podcast summary (PDF)
- Subscribe to the free Health Practice Insights Email Newsletter
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Transcript
WALLACE LONG
Welcome to Health Practice Insights. I’m Wallace Long. My guest today is Cecilia White, Human Resources consultant and director at Perks People Solutions.
Perks People Solutions is a leading provider of outsourced HR and recruitment services. Cecilia White has 25 years’ experience in human resources and employment law.
In our conversation, Cecilia shares the HR challenges she’s seeing within the health sector. Cecilia provides an update on the changes in workplace relations and workplace law.
She talks about the changing expectations of new and existing staff, sharing strategies to address these, and how also to become an employer of choice. We talk culture, values, leadership and the benefit of having a sound set of HR policies. This episode is packed with practical information, so I think you’ll enjoy it.
Cecilia White, welcome to Health Practice Insights.
CECILIA WHITE
Thanks Wallace, for having me.
WALLACE LONG
What are the challenges that businesses are facing today?
CECILIA WHITE
We’re certainly seeing a talent or skill shortage at the moment in a number of sectors and number of industries. So finding good people, high quality talent for businesses has become harder and more challenging across the board.
So that’s probably a key challenge that we hear from our clients, our partners, and people in the industries. As well as increased pressure on salaries, remuneration. So I think with cost of living pressures, housing affordability pressures, we are certainly seeing higher demand for higher salaries than we’ve ever really seen before, particularly early career professionals.
So there’s been a real shift, I think, in terms of the expectations of early career graduates, professionals coming in and commanding fairly high salaries from the outset. So that’s created some challenges, I think, for a lot of businesses and a range of industries.
Probably the other conversations that we’re having frequently with business owners is the increasingly complex landscape around workplace relations and workplace law.
So the compliance obligations around HR and just general workplace compliance have really increased and they’ve really upped the ante for employers in the last couple of years. And in the last two years, we’ve seen a number of really quite significant changes in the workplace relations landscape.
For example, the introduction of the new psychosocial hazard laws, which no doubt you’ve heard of. What that does is create another whole set of obligations for employers to ensure the psychosocial safety of their employees in their workplaces. So, employees wrapping their heads around that and understanding, what does that mean for them.
What can they do and what should they do in their businesses? What does that look like for their industry? So, we’re doing a lot of work in that space as well. And probably one of the other main changes in that workplace legislation area would be the changes to sexual harassment laws as well. Very much a sign of where we are as a society and expectations about respect in the workplace and inclusion and safety in the workplace.
The sexual harassment laws have now extra obligations, again for employers to create safe harassment free environments. So again, understanding whether I’m a small business owner, medium business owner, or a large business owner, what does that look like for me and what do I need to do? And trying to understand and keep up with the regulations and with the requirements there.
Everyone would be aware of, I guess, the modern award system in Australia. That is also something that is becoming increasingly complex, particularly around entitlements, pay rates. We hear so many cases, a lot of media around even the largest of businesses who get it wrong.
Incorrect interpretation of awards, incorrect rates being applied. Underpayments of overtime and penalty rates, it’s really easy to get it wrong because the awards are so complex. And so we are constantly working to support employers to understand again, what their requirements are, ensure they’re compliant, ensure they’re not falling short of those requirements.
That’s a constant learning curve, I think, for a lot of business owners, particularly small business owners as they grow, and getting their heads around the complexity of the award structures. There’s also, I guess, pairing, just back to that point I mentioned before about the psychosocial hazards and the sexual harassment laws where we’ve seen really quite seismic shifts in employer obligations.
Both Fair Work Australia and SafeWork SA for those here in South Australia, but also their equivalents or counterparts across other states are extra resourced now to conduct, audits, you know, random audits, investigations. They can initiate investigations in particular industries, sectors, or in particular workplaces where they will come on site effectively and want to see evidence that employers are complying with those psychosocial hazard laws or with the sexual harassment laws.
