I read a Fair Work Commission decision this week that I have not been able to put down.  A truck detailing business here in Queensland dismissed a worker by text message in September last year. Almost three years of service. No warning, no reason given, no chance to respond. She lodged an unfair dismissal claim nine days later.

Then the Commission wrote to the business. And rang. And posted the papers out. And sent them again by express post, with tracking that confirmed they had arrived. There was a hearing the business did not attend, and directions giving them until June this year to say something. Anything.

They never did. The decision came down on 9 October, decided on the papers, because there was nothing at all to weigh against her account. (The summary is here.)

What has stayed with me is not the text message. It is the year of silence.

I understand the impulse more than I probably should admit. When something lands that you have no idea how to answer, not answering feels like buying time. It feels like keeping the problem small. But silence is not neutral. It is a decision, and it is the one decision you do not get to make. Somebody else makes it for you, with only one side of the story in front of them. The part I keep returning to is what the Deputy President said about size. Being a small business carried very little weight, because small businesses are generally able to avoid dismissing people this unreasonably. Not having anyone doing HR got much the same treatment.

I think it is fair, and I think it would surprise a lot of owners. Because none of what was missing here was HR expertise. There was no policy that would have saved this, no template, no system. It needed one person to pick up the phone and say out loud to another person: here is what is worrying me, and what do you say to that.

That is not a process. That is just treating someone as though they are actually there.

So this is what I would genuinely like to know, from the owners and managers reading this. When something difficult lands in your inbox, what is the thing that actually makes you open it today instead of next week?

This is general HR information and commentary only. It is not legal advice and it is not advice about your particular situation.

The Inbox Was Never the Real Problem

For a good part of my 20-plus years in Human Resources, I was the only HR person in the building. My later roles inside organisations were stand-alone ones, which meant that when a manager knocked on my door with a question, there was no team down the corridor to ask. I found the answer myself, and I kept what I found. Over time that became quite a library. In the weeks since finishing my Bachelor of Laws (Honours), I have been going back through that library, one document at a time, and asking two questions. What still holds? And what needs rebuilding for today, and for what is coming? Last month it was managing absence. This month I pulled out a Chartered Management Institute checklist, last revised in October 2008, on handling information and avoiding overload.

I will admit I smiled. Here I was with years of carefully saved resources, reading a checklist that warned me against keeping things for a rainy day.

What the 2008 version said

The checklist was written for a manager with an email inbox, a pile of paper and a fairly new thing called the internet. Be ruthless with paperwork. Take your name off mailing lists. Never handle a piece of paper more than once. Watch out for the email that turns into 80 printed pages. And when all else fails, “remember to use the delete key”.

Every step was about the individual. Know yourself. Manage your time. Sort the need-to-know from the nice-to-know.

It was sensible advice. It also assumed the flood was something each person simply had to cope with.

What has changed

The volume, for a start. The paper has mostly gone, and something much bigger has moved in. Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index research (global data drawn from its own products) found the average worker receives 117 emails and 153 Teams messages a day, and is interrupted roughly every two minutes during core hours. Nobody is printing that out.

The messages also followed us home. The Centre for Future Work’s 2025 research estimates the average Australian worker does around 173 hours of unpaid overtime a year. That is about four and a half working weeks, and a fair share of it is the “quick reply” at 8.30 at night.

But the biggest change is not the volume. It is who carries the responsibility.

In 2008, overload was a personal discipline problem. In 2026, parts of it sit with the employer. Two things every small business owner should know.

First, the right to disconnect. It has applied to small businesses (fewer than 15 employees) since 26 August 2025. Your employees can refuse to monitor, read or respond to work contact outside their working hours, unless refusing would be unreasonable. It does not stop you sending the message. It does mean you need to have thought about what is truly urgent, who is paid to be available, and what can wait until morning.

Second, work health and safety. In Queensland, psychosocial hazards must be managed like any other hazard. The Code of Practice gives time pressure, role overload and unrealistic expectations to respond outside work hours as examples of high job demands. A team that is drowning in messages is not only inefficient. It may be a risk you are expected to manage.

And then there is AI

The 2008 checklist suggested finding a human gatekeeper to sift information for you, and using software that ranks content by relevance. That was ahead of its time. Today an AI assistant will summarise your inbox in seconds.

