ELECTION 2023
Sponsored Article
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.
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
A
year 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 56 propertyandbuild.com
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
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
