Bain & Company recently won the 2008 Hewitt Best Employers in Australia and New Zealand study. SEEK Limited was named as the runner-up, while FedEx Express New Zealand, Inside Mobile, Medtronic Australasia, NSW Teachers Credit Union, The GPT Group, Vedior Asia Pacific and Westaff were all highly commended
Bain & Company recently won the 2008 Hewitt Best Employers in Australiaand New Zealand study. SEEK Limited was named as the runner-up. while FedEx Express New Zealand, Inside Mobile, Medtronic Australasia, NSW Teachers Credit Union, The GPT Group, Vedior Asia Pacific and Westaff were all highly commended. The Hewitt Best Employers study is conducted annually by Hewitt Associates, and the study is used by organisations in Australia and New Zealand as an opportunity to measure employee engagement and align people practices to business strategy.
Smart employers go global
Many Australian employers have started actively sourcing UK candidates for local vacancies, according to Hays. “Over 200,000 British citizens left the UKin 2006 and Australia remains their most popular destination,” said Adam Shapley, regional director of Hays GlobaLink. “This doesn’t include those here on working holiday visas, so there is a large pool of skilled and experienced jobseekers actively looking for a local role that employers can tap into. These skills are a vital injection to the local candidate market, and targeting them before they leave the UK is one way to secure the best talent from this group of specialist skills,” he said.
A laugh a day makes employees stay
Having a good laugh at work can do wonders for a person’s job satisfaction, according to Swinburne University of Technology researcher Maren Rawlings. In a recent study, the psychologist found that individuals who use, and are surrounded by, positive humour in the workplace had higher levels of job satisfaction than those who don’t. During the study Rawlings surveyed 300 workers from 20 different countries about their individual use of humour in the workplace, and how they perceived the humour used by their colleagues. “I found that the more positive the humour climate was in a workplace, the greater the job satisfaction of employees,” said Rawlings.