It will also produce more content in seconds, and not all of it is good. Researchers from Stanford and BetterUp have given a name to the polished but empty AI output that lands on a colleague’s desk to fix: workslop. In their US survey, four in ten desk workers had received some in the past month, and each instance took nearly two hours to deal with. Here in Australia, Jobs and Skills Australia has reported that somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of workers are using generative AI without their manager knowing.

So the tool that can reduce overload can just as easily add to it. And when someone pastes client or employee details into a free tool to save time, it becomes a privacy question as well.

What still holds

More than I expected.

Sort information into must-have, nice-to-have, and not necessary. Set aside time to deal with it, rather than grazing on it all day. Do not forward something just because it might be useful to someone. Ask people to report by exception, on one page. And my favourite piece of advice in the whole document: a face-to-face conversation is often worth more than a stack of memos and reports.

That one has aged very well. The medium changed. People did not.

The one piece of advice I would handle with more care now is the delete key. Employers must keep employee time and wages records for seven years, and those records need to be accurate and easy to produce. Be ruthless with noise, by all means. Just know what counts as a record before you clear it.

What it means for your small business

You do not need a big program. In a small team, one conversation and a one-page agreement will do most of the work.

• Agree which channel is for what. Phone for urgent. Email for anything that needs a record. Chat for quick questions. Most overload in a small team comes from five channels all doing the same job.
• Agree what “urgent” means, and how you will reach someone after hours if it truly is. Write it down.
• Set realistic response times. Not everything needs an answer in ten minutes.
• Protect some uninterrupted time. Even an hour a day changes what people can get done.
• Set simple AI ground rules. Which tools, what must never go into them, and a person checks the output before it goes to anyone else.
• Look at your own habits first. If you send emails at 10pm, your team will read them at 10pm, whatever the policy says. Schedule them for the morning.

The quiet part

What struck me most, reading a checklist that is nearly two decades old, is that the problem was never really the inbox. It was the absence of any agreement about what matters, what can wait, and when people are allowed to stop.

The 2008 version asked each manager to cope better. The 2026 version asks us to design work better. I think that is progress, and I suspect the next version will ask how we share the load with AI without handing over our judgement.

My motto has always been “never stop learning”. Going back through this library is reminding me how much there still is to learn, and how much of the good advice was about people all along.

How does your team handle the flood? I would love to hear what has worked for you. email me at paulette@freshhrinsights.com.au 

Sunday 27 September 2026

The Week I Had to Check My Own Homework

I wrote something last week that I need to walk back, and I would rather do it here, out loud, than quietly.

Last Sunday I told you the SCHADS home care increase was landing on 1 October. That was the date everyone was using, including me. This week I went looking for the final determination and found commentary saying the Commission has moved it to 1 December. Same increase, different start date, and two months of breathing room that nobody is going to hand you unless you go looking for it.

That is the thing I keep coming back to. A newsletter is not a payroll instruction. Not mine, not anyone’s.

Here is what caught my attention in the past seven days.

1. One 1 October date moved. Another one did not.

The SCHADS Schedule E home care increase, the disability stream, was widely reported as starting from the first full pay period on or after 1 October. Two independent payroll commentators now say the Commission published its final decision and determination on 11 September and pushed the start back to the first full pay period on or after 1 December 2026. They also both say it is not a flat 15 per cent. Most Schedule E classifications sit around 15, but E.4.2 comes out at 14.96 and E.5.2 at 13.31.

I could not open the determination itself on the Commission’s site this week, so please treat that December date as something to confirm rather than something to bank. Confirm it you must, though, because paying it early and paying it late both cost you, just in different ways.

The one that is definitely landing on 1 October is the Health Professionals and Support Services Award. That flows from a Full Bench decision on 26 May this year, and it is less a pay rise than a rebuild. The old levels tied to years of service are gone. In their place are Levels 1 to 4 anchored to Australian Qualifications Framework levels, with the upper levels keyed to what the person actually does: senior clinician, specialist, supervisor, educator, section manager. The first of five increases starts on 1 October, and the rest land on 30 June in 2027, 2028, 2029 and 2030.

