How to attract, retain and support good staff

How has the Certification industry been disrupted by the Covid environment and what have we done to combat the changes

Ayear ago I wrote an article on this very same topic. At that time New Zealanders, and in particular those of us up in the Northern part of the North Island, had just come out of an extended period of restrictions.

Little did we know that we would return from the Xmas break and be pushed back into another series of restrictions.

As the year unfolded New Zealand finally threw open the doors and allowed both its people and international visitors to start the process of travelling freely up and down country again.

By the time this all came into being we had all spent more than 2 years managing Covid through an initial eliminate strategy, and ultimately a learning to live with the virus world

In the previous article I focussed on the core operational levers that we had been required to review and amend to allow our business to operate and effectively survive.

Now a year later all of the changes we had determined to make are either locked in or in the throes of being locked in.

The sticking point

There is one area that continues to be a significant struggle for all businesses throughout New Zealand, and we at Telarc are not isolated from it. This area is the way in which we attract, retain and support people in a post Covid world.

We are a normal business by New Zealand standards. We employ just under 50 people. We have workers based from Auckland in the north down to Dunedin in the south. We have clients on Stewart Island all the way to Kaitaia in the north.

Five years ago the business employed predominantly European males with an average age of late 50’s to mid-60’s.

Covid’s arrival saw a number of those employees retire. When seeking to replace the retiring wave we had in front of us we found ourselves increasingly looking at and employing really good candidates from offshore.

So when you look at our business today it is a completely different demographic.

Half of the current team identify as NZ European. We now find ourselves with the balance of the team being born and educated in places such as Iran, Pakistan, South Africa, Zimbabwe, India, Korea, UAE, Croatia, Germany, Canada, Fiji, the UK and Australia.

Encouragingly as we have on-boarded these people the male/female split is now lifted to 60/40. And our remuneration is based on role and competence within the role as well as performance.

Real world experience

Where have the workers gone? The change is not something we had planned for. What we discovered as we looked to replace our ageing workforce was that there weren’t many New Zealanders with the experience and qualifications we needed who were looking for work.

You may ask why? The challenge we have is that we need people with real world experience. We audit predominantly infrastructure management, manufacturing and construction companies. The building of those entities took place, in a good proportion of cases, many years ago.

As we, in New Zealand, have automated processes and downsized traditional operational training grounds for new talent coming into the industries sectors mentioned earlier we have seen the pool of “could be” auditors diminish.

On the other hand, in the countries I mentioned earlier, from whom we are sourcing qualified people, we are able to access people who have been involved in, or supported, the development and management of large-scale infrastructure projects. This is both in their own countries as well as within the regions they have resided in / travelled to.

By having the experience they do, and also having been exposed to management system auditing, they arrive really well qualified to support the growing certification market that New Zealand is experiencing.

We still find the odd diamond in New Zealand who brings the work experience we need to the job. In most cases, though, the people who do successfully come to us do have a number of years of experience in a variety of operational roles.

This leads to our having to jointly invest between 9 and 12 months to be trained, and supported, to be confident when they start their stand-alone auditing journey. We continue to support and on-board local people, but as I have said the journey to being confident is a long one.

The other aspect to weigh into this equation relates to “where have all the New Zealand workers gone”. We hear all sorts of reasons including – early retirement, overseas experience (delayed or just the right time for it), moved to another country for higher pay or lifestyle, became a real estate agent or property developer pre-2022.

The list of reasons is getting longer and, to be honest, it is not something we can influence change in overnight. It is what it is and as a result we solve for today’s problems with the most suitable resource we can find. And on the whole the best qualified come to us from offshore.

New approaches needed

With the on-boarding of people from all over the globe we have found ourselves facing dilemma’s that we wouldn’t have predicted in a pre-Covid world.

A good example of one of the challenges we face is dealing with spoken and written English. For a number of the people who have joined us English is the second, or third and even sometimes fourth language of choice for them.

