Australia’s flurry of workforce reforms undeniably presents challenges for employers in the health and aged care sector, but they also present opportunities. Heightened compliance may increase costs as well as business and personal risks for directors and management. But there are ways to mitigate these downsides and achieve substantial upsides too.
A strategic response from leaders can help manage risks while delivering benefits that could be felt for years to come – not only by staff but also by the people in their care. By considering culture, compliance, and incident response, employers can put themselves on a path to complying with myriad legislative, judicial, and regulatory changes. Along the way, they can elevate organisational capability, fairness, inclusion, and transparency – and make themselves a magnet for top talent.
In this article, we briefly highlight some notable workforce reforms and then outline a methodology for organisations to rise to current and future regulations.
Major reforms in summary
The federal government has introduced a raft of changes which significantly expand employers' obligations to consider the welfare of employees and provide more rights to employees.
In the area of payroll and remuneration, some of the notable changes for health and aged care employers include:
Criminalising wage theft, and increasing civil penalties to as high as three times the wage underpayment (Closing Loopholes No 2 Act)
Requiring employers to publicise their gender pay gap and their strategies to reduce it (Closing the Gender Pay Gap Act)
- Requiring the Fair Work Commission to consider gender equality in annual wage reviews (Secure Jobs Better Pay Act).
Another major reform addresses sexual harassment, a notable area of risk in health and aged care industries due to:
a high level of contact with third parties (i.e. patients)
typically hierarchical workplace structures
the prevalence of casual staff and/or workers being on short-term contracts
a gender imbalance across the workforce, including senior leadership
remote/isolated workplaces.
Employers need to go further than policies and processes that respond to individual reports as they arise. The Sex Discrimination Act now places a positive duty on all employers to prevent sexual harassment. The Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has new powers to investigate and enforce compliance with this positive duty.
Further workplace reforms at state and federal level are targeting work health and safety liabilities including psychosocial hazards. Employers are now required to:
identify psychosocial hazards and undertake a comprehensive risk assessment
consult with their workforce
evaluate, and monitor the organisation’s controls.
And the reforms don’t stop there. Others which may impact health and aged care employers include:
preventing employers from offering fixed term contracts for more than two years in total (Secure Jobs Better Pay Act)
expanding rights of migrant workers (Fair Work Act, Migration Act)
establishing employees’ rights to disconnect outside of working hours (Closing Loopholes No 2 Act).
For employers, adapting to all these reforms may seem a daunting prospect, and the size of the tasks cannot be underestimated. But, based on our experience working with health and aged care organisations, we know it’s achievable. Furthermore, the potential benefits really are substantial. Besides better risk management and regulatory compliance, you cannot put a price on having a safe, loyal, and engaged workforce.
A strategic launchpad to embrace these new responsibilities
The regulatory changes are wide-ranging, and every organisation will vary in terms of its current state of readiness. So, leaders require a clear and objective understanding of the foundations they are building upon. Specifically, this means assessing the current workforce culture and the control systems you have in place to manage workplace risk and compliance. And, crucially, that should include a review of current incident and crisis management processes.