My take. If you run a small allied health practice, physio, psychology, dietetics, imaging, this is the biggest piece of admin sitting on your desk this week. You cannot carry people across on their old level. Every person has to be re-classified against the new criteria, and their qualifications and experience need to be evidenced and filed, including experience they gained working for someone else. Then you need to test it in payroll before the October pay run, not after it.

And the wider lesson, the one that applies to every business owner reading this: when a date appears in the trade press, it is not yet in your payroll. Go to the award. Go to the Commission’s own determination. If the rates or the classifications are genuinely unclear for your business, that is a conversation to have with someone who can look at your actual employees, not a guess to make on a Sunday night.

2. You cannot back-date a dismissal

A decision reported on 21 September has been sitting with me all week, because the mistake in it is so easy to make.

An employer told a worker on 5 March to stay home on pay. The pay then stopped. On 13 April the employer emailed to say the employment had ended, effective 31 March. The worker lodged a general protections claim on 4 May. The whole fight was about the calendar. If the dismissal took effect on 31 March, the 21 day window had closed. If it took effect on 13 April, the claim was in time.

The Commission held it was 13 April. A dismissal takes effect when it is actually communicated to the person in a way that gives them a reasonable chance to learn of it. Writing an earlier date on the email does nothing at all. The matter now proceeds, and the employer had not filed a single response at any point along the way.

My take. I see the instinct behind this often, and it usually is not malice. It is an owner who has gone quiet because the conversation felt too hard, then tries to tidy up the paperwork afterwards so the dates look neater. It does not work, and it makes the business look worse than the original problem ever did.

Two practical things. The date that matters is the date you tell them, so say it plainly, in writing, on the day. And “stay home on pay” is not a holding pattern. It either ends properly, with a process, or it keeps costing you. Letting the pay quietly stop is the worst version of both.

I would add this too. Ignoring a claim does not make it go away. It just means the only version of events in front of the Commission is theirs.

3. Two sick days, and a response that cost the business the case

An apprentice plumber took two days off, one for an injury and one because he was unwell. The employer’s reaction was described in the decision as bullish and intimidating. He resigned. He then ran a general protections claim saying he had been forced out, and Commissioner Jennifer Hunt found the employer’s conduct inexcusable, and that it essentially wished to deprive him of his rights. The constructive dismissal case was made out.

I have only been able to read a summary of this one, so I do not have the full reasoning or the final outcome. But the shape of it is familiar enough that I want to talk about it anyway.

My take. This is the closest case of the week to an actual Gold Coast trade business, and that is exactly why it is worth sitting with.

Taking a day off sick is an employee exercising a workplace right. Not a favour you grant. Not something to be earned back later. If your response to a sick day is pressure, sighing, a comment about the roster, or a quiet cooling in how you treat the person, then a resignation a few weeks later is not really a resignation. It is a dismissal you caused, and “he quit, so there is nothing to answer” is not the defence people think it is.

Apprentices are not a lesser category of employee either. I know how frustrating it is when you are already three people down and the youngest one rings in. I do. But that frustration belongs on your side of the ledger, not theirs.

4. If you have a restraint clause in your contracts, this one is yours

Treasury has an exposure draft out on banning unfair non-competes, and submissions close this Friday, 2 October.

The short version. Post-employment non-competes would be banned for anyone earning at or below the high income threshold, currently $190,100 in base earnings, which is very nearly everyone in a small business. Clauses stopping a departing employee from poaching your other staff would be banned for all employees, whatever they earn. Cascading restraints, those stacked alternatives with the different radii and durations that sit in almost every template contract I see, would be banned outright. The cartel provisions would extend to no-poach and wage-fixing arrangements between businesses.

The commentary I have read differs on the penalty figures, so I am not going to put a number on it.

My take. Open your standard employment contract this week and look at three clauses: the non-compete, the non-solicitation of staff, and whether your restraint cascades. If you are relying on any of them to protect the business, that protection may well be about to disappear.

The work then moves to the clauses that will survive: confidentiality, intellectual property, and a properly drafted client connection clause. That is not a template job, and it is not an HR job either. Restraints of trade are genuinely legal territory, and if your business depends on one, this is the point to talk to an employment lawyer rather than to me. What I can help with is everything around it: the contract suite, the onboarding, the handover process, the exit conversations, all the things that actually keep people and clients rather than trying to chain them.

