How to manage job cuts and the latest hybrid work stats

The news | The Australian Bureau of Statistics yesterday revealed that unemployment fell to 3.6 per cent in September – down from 3.7 per cent the month before.

Why it matters | It means the jobless rate is still hovering at near-record lows. But a lot of turbulence is buried beneath the headline figures because it’s no secret that waves of redundancies have been sweeping through corporate Australia this year.

Zoom in | The list of companies in Australia that have cut more than 200 jobs is long and includes big names such as KPMG Australia, Australia Post, Star Entertainment, Telstra and Atlassian.

In fact, Department of Employment figures provided to AFR Success show that 331 companies this year have reported plans to make 22,812 positions redundant, despite the unemployment rate hovering at near-record lows.

That figure is likely much lower than the total number of actual redundancies too, as employers are only required to notify Centrelink when they plan to make 15 or more staff redundant. But it gives you a sense of just how many people are being affected by the job cuts that we have reported regularly since inflation surged after the pandemic and the Reserve Bank of Australia embarked on its rate-tightening cycle to control it.

What’s happening | Our lead story explores these layoffs in more detail . More specifically, it looks at how employers have approached their cuts in remarkably different ways.

Human resources experts say employers should be as transparent as possible about them. While some have published blog posts and media releases to explain their decision-making, others have been accused of encouraging voluntary exits (and therefore avoiding severance payments) by issuing return-to-office mandates.

“It’s just a way of saying, ‘Well, we didn’t get rid of you, you chose to leave because of our position on working in the office’,” one HR consultant said.

Other news | We also explain why a rising number of employers are turning to breathwork sessions to help employees build resilience, reveal the biggest source of distraction for Australian office workers, and reveal how Sydney Swans chief executive Tom Harley makes tough decisions .

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This week in tech

Employment Hero secures $263m in year’s biggest capital raising The human resources technology firm has shrugged off depressed private tech market sentiment and is now valued at just shy of $2 billion, writes Paul Smith .

What Musk’s high-stakes plan to charge for tweeting really means X, formerly known as Twitter, is charging $US1 a month for New Zealand and Philippines users to post in an experiment that could go global, writes Nick Bonyhady . So what’s Elon thinking now?

For more like this, sign up for The Download newsletter an insightful look at the week’s biggest tech stories, deals and trends delivered to your inbox, every Tuesday.

By the numbers

Hybrid workers in the US attend the office for an average of 2.6 days a week, a recent Gallup study found.

The workplace consulting group said office attendance patterns had remained relatively stable over the past 12 months.

The most significant change was a six-percentage-point rise in the proportion of workers attending the office three days a week, followed by a five-point drop in those coming into the office four or more days, and a three-point drop in those heading in no more than once.

The research suggests office attendance in the US is similar to that in Australia . A survey by LinkedIn in March found that more than six out of 10 Australian workers attended the office two or three days a week.

In our own LinkedIn poll last month, 63 percent of you told us you were back in the office between 1 and 4 days a week.

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