With Western Australian borders remaining closed the job market continues to be tight, with business owners struggling to find staff to fill positions within almost every industry. Labour analysis released by the National Australia Bank in January found that 40% of all Australian businesses are experiencing workforce shortage. Western Australia recorded the highest results, with 44% of businesses reporting labour shortages that have significantly impacted their business. Unfortunately, this is expected to continue over the next 12 months, with skilled and unskilled employees remaining difficult to source.

Everyone is aware of the national labour shortage and business owners are doing their best to keep their businesses operating under tough conditions. Some of the key impacts a labour shortage has on businesses include:

• Staff become overworked – the day to day list of jobs doesn’t get any shorter when there is less staff. Staff end up working longer hours than usual and become burnt out or unhappy in their job – ultimately resulting in a higher staff turnover in an employees’ market.

• Business owner shifts focus – the business owner falls into the trap of significantly increasing their hours to support their employees and keep customers satisfied. Unfortunately as the business owner spends more time in the business, they also spend less time working on the business. Debt collection and business goals are forgotten while customer service and day to day tasks are tended to.

• Customers become dissatisfied – no matter how much staff members step up, some staff shortages are too big to fill. When a business continually operates understaffed the standard of service inevitably falls and customers become disgruntled. This has a flow on effect, as unhappy customers are less likely to become returning customers.

A solution to the workforce shortage appears to be some time away and even when the Western Australian borders open it will take some time for the international workforce to return. To many business owners this is quite concerning, with some possibly wondering how they can keep their doors open. There are however some changes that can be made to try to ease the workload and help keep employees happy. These include:

• Consider giving staff a longer lunch break to recharge the batteries or even an additional day of annual leave each year on their birthday. Sometimes even the smallest gestures make a difference to an employees’ job satisfaction.

• Take 15 minutes each week to check in with your staff, clearly convey to them that the current understaffing is not the norm and that you are open to ideas on how to relieve the stress. You will need to listen and action – listening with no actions will aggravate staff even more.

• Hire a part time assistant to do simple jobs such as filing, stocking shelves, cleaning or running errands, leaving existing staff members more focussed their technical tasks. 

• Outsource tasks that you as the business owner don’t need to be doing. This could mean talking to your accountant about payroll or bookkeeping, getting an IT specialist involved instead of you spending time problem solving, or engaging a marketing consultant to manage your website, advertising or social media. This leaves you more available to help staff and work on urgent tasks that no one else can do. 

• Prepare a list of tasks for the business and rank them by importance. Employees should be spending 80% of their time on the 20% of the tasks that are most important. This will help ensure that the business operates as efficiently as possible under difficult circumstances.

• Consider adjusting your operating hours so that the staffing hours you have available more closely align with the hours that you are open. Would it really impact your customers if you opened an hour later and closed an hour earlier? Would you still get the same amount of customers if you were open five days a week instead of six? The answers to these questions won’t be the same for every business but you should take some time to really contemplate how this might look for your business. 

• Assess your service offerings and only offer those that are in most demand and most profitable. For many businesses the more varied your service offering is, the more staff are required to deliver it. Use your POS program to analyse your sales, which will assist you in making these decisions.

If you would like to discuss how we can help you work through your operational issues, or understand the financial impact of operational changes, please contact our Business Services Advisor Jenna van Nierop on 9842 5155.