One more caution, and I would not have thought of it myself. The draft reportedly applies to arrangements made or varied after it commences, which means a bulk contract refresh before then could pull an existing contract into the new rules. So do not rush a re-issue without advice.

If you want a say, Friday is the deadline.

5. Psychosocial risk is now a fifth of one regulator’s entire workload

New South Wales launched a psychosocial advisory service on 22 September, with trauma-trained advisers available to both workers and employers on bullying, harassment, work-related stress and psychological harm.

It is the numbers behind it that I want you to see. Psychosocial requests to SafeWork NSW have more than doubled in five years. In 2025 to 2026 there were 3,145 of them, 20.5 per cent of everything that regulator was asked to deal with, up from 10 per cent in 2021 to 2022. A recent compliance blitz visited more than 200 workplaces and issued more than 80 improvement notices.

That is a New South Wales service and those are New South Wales numbers. But we have had a psychosocial hazards code of practice in Queensland since 2022, and the duty is the same duty.

My take. I have never met a small business owner who did not care about their people. Not once in fourteen years. The gap is almost never intent.

The gap is the document. When an inspector walks in, the first thing they ask for is your written risk assessment. What you identified, what you did about it, when you last reviewed it. Workload. Role clarity. Conflict. Poor support. Customer aggression, which in hospitality and retail is the one nobody writes down. If your answer is “we are a good team and we talk about things”, that is genuinely lovely, and it is not compliance.

It does not have to be a corporate program. For most of my clients it is a few pages, reviewed twice a year, plus actually doing something about what it says.

And a number worth sitting with

The ABS released August labour force figures on 24 September. Unemployment rose to 4.6 per cent, the highest it has been since the COVID years. But look underneath it. Employment actually grew by 39,500, and the rate went up because more people came looking for work, not because jobs disappeared.

The split is the bit I noticed. Part-time up 46,000. Full-time down 6,000.

That reads to me like a lot of business owners doing exactly what I am hearing on calls. Adding hours, adding shifts, staying cautious about committing to another permanent full-time wage. Which is a completely reasonable thing to do, and also the thing that quietly builds a casual and part-time workforce with conversion obligations, rostering obligations and a very different set of risks to the one full-timer you decided not to hire.

Over to you

Two questions this week, and I would genuinely like to hear from you on either one.

The first is the 1 October one. How do you actually find out that a pay rate has changed? Is it your bookkeeper, your accountant, a newsletter, your industry association, or do you find out when someone queries their payslip? I ask because I got the date wrong last week from a source I trusted, and I would like to know what your early warning system looks like.

The second is the sick day one. Be honest with me. When someone rings in on your busiest day, what is the first thing that comes out of your mouth? Not what should come out. What does.

I ask because I suspect most of us are better employers in our policies than we are in our first ten seconds. And the first ten seconds is the bit people remember.

Drop it in the comments, or send it to me privately if you would rather.

A note on what I do and do not do. Everything above is HR commentary and my own opinion, informed by my understanding of employment law. I am not a lawyer, and none of this is legal advice. Where I have said a situation needs a lawyer, I mean it.

Paulette McCormack, Founder and Director, Fresh HR Insights Pty Ltd. freshhrinsights.com.au

For more than 20 years, I have worked in Human Resources, and in my later roles inside organisations, I was the stand-alone HR person. There was no team down the hall to ask. So I found my own information, and over time I built up a resource base of my own. It is large. Bigger than I had realised.

In the weeks since I finished my Bachelor of Laws (Honours), I have been going back through it. And I have decided to start working through those resources properly and bringing them up to date, for today and for what is coming. It is an interesting exercise. It shows you very plainly what has changed in this space, what has held up, and how far we have come. Never stop learning has always been my motto, and this is me living it.

So this is the first instalment. I started with a 2009 management checklist on managing absence. It is a good document. Sensible, structured, the kind of thing I would have handed to a new manager back then without a second thought.

But reading it now, something jumped out at me. Almost every recommendation was about controlling the employee. Trigger points. Return-to-work interviews. Attendance bonuses. League tables comparing which departments were losing the most days.

Not one step asked why people were away in the first place.

Seventeen years on, I think that is the question that matters most.

The numbers, briefly

The latest Australian absence research (Sedgwick’s 2025 Absence Management and Wellbeing Report) puts the direct cost of unplanned absence at more than $4,000 per employee, per year. For a business with ten staff, that is a part-time salary walking out the door. And a worker entitled to ten days of personal leave will, on average, take about eleven.

The figure that stayed with me, though, was this one: more than half of employers say absence linked to mental health is rising.

You cannot manage that with a trigger point.

Absence is usually a symptom

In my experience, the reason for a sick day is very often real. People do get sick. Kids get sick. Parents need looking after. Personal leave exists for exactly that, and it is a good thing.

But when absence starts to climb, or clusters around one team, or lands reliably on Mondays, it is rarely random. It is usually telling you something about workload, about a manager, about whether people feel safe to say they are struggling. Someone who dreads Monday will find a reason not to be there.

The old checklist did say one thing I still agree with completely: poor management contributes to high absenteeism. It was buried near the end. I would put it first.

What the law now expects of you

This is where 2009 and 2026 really part ways. Two things every small business owner should know.

• First, personal leave is a National Employment Standard, not a policy you write. Full-time staff get ten days a year, it accrues and carries over, and you can ask for evidence that would satisfy a reasonable person (a medical certificate or a statutory declaration, usually) as long as the request is reasonable. Your award may add its own rules, so check it before you set yours.
• Second, and this is the part most small businesses have not caught up with: managing the things that make people unwell at work is now a legal duty, not a nice-to-have. In Queensland, psychosocial hazards such as unmanageable workload, poor support, low role clarity and bullying must be identified and controlled in the same way you would manage a trip hazard. That duty sits on the business, and the Code of Practice spells out how.

So the question is no longer just “how do I reduce sick days?” It is “what in my workplace is making people need them?”

What I would actually do

If you run a small team, here is where I would start. None of it needs a big program.

• Have a simple, written absence policy and make sure everyone knows it. Who to tell, by when, what evidence you ask for and when. Clarity is kind.
• Keep a record and look at it once a month. Not to catch people out, but to see patterns. Patterns are information.
• Have a short conversation when someone returns. Two minutes. “Good to have you back. Are you okay? Anything we need to change?” Done well, it is care. Done badly, it is surveillance. The difference is in how you ask, and whether you listen to the answer.
• Treat long or repeated absence individually. Talk to the person, ask what would help, consider adjustments. Do not reach for discipline until you understand what is going on, and get advice before you do.
• Look at the manager before you look at the employee. If one team’s absence is double everyone else’s, the fix is probably not in the policy.

And drop the attendance bonuses. They reward people for coming to work sick and punish the genuinely unwell. I have never seen one improve a culture.

The quiet part

Running a small business is hard, and someone not turning up on a busy day is stressful. I understand the instinct to tighten the rules.

But the businesses I see with the lowest absence are not the ones with the strictest policies. They are the ones where people feel respected, where workload is realistic, and where saying “I am not coping” does not cost you anything.

A sick day is data. The question is whether you are listening to it.

How does your business handle absence? I would love to hear what has worked for you.

HR Musings | Paulette McCormack, Fresh HR Insights Pty Ltd | Monday 21 September 2026

I had a version of the same conversation three times this week. Different businesses, different problems, but the same sentence underneath all of it: “But I had a good reason.” And every time I found myself saying the thing that never lands well the first time you hear it. The reason is only half of it. How you get there is the other half, and it is the half that costs people money. Then the week’s decisions and announcements came through, and they said it better than I did.

1. The engineer, the group chat, and the dismissal that still failed

A Fair Work Commission decision reported this week involved a project engineer who had been with his employer for about three and a half years on the Snowy Hydro 2.0 project. In late October 2025 he sent messages in a private WhatsApp group with nine colleagues. The messages were insulting about his direct manager and encouraged others to resign. He had already given eight weeks’ notice. Management found out when someone photographed the chat on a colleague’s unattended screen. He was summarily dismissed a few days later, on 3 November 2025. No conversation. No show cause. No chance to respond.

