The State of Play: the current economic and employment climate. Worrells 2025 CBD Conference

This weeks blog lands in your inbox a day later than usual as I wanted to share with you my take aways from the Worrells 2025 CBD Conference held at the Grand Hyatt Melbourne yesterday (a fabulous venue for a conference by the way!).

I was invited to be a part of the Industry Panel session for the Worrells Conference. The session was facilitated by Martin Lakos, Division Director Macquarie Bank and my fellow panel members were Paddy O’Sullivan (CEO, Australian Hotel Association), Amy Bell (GM Workplace Relations and Wellbeing, VECCI) and Tim Piper (Head of Victoria, AI Group).

The focus of the session was the current economic and employment climate, challenges specific to industry including how these factors are influencing hiring and employee engagement and retention. From the discussions and the questions from the floor, here is a snapshot of my key takeaways from the session.

• Doing business is tough, doing business in Victoria is even tougher! The rising costs of doing business, wages growth, workcover costs, red tape / policy, increased taxes are putting huge pressure on businesses. This has been evident by the businesses going into voluntary administration or simply closing.
• Employment legislation changes; The right to disconnect, the changing definition of casual employment (Amy shared with us the definition has changed something like 5 times in 5 years – it’s no wonder we are all confused!), employee like workers – independent contractors, workplace delegates rights, family and domestic violence leave, fixed term contract changes. Keeping up with the rate of employment legislation changes and how they apply and impact business has been a challenge. Amy also shared how complex our industrial relations system is in trying to determine which is the most appropriate award to apply to each employee in your business – in many situations it’s not straight forward or easy to determine. Amy’s thoughts are, it would take a strong Government to tackle overhauling our industrial relations system.
• Attracting and retaining talent has been and still is a nightmare. It’s been the worst candidate short market I have seen in my 20 years in the industry. Paddy shared the challenges of hiring and retaining talent across the Hotel sector, as people are more willing to simply move on to the next job rather than stick with the one employer. Tailoring rewards, perks and benefits to appeal to the individual employee rather than the collective can have greater impact. It’s not a one size fits all. It’s being able to offer flexibility to the employee who wants to be able to do school drop off and pick up and/or attend school sports. While our Gen Z’ers might value the likes of a life admin day for greater work life balance.
• Retaining employees requires effective relationships. Gone are the days of loyalty and commitment for the long term, people move jobs easily and comfortably. It’s also the nature of a candidate short market; your employees have choice; if they are not happy in your business there have been plenty of other opportunities for them and they have likely been getting tapped on the shoulder for other jobs. The common reasons I hear from disengaged employees and employees leaving businesses are poor culture/values, poor leadership and management and lack of career development (this doesn’t have to mean career progression). No one has ever said to me I’m leaving because my business doesn’t do pizza lunches or we don’t have bean bags and table tennis tables. While these might be nice to haves they are not the initiatives that are engaging and retaining your employees. Hence, our engagement and retention initiatives need to focus on the culture, the values and the unique value proposition your business has over others as an employer. We also need to focus our attention on developing our people leaders and managers to build great relationships with team members and to be highly effective people leaders and managers.
• It’s not always the employer instigating the casual employment relationship. Some employees much prefer being engaged as a casual employee over permanent employment. They want the flexibility to pick and choose shifts, they would rather the 25% casual loading over the leave entitlements. However, legislation keeps making it harder and harder to navigate the casual employment space.
• The importance of surrounding yourself with experts. As a business owner never has it been harder to wear all the hats to effectively run your business. Help and support might look like memberships with VECCI and/or AIG, using consultants or business advisors. Having that team of experts you can draw on has never been more important; Accountants, Solicitors, HR Consultants, Business Coaches. Bringing them together to lean into their areas of expertise is vital and while it is an added cost for the business, if it can free you as the business owner, where is your time best spent; often that’s growing the business and generating more income for the business.

Congrats to the Worrells team on hosting an informative event and it was great to see so many people in attendance as often when things are tough in business it can be hard to carve out the time for learning and professional development.

If you’d like more info on any of these key take aways specific to your business, the economic climate or hiring, engaging and retaining employee trends, feel free to get in touch.