So really seeing, again, more activity in that regulatory environment, which is then just another thing for business owners to try and manage, keep up with and, and stay ahead of the ahead of the curve really.
WALLACE LONG
We look back five years ago, these weren’t as significant issues for businesses.
CECILIA WHITE
They weren’t. Significant issues in, in the sense that there were some laws that did govern sexual harassment and safety in the workplace. But it’s an extra layer now of compliance required, and it’s an extra set of obligations in the sense that it’s not enough now for employers to just react and respond well to an incident or an issue. These laws create obligations for them to actually proactively take preventative steps and preventative measures to ensure that these sorts of behaviours aren’t happening to begin with, or ensuring that they’re taking all reasonable steps to create a safe work environment.
So, it certainly has lifted the, you know, it’s up the ante for employers from where we were 2, 3, 4, 5 years ago.
WALLACE LONG
And that applies to small and large businesses.
CECILIA WHITE
That’s right. There’s differences around when we are just talking about, well what are reasonable steps if, if the laws say, well, you’re required to take reasonable steps, reasonable measures, what’s reasonable for a small business will be very different to what’s reasonable for a very large corporate employer.
So there’s recognition of resources, in-house expertise or otherwise, but no matter what size the business, there is some level of obligation to take proactive preventative steps in that safety area.
WALLACE LONG
Are there any specific issues to the health sector that they’re facing?
CECILIA WHITE
I think the shortage of good people. That’s partly arising from I guess loss of, you know, the brain drain, people professionals leaving South Australia either to go To the eastern seaboard or overseas. So, there’s now that things are a lot more mobile than they were five years ago, when we were all very confined to our, our cities and our states for obvious reasons.
The world’s opened up again. People are a lot more mobile and exploring those opportunities to go elsewhere, particularly early career professionals. So I think that probably is fairly pertinent for the medical or health sector. I think the salary demands as well, not unique too, but there are particularly, I guess, unique challenges for the health sector when it comes to trying to compete perhaps with eastern state salaries or trying to compete with public sector, health practice and salaries and benefits, etc. offered there.
How do they remain competitive? But even just accessing data, salary data in order to benchmark salaries can be really hard. How do you find that data? How reliable is it? Where do you source good quality salary, benchmark data from specifically for the health industry?
It can be tricky to locate and collate that in order to gauge where you’re at in your business in terms of how competitive your salaries are.
WALLACE LONG
Is there anything else within the health sector, which is, you know, not necessarily unique, but something which health professionals are probably seeing at the moment?
CECILIA WHITE
I think the risk of burnout, I think is something that’s really pertinent for the health sector. So, I mean, the World Health Organisation actually recognised occupational burnout as a syndrome a few years ago. So we know now that burnout is a really pressing issue for a range of industries. But if you think of the particular challenges in the health sector, the hours that are worked, the highly stressful environments in which they work, the pressure that they’re working on, under, the stakes are high. You know, with the work that they are doing. They’re all the ingredients that are there for a risk of burnout.
And we also know from various studies, including one from AHPRA recently, that burnout was named as one of the main reasons why health practitioners would consider leaving the profession. So it’s the hours, the pressure, the environment. It’s a tough gig for a lot of people, and it’s a challenge for employers to strike the balance between good patient outcomes and ensuring a good service for patients but also ensuring their people aren’t burning out.
WALLACE LONG
I’d like to explore what good health businesses are doing to address these challenges relating to staff, existing staff and acquiring staff, so they can be an employer of choice.
CECILIA WHITE
So, one of the big-ticket items when asking employees what would attract you to work with a particular business or what would keep you working with a business. One of the big-ticket items we see is flexibility, flexible work practices. We know now that flexible work isn’t considered to be a privilege, or it’s not just something that really progressive organisations are doing. It is an expectation now of employees of all age groups, but I think particularly younger and emerging professionals will be expecting that they can work flexibly, that they can maintain a healthy work-life balance.