Commissioner Crawford accepted there was a valid reason for dismissal. The messages did breach his obligations. The dismissal was still found harsh, unjust and unreasonable, because of the complete absence of process and the circumstances around it: the messages were sent outside work hours, they were never intended for the manager to see, his record was otherwise clean, and the way they came to light was questionable.

He was awarded roughly $13,700 gross plus superannuation, reduced by 50 per cent to reflect his own conduct.

That 50 per cent reduction is the part I want you to notice. The Commission did not think he behaved well, and it said so with the money. The employer still lost, because they skipped the one step that takes an afternoon.

If you have fewer than 15 employees, the Small Business Fair Dismissal Code is not a shortcut around this. It still expects you to tell the person what the concern is and give them a genuine chance to respond before you act.

Another issue here is how you found the evidence. Going through someone’s unattended screen is not a neutral act. If you are relying on something you found that way, expect to be asked about it.

2. The Fair Work Ombudsman’s year, and the word I keep coming back to

Figures reported this week put the Fair Work Ombudsman’s recoveries for 2025 to 2026 at about $453 million for more than 181,000 workers. That is around 27 per cent up on the year before, and close to half of it came from large corporates.

The number that interests me more is the proactive one. Proactive investigations nearly doubled, to about 2,860.

Proactive means nobody complained. It means they came looking.

Small businesses very rarely end up in trouble because someone set out to underpay. They end up there because of drift. A classification set when the person was hired in 2019 and never revisited. An allowance in the award nobody realised applied. An annualised salary that made sense until the hours quietly grew.

Pick one thing this month. Open the award, choose one employee, and check their classification against what they actually do now. Not what the position description says. What they do. That one hour is the cheapest insurance in this business.

3. SCHADS: a 15 per cent increase is two weeks away, for some people

Flowing from the Commission’s gender-based undervaluation review, decision [2026] FWCFB 137 handed down on 1 June 2026, an interim increase of around 15 per cent is due to apply to home care employees in the disability stream, Schedule E of the SCHADS Award, from the first full pay period on or after 1 October 2026.

It is narrower than the headlines suggest. It does not cover core disability support workers in the social and community services stream. Their changes arrive with the new classification structure in October 2027.

If you run a home care or disability service, this is a fortnight away and it is not a small number.

Two things worth doing now. Work out exactly who sits in Schedule E, because applying an increase to people it does not cover creates a problem of its own and it is very hard to walk back. And confirm the final determination before you change payroll, because the phasing has been working its way through the Commission and I would want the determination itself in front of me rather than somebody’s summary of it.

Then have the funding conversation early. Do not wait until the first pay run to find out what your contracts absorb.

Of everything in this week’s list, this is the one I would most want you to check against the Commission’s own case page before you act on it. Summary of Decision 16 April 2025 

4. A performance plan followed “to the letter” was not reasonable management action

Outside Fair Work, but worth a look. The NSW Personal Injury Commission dealt with a claim by a marketing manager for a psychological injury, where the insurer argued the injury came from reasonable performance management. Member Gabriel disagreed. Requiring her to adhere to her performance improvement plan to the letter was, in his words, “so lacking in fairness and flexibility” that it was not objectively reasonable. He noted the employer seemed able to find flexibility around the plan when it suited the business, but not when it suited her.

This is New South Wales workers compensation, not Queensland, and not a Fair Work matter. The principle still travels, because it is the same behaviour being looked at through a different window.

Performance management is legitimate. I will defend it all day. What this says is that a plan is a tool, not a trap. If circumstances change and you will not move, and the person can see you moving for everything else, you have stopped managing performance and started applying pressure. In Queensland that same pattern turns up as a psychosocial hazard question under the work health and safety duties, not only as a fairness question.

The practical version: when you write a plan, write into it how it gets reviewed and what happens if things change. Then tell the person that flexibility exists. Most of the harm I see comes from people believing there is no way out.

Where this leaves me

Four different bodies, four different subject areas, one thread running through all of them. A good reason is not enough. A genuine intention is not enough. Having a plan is not enough.

It is how you do the thing. That is not a comfortable message when you are running a business with no HR team, fitting this in between quotes and invoices and everything else. I know it. I also know the step people skip is almost always the cheapest one in the whole process.