So things that would normally be taken for granted, such as writing or defining orally a concisely worded observations or recommendation, can initially be a struggle for some of the new people we have employed.

Add into this the idiosyncrasies that make New Zealand business, and social banter, challenging for new arrivals results in both our clients and our new auditors ending up being a little frustrated in finding com- mon understanding.

We recently ran a structured approach towards better understanding some of the dilemma’s auditor’s face when getting out into their first “stand alone” engagements.

One of the biggest insights related to keeping the onsite auditing engagement calm. When managing an audit the last thing the auditor wants is for the audit to turn into a “voices raised” and “defensive” engagement. Finding ways to put all parties at ease is a skill. And when achieved allows the engagement to proceed with minimal flare ups or disruptions.

Even for New Zealand born and raised auditors, out on their first “stand alone” audits, keeping the engagement calm is challenging.

They come to the engagement understanding

Telarc is a Jas-anz Accredited Certification Body which provides qualified, competent, New Zealand auditors, who are industry coded to provide relevant and impartial intervention for a large range of New Zealand business regardless of the business size.

The body is able to provide New Zealand business with an individual or a team of auditors capable of assessing one or multiple standards across one or multiple sites.

While the key priority of any commercial relationship is to deliver a product or a service, there is an increasing need from businesses to have confidence that their tendering parties and suppliers are managing their business in a manner that won’t negatively impact the supply relationship.

There are increasing demands from buyers for their suppliers to provide confidence that they are operating their business in a manner that is delivering good quality and environmentally aware products (ISO 9001 and ISO 14001) while managing workers in a way that protects worker well-being and safety (ISO 45001). the idiosyncrasies of New Zealand and its language. So when a recent arrival to New Zealand who is operating with English as a 2nd or 3rd language is trying to i.) Interpret the spoken word while, ii.) trying to keep the client calm and engaged, the world can turn messy very quickly.

There is more demand across other areas such as ethical work practices, Asset Management (ISO 55001) and IT Management (ISO 27001).

Accredited Certification looks for gaps, risks and improvements in the way that work is actually done versus the way it is planned and communicated.

This provides visibility of where work practice and or documentation anomalies lie in all levels of the business. This then leads to improvement activity so Certification can be granted.

The second growing area that is driving minimisation of risk through Certification is through board and senior leader directives.

Over the last decade, legislation and regulations have looked to push culpability for sub-optimal work practices towards senior leaders and boards.

I haven’t even touched on the writing of reports in this overview as this then creates the next downstream challenge for the new arrivals.

For those of you reading the article you probably are thinking why bother, if it is going to create all the frustrations alluded to above?

Enthusiasm for the job

What we have found is the people we are hiring from off shore are intelligent, motivated, qualified, “keen as” workers who want to live in a country where they can safely raise their family while working hard.

When I was growing up, the qualities I see in the people moving here is what differentiated New Zealand from other countries and made our people successful all over the world.

To that end increasingly we are going to become more reliant on workers coming from countries around the globe. Understanding their culture and their difficulties when integrating into the New Zealand way is going to be a challenge we will have to solve for.

The above is one example of the challenges we are facing in a post-Covid world. There are a number of others, but for this exercise I think it is better to focus on one area to highlight the changes we will all have to deal with over the

next few decades.

Goodbye good old Kiwi business

Once an organisation accepts that the days of being the “good old kiwi business” are gone and that the new world order requires a very open, culturally diverse mind-set the overarching people management ethos changes, significantly.

The key is to embrace the change and find ways to adjust our mind-set to remain successful, rather than fighting it.

Which is a nice segue into the final point of this overview.

The greatest challenge post Covid is mind-set. Trying to bring back the past, trying to replicate what we want and trying to carry out work in a way that was successful before is not going to be easy.

Mind-sets need to change and need to adjust to a new world order in which the globe is becoming a huge resourcing opportunity, and that we should get the best people we can before someone else does.