Dunheved Industrial Group

The results of the recent meetings and networking group are contained in the following two documents for your viewing and comment.

Why is training so important
“What if I train my people and they leave as opposed to what if I don’t train my people and they stay. If we train our people well, they tend to be more loyal and productive. If they eventually decide to leave, we know we have done our best for both the individual and the company.”
It’s a thought that’s often reiterated throughout the business community. Training is even more pertinent considering the battle that employers have to source the best skills for their business.  It is one way of keeping staff and an effective tool to getting a job done properly.
The most important asset for any business is its people, even more so considering the acute labour and skills shortage many businesses are experiencing. While it’s easy to think of staff only in their current situation and the positions that they hold, it is a lot harder to try to foresee the future needs for these people. Existing employees need to acquire new skills and knowledge to keep them motivated and the business moving forward.

Tips for businesses to adapt to the future workforce
• Make employing the right staff for your particular business a key priority. Poor recruitment is an expensive mistake for any business, even more so in times of a severe skills shortage.
• Have sensible HR risk management strategies in place. This will better prepare a business for the worsening skills crisis. Strategies should be primarily focused on attracting skilled staff, retaining skilled workers; and employing measures for integrating different generations into one motivated team.
• Before making an employment decision: Reassess your business plan and consider what skills your business needs for now and the future. Develop detailed job descriptions for the roles you need to fill. Undertake employee screening and choose new staff wisely. Be aware of the value of diversity of staff by gender, ages, skills and background
• Develop practices, such as job sharing and job rotation, to encourage knowledge transfer within the organisation.
• Have flexible HR practices, offering part-time and variable hours, which acknowledge the family commitments of employees.
• Recognise the value of interpersonal skills, which are critical to maintaining effective work practices.
• Develop a culture that reflects the values and needs of the employees. Update staff skills constantly to optimise the value of employees and enable them to move up within the organisation.
• Become an employer of choice and adapt the culture to meet these challenges.

Succession Planning: you can’t ignore this
Within the next decade or so, many baby boomer business owners will be retiring or exiting from their businesses resulting in a glut of enterprises on the marketplace. 
Where family members are not interested in taking on the helm, employers need to consider a hand over to appropriately sourced and trained managers to sustain the life of their organisations, if that is the owner’s intention. 
Often these are businesses that have been built up over a lifetime which makes it all the more important that owners take succession planning seriously - particularly as the market is experiencing acute labour and skills shortages.
Succession planning helps to protect the lifetime of a business well beyond its operations and ownership structure, as well as against the unexpected illness or loss of an owner or senior management’s time.
There is a range of issues that businesses need to address if they are to develop effective succession planning strategies. 
For some businesses who employ a small number of staff or who rely on family members to operate the business, consideration should be given to the financial and workplace aspirations of children, partners or other staff within the business when developing a succession plan.
With planning, it may be possible for more mature owners to move from a fulltime to a part-time capacity while other family members begin to take a more active role in running the business. Alternatively, a succession plan may incorporate an agreement to sell the business within a certain time frame.

Tips for sensible succession planning
 
1. Consider family members as successors: identify the family member(s), discuss the succession plan, share a common understanding, get their agreement and involvement, and clarify the anticipated roles, responsibilities and opportunities. Before you make a decision about a family member automatically taking over the business consider:
• Do family values conflict with commercial decisions?
• Does the family appreciate that involvement in the business is a privilege, not a right?
• Is the family business managed professionally?
• Will the family business fund growth and retirement?
2. When determining successors
• Assess their skills and identify any weaknesses.
• Build extensive profiles of potential employee and outsider successors for evaluation.
• Consider emotional and standard intelligence measures.
• Consider past performance and future leadership potential.
• Consider how well potential successor’s behaviour and values match the business.
3. Combine assessment for succession with a two to three year development plan
• Include evaluation of potential successors as part of the regular business, human resource review and performance management processes.
4. Develop a risk management plan that:  
• Describes who in the organisation will take over senior roles in the event of an emergency with a detailed action plan.
• Incorporates contingency plans for the company to follow if something happens to any of these executives.
• Identifies any gaps in skills and expertise. Arrange training where necessary.  

Testimonials – Member Feedback Unsolicited
 
Able Office Furniture would like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to the Penrith Valley Chamber of Commerce for helping us build/expand our business within the Penrith district.

Having been apart of the Chamber for the past 12 months and attending regular meetings we have continually gained great business and personal contacts. The meeting nights have been a great source of networking and have helped build our confidence in dealing within the local business community.

Many Thanks

Paul and Elaine Montgomery

 Functions:
 
Tracey Loughland - AAA Safe Cash AAA Security Solutions - I want to express my thanks for the informative and supportive evening on Wednesday at the Small Business Support Group.  Very unsure of what I was to encounter it was a wonderful opportunity to meet other people “in the same boat” and talk about the joys of being a business owner.  Through talking to a few of the other members I became aware of some areas that I need to address and offered advice to others.  A big THANKYOU to Telstra Countrywide for their presentation and for the Lucky Door Prize – the jacket will come in handy for the car races and football, please pass on my thanks for me.

Debbie O’Connor – Penrith Valley Home Based Business Network - I just wanted to thank you for the Small Business Networking meeting on Wednesday evening.  It is the first one that I have been to and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  The atmosphere was so friendly and welcoming and I got to not only meet, but actually talk to some wonderful business owners.

I think it’s a wonderful Chamber initiative!

Tracey Machut – Tony Ferguson Weightloss Centre - I have attended the Monthly Networking evening and Small Business Group Networking Functions, I found them Great Value for business connections. I was very impressed with the Telstra SBSG.

 Website:

Linda Kemp – Complete Recruitment Solutions - I have been advertising on the PVCC website since becoming a member of the chamber last year, just after the website was launched. I thought “$1.50 per day is not a lot to risk…let’s give it a try” We are a really new business, just over a year old now, so we really needed to do something different to ‘get our name out there’.

Whenever we have enquiries from new prospects (clients), we always ask how they came to hear about us, and I am amazed at how many times we hear the words ‘we saw your ad on the Chamber website’.

When we originally decided to try advertising with a small ad, I wasn’t sure if we would get much response, but I am so impressed with the feedback that we get, that I have decided to invest in a larger size ad.