So here is what I would like to hear from you. When you have had to performance manage someone, how much room did you leave yourself to change the plan when circumstances changed? And did you actually tell them that room was there?

I have my own view and I am not certain it is the right one. Tell me how you have handled it.

A note on what this is

This is my commentary and my opinion as an HR practitioner, informed by my experience spanning over 20+ years and my understanding of employment law. It is not legal advice and should not be relied on as though it were. If you are dealing with a live dismissal, a claim, or a decision with real consequences for a person, get a lawyer involved. And if you would like a hand thinking through the HR side of it, that is what we are here for.

Are We Quietly Stopping Hiring Younger Workers?

There’s a conversation happening behind closed doors in recruitment right now.  And it’s uncomfortable. Small business owners aren’t saying it publicly, but they are absolutely acting on it.

They’re starting to favour mature workers.

Not because they don’t value younger people. But because right now, they’re asking one simple question:

“Who can I rely on?”

The Reality on the Ground

Through our recruitment work at Fresh HR Insights, we’re seeing a clear trend:  Employers are leaning toward candidates who:

• Turn up
• Stay engaged
• Do what needs to be done
• Don’t push back on every task

And increasingly… those candidates are not the youngest in the pool.

This Isn’t About Generations — It’s About Risk

Small businesses don’t have room for:

• inconsistent attendance
• disengagement
• “that’s not my job” attitudes

One wrong hire doesn’t just cost money, it impacts the entire team. So naturally, employers are choosing what feels safer.

The Problem?

If this continues, we create a bigger issue: Where do younger workers get experience… if no one hires them?

Final Thought

We’re not seeing a rejection of young workers. We’re seeing a return to fundamentals:
reliability, accountability, and contribution.

The question is: Are we expecting those things — or actually teaching them?

Fourteen years ago, I took the leap and started Fresh HR Insights.

Like many small business owners, I had a vision, a strong work ethic, and a belief that I could make a difference. What I didn’t fully appreciate at the time was just how hard the journey would be.

It hasn’t been easy. I won’t pretend that it has been.

There have been incredible highs,  moments where everything feels like it’s falling into place, where the work is meaningful, and the impact is real. But there have also been lows. Times of uncertainty. Times when I’ve questioned decisions. Times when the pressure has felt overwhelming.

And through it all, one thing has made the biggest difference:

The support of people around me.

Right now, as we watch what’s happening in the world,  rising costs, economic pressure, uncertainty, I’m reminded just how tough it can feel, especially for small business owners.

Because often, it’s lonely.

You’re the one making the decisions.
You’re the one carrying the responsibility.
And sometimes, you don’t feel like you have anyone you can truly talk to.

You can’t always offload to your team.
You don’t want to burden your family.
And there’s this unspoken expectation that you should just “handle it.”

But the truth is — no one is meant to do this alone.

Sometimes, the most powerful thing you can do isn’t solve a problem… it’s simply reach out.

Ask someone, “Are you okay?”

And not just as a passing comment, but genuinely ask.
Be present.
Listen.

Not to respond.
Not to fix.
But to really hear what’s being said.

That kind of listening is rare. And it matters more than we realise.

Because when things are tough, when money is tight, when pressure is building, when it feels like everything is working against you, just knowing someone is there can make all the difference.

I’ve seen it. I’ve experienced it.

A simple conversation can shift perspective.
It can ease the weight, even just a little.
It can remind someone that they’re not alone in what they’re facing.

And sometimes, that’s enough to help them take the next step forward.

As small business owners, we’re often so focused on supporting our teams, our clients, and our businesses that we forget about ourselves — and each other.

So this is just a gentle reminder.

Be kind.
Check in.
Reach out.

You never know what someone else is carrying.

And if you’re the one feeling the pressure right now, please know this:

You’re not alone.

There are people who understand.
There are people who will listen.
And there is support available,  even if it starts with a simple conversation.

Because in the end, business is about people.

And people need connection.

Always.