It can be a range of things that can be looked at to achieve that, that flexibility. It could be, for example, initiatives like a four-day working week, which isn’t, doesn’t necessarily just mean cramming five days worth of work into four days, and then having a Friday off. A four day work week is more about productivity first, and then the byproduct of it is a wellbeing result.
So if you look at it as a four day working week, we are going to reduce our hours across the week. So whether that’s having a full day off or whether you just work flexibly, but so you are working reduced hours, but with the same output. So the expectation is yes, you can work the four days equivalent, but with the same output and on the same salary, so you’re not taking a pay cut.
The key is that output. So in order to achieve that, you have to look at your work design, you have to look at your efficiencies. You have to look at your productivity and how you are working, and if you can get that right in the four days or equivalent, everyone’s winning. The business is still getting the output that they need, the patients are still getting the care that they need. You’re still providing the services that need to be, need to be provided, but you are mitigating that risk of burnout by allowing people to work reduced hours. So that’s a great initiative.
There’s some excellent work and studies being done in the states, in the nursing world, where they’ve trialled it over there. So there’s some really good examples of how that’s being done in quite an innovative way.
Simple things like if you’re a smaller practice, for example, the four day working week, it’s just operationally going to be difficult. Flexible start and finish times. That could make a real difference for somebody who has caring responsibilities, for example.
The pressures on people have changed now, they have. Most families are dual income families. Most of the time you have both parents, for example, working and often they’re both working full time. So allowing an employee in that situation, flexibility to start a bit later, finish earlier or vice versa, can really create a greater sense of wellbeing, well a sense of balance.
And ultimately, they’re going to be more inclined to stay working for that business because they’re seen as being valued. And that flexibility is a sign of we value you, we trust you to get your work done. We’re happy to adjust the timing to provide you with that balance.
Other simple things, allowing employees additional leave. Whether that’s funded by the employer, it might be an extra day or two or three a year. It could be an extra week, you know, for more generous employers. But again, that can make a real difference for people, particularly with caring responsibilities during school holidays, for example.
Or it could be the ability to purchase extra leave. So you essentially salary sacrifice part of your salary in order to have an extra week or two, whatever it might be of leave a year. And then finally work from home. You know, it’s not possible in every single role, in every single organisation, but technology is a wonderful thing and there are so many roles that can be done, at least partly on a work from home basis or flexibly on a work from home basis.
And I know there’s been a lot of talk about return to office, return to workplaces and swinging it back from where it was five years ago during COVID. But there’s still, I think, a lot of benefit in maintaining a level of work from home practice in your business where you can and where it works.
People do really value that. We know that.
WALLACE LONG
What else is there from the ownership of practice that they can do?
CECILIA WHITE
Really competent, confident leaders where they’re supported in their development as leaders. You’re investing in their development so that they have the ability to really manage their people well, motivate staff, keep staff engaged. Look at all of these sorts of things, you know, different practices to keep people engaged, look at flexible work.
You know, if you’ve, if you’re investing in leaders and giving them the ability and empowering them to do that and supporting them to do that, that’s what will make the difference culturally, I think, in a business between, is this somewhere that I can see myself, myself still working in 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 years, or is this just really a business where I think this isn’t for me, and I’m not, I’m not confident in the leadership. I’m not seeing that those initiatives being driven by strong leaders. So I think investing in your leaders and ensuring that they’re doing the best that they can do to lead and to drive culture.
WALLACE LONG
How would you define culture?
CECILIA WHITE
It’s the, you know, it’s that DNA of an organisation, so the unspoken nature of the environment that people work in. And culture is something that takes a long time to build, and you do have to put conscious effort into building culture, it won’t just happen organically.
Leaders will drive the culture 100%. So if your leaders are behaving a certain way, if they are inclusive, if they are emotionally intelligent, if they are professional, that will drive the culture. So again, getting that leadership right is critical. The culture in terms of building the culture, how do you do it?