I used to think workplace bullying was mostly about “bad personalities.” The law (and lived reality) nudges me toward a different frame: bullying is a psychosocial hazard—behaviour at work that, if repeated and unreasonable, can create a risk to health and safety. The benchbook even notes intent isn’t the test, excuses like “it was a joke” are misplaced when the pattern creates risk (FWC benchbook). That matters because risk is often cumulative. A single sharp comment may be conflict; a pattern becomes a work-design problem: what gets rewarded, what gets laughed off, and what silently pushes people out (FWC benchbook).

The KIIS FM breakdown is a vivid reminder, even though it is far from an ordinary workplace. Public reporting describes Federal Court proceedings following an on-air dispute, with Jackie “O” Henderson alleging that the network failed to protect her from bullying and psychosocial hazards and seeking at least $82.25 million, while Kyle Sandilands disputes the allegations and challenges his termination (Guardian; ABC; ARN ASX). ARN’s market announcements say Henderson told the company she could not continue working with Sandilands, and that ARN considered Sandilands’ conduct in the 20 February 2026 broadcast to be “serious misconduct” under its services agreement process (ARN ASX). Some procedural and contractual details are drawn from media summaries of filings and remain untested until the court rules (Guardian; ABC).

The stop-bullying framework is also easy to misunderstand. The Fair Work Commission’s role is preventative, not punitive or compensatory: orders are designed to prevent further harm and cannot require payment (FWC benchbook). That limitation can feel emotionally unsatisfying if someone has already been hurt, but it reinforces a practical lesson: early, credible employer action is the real lever.

For small businesses, the hardest part is capacity. Psychological injury claims are a growing, costly category, with longer time away from work than physical injuries (Safe Work Australia). Yet WHS obligations are not a demand for perfection. “Reasonably practicable” requires weighing the likelihood and severity of harm, what you know, what controls are available, and cost (WHS Act). In practice, that can mean durable basics: clear behaviour boundaries; a complaint pathway that is actually used; and work design choices—like workload pacing and role clarity, that reduce chronic overload and conflict triggers (Comcare).

Three small-business steps: set written behaviour boundaries and role clarity; triage and document complaints early, fairly, and privately; redesign workload/rostering hot spots before “pressure” becomes harm.

I was reading a piece in Workplace Express about the push for fairly significant wage increases, somewhere in the range of 7.5% to 11%, to address the fact that real wages haven’t properly recovered since the pandemic and are likely to come under further pressure with rising living costs. The argument was pretty clear: workers are still behind where they should be, and without meaningful increases, that gap only widens.

And honestly, it’s hard not to agree with the intent behind that. If people’s purchasing power has gone backwards and everyday costs are climbing, there’s a strong case that wages need to catch up in a real, tangible way—not just incremental adjustments that don’t quite move the needle.

But reading it, I found myself thinking about the other side of that equation as well. Because while the article focuses (understandably) on the employee impact, in practice, those increases land within businesses that are often dealing with their own cost pressures, uncertainty, and constraints. That’s where the tension really sits for me. On paper, a significant wage increase can be positioned as both necessary and justified, and it may well be. But in reality, not every organisation is equally placed to absorb that kind of shift without consequences, whether that’s on hiring, pricing, or longer-term sustainability.

It leaves HR in a bit of a balancing act. You can clearly see the rationale for a meaningful wage increase, particularly for those on lower incomes. At the same time, you’re often working within a business context that’s asking, “what can we actually sustain?”

What I took from the article isn’t that one side is right, and the other is wrong; it’s that the gap between economic policy discussions and operational reality can be quite wide. And part of HR’s role is to translate that into something workable, where both the human and business impacts are properly understood.

It’s not a neat answer, but then again, most of these conversations aren’t.

There’s a subtle but undeniable shift happening in how people think about work. It’s not loud, and it’s not always easy to measure, but it’s there. Employees are rethinking what they want from their jobs, and perhaps more importantly, what they’re no longer willing to tolerate. The article (that I was reading this weekend that you can find HERE) highlights a growing disconnect between traditional workplace expectations and what workers actually value today: flexibility, respect, meaning, and a sense of being seen. This isn’t just a large corporate issue, in many ways, it’s even more relevant for small business.

Because small businesses don’t have the buffer of layers. Culture isn’t a policy, it’s the owner, the manager, the day-to-day interactions