Looking for opportunities to bring people together. I think that’s really key. Whether it’s informal social type activities, whether it’s more days where there’s discussions about the business, people have an opportunity to be heard or contribute to the vision of the business, the strategic direction of the business.
What’s really important for culture is where people feel heard. So what opportunities are you providing for your people to be heard, on all manner of things? Do they have the ability, do they feel safe and confident to speak out or call out things that are bothering them that they’re not happy with? What mechanisms have you got in place for that? That’s a really key part of a positive workplace culture.
I’m a massive advocate for diversity and what that can do for culture. I think organisations that lack diversity, which are very homogenous, there’s that group think phenomenon that happens.
Those workplace cultures will be less positive, less motivating, less attractive to a whole range of people than a culture that really values and embraces difference. Differences of opinion, different backgrounds, different ages, all of the different types of diversity. That’s what creates a really rich welcoming culture, I think.
We do work with a lot of businesses who identify that they need more diversity in their business. How do we go about that? How do we make sure we are an inclusive culture as well?
WALLACE LONG
And I suppose anything you put in place today is going to be beneficial for those that are currently in the health practice, but also for many years to come.
CECILIA WHITE
Most definitely you, you’re planting trees really for the future by putting these foundational pieces in place. Building that culture from the ground up and weaving it in, weaving positive culture and the values of your organisation into every part of how you run your business. That’s how you get the longevity and that’s how you’ll ensure that, that culture will carry through regardless of changes in personnel.
Because that’s where the risk is if you have those changes, new people come in. It’s really important that the culture is solid, the values are solid, and that you’re recruiting for that values fit and that culture fit as well as just skill.
Working with organisations to develop up their values is really rewarding and really, really interesting work. We love going into different organisations, businesses, small, medium, large, and working collaboratively with their leaders, but also with their teams to collectively and co-design a really good solid set of values. What are we about here? What is our DNA? What are the non-negotiable behaviours? What do we want to be known for?
Working with organisations to build those, those values is fantastic. because they then become such an important tool for a whole range of things, right through, from hiring to performance reviews, building people’s job descriptions, workforce planning. You know, there are so many areas where you can take and grasp hold of your values and really weave them into all different parts of your business and your strategy.
WALLACE LONG
If they wanted to become an employee of choice, where do they get started?
CECILIA WHITE
Putting together what we would call your value proposition, your employee value proposition. It’s almost like a branding exercise. What’s your point of difference? What are you offering in your business which is attractive, which might be different to what other practices are offering.
So you would map out what are you doing in terms of your culture, describing your culture, and understanding your culture and how to promote that as a positive aspect of coming to work for the business. Looking at your compensation, obviously your remuneration structures that we talked about before.
So doing that salary benchmarking can be useful to understand where you sit in the market and can that be presented as again, an attractive proposition for a potential employee. Another area is, I guess it’s linked to culture, but the flexible work. I just think that’s such a key piece of your value proposition.
Keeping up with the expectations that people have around flexible work. So looking at what you’ve got in place, so what you could put in place to be competitive there.
The other aspect is career development and professional development for people coming in. What sort of pathway is available for them, if they were to join your practice, what does that pathway look like?
What are the opportunities? How are you going to be investing in them and their growth and their development? Such an important part of what people are looking for in their work experience and in their work life. Understanding what you can do, depending on the size of your business, what you can do and what you can offer in that space is, I think also really critical.
WALLACE LONG
Is there anything else on top of the value proposition and the culture and the flexible work?
CECILIA WHITE
Sure, so I think once you’ve established what your value proposition is, the other complimentary part to that is making sure you’ve got really good, solid policies in your business, HR policies, which support and align with those aspects.
Because that in itself is indicative that an employer is an employer of choice. They’ve got it together, they’ve got good foundations. They value their people by having really clear policies and guidelines and expectations in place. If I’m a new employee or I’m a candidate, or I’m applying for a role, and the contract that I get sent as the offer is professional and compliant and clear.
That is going to be a much more attractive proposition than getting a contract, which looks pretty deficient, and non-compliant, or not contemporary. So making sure those foundations are in place. It might seem a bit dry and a bit compliance based, but it will actually help you attract good quality professionals because they will value that.
Asking your team what would be valuable to them rather than making the assumption. And that can be done in a number of ways. You can run a fairly simple survey, you can have one-on-one conversations, a bit of a listening tour if you like, by a leader in the organisation to establish what people are looking for, and then that can really help inform what your particular initiatives will be.
You can present a range of options. Here are some things that we are thinking of putting place as a business. What do people think? Put it out for a bit of a poll or a bit of a vote. That’s a good way of getting people’s buy-in into some of those strategies. So that’s a nice way to start in a fairly sort of collaborative way.
Another really important part of all of this, whether it’s flexible work practices or any initiative I think that you’re putting in place as a business, it’s really important to have a good clear policy or guideline around, well, what is that? Once you land on what that initiative looks like for your business, making sure that’s documented really well so that it’s really clear, there’s no confusion about what’s in, what’s out, what this looks like, what this doesn’t look like. That’s also really important. It’s a, you know, policies and procedures, I think in any workplace are really, really important from the outset. From that, even a very small business, I would always recommend, you know, just a small bundle at least of good quality HR policies.
And the flexible work policy might be one of them, for example.
WALLACE LONG
And if they’re a small practice, what are their options?
CECILIA WHITE
There’s a lot of helpful content available for employers on the Fair Work Australia or Fair Work Ombudsman website. Lots of templates, guidelines, fact sheets, some good, helpful general information there. Obviously, it’s not tailored, but it is useful.
For organisations who are a member of an employer association or some sort of industry organisation or peak body, there’s information that’s available specific for the sector or the industry through those organisations as well, or other business associations or business groups that those practices might be members of.
It’s also a great thing to talk to peers and colleagues who are also in the industry, see what they’re doing, what have they tried. There’s any sharing of information that could be done there. A lot of our clients work quite collaboratively together to share information and resources as well.
WALLACE LONG
Cecilia, can you tell us how the team at Perks People Solutions assist healthcare professionals and their businesses?
CECILIA WHITE
We provide outsourced HR support. So for organisations who don’t necessarily have their own in-house HR expertise, but they’re at a size where they need advice or guidance or support in relation to their HR function, then we can come in and provide that support in a whole range of ways from the compliance aspect, policies, procedures, contracts through to just general day-to-day management of people, whether that be performance related, if it’s relationship conflict in the workplace.
We also can support with learning and development. We run a lot of different training development courses for different businesses, particularly in the health sector as well. We can certainly help with the sticky issues or the tricky issues where there might be a need for some technical advice or support around a particularly difficult situation.
We’ve got that expertise in-house that we can provide good pragmatic, commercial compliant advice when it comes to managing staff in those more difficult situations. So it’s a pretty broad service. We like to really partner with business owners to help them create the best work environments that they can, and sometimes they just need a bit of help to do that.
WALLACE LONG
Cecilia, thank you so much.
CECILIA WHITE
My pleasure. Thanks Wallace.
WALLACE LONG
Big thanks to Cecilia White. I enjoyed listening to Cecilia’s practical recommendations around the challenges facing health practices, in particular when wanting to become an employer of choice. Putting together your value proposition, focusing on the three Cs, culture, compensation and career development.
You can find Cecilia’s contact details in the show notes. To receive a PDF summary of this episode, head to the link in the show notes or go to our website, www.healthpracticeinsights.com.au
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In the next episode my guest is Health Practice CEO, Richard Pierce.
We’ll be looking at the key areas health practices can focus on when looking to reduce costs and create efficiencies.
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I’m Wallace Long. Thanks for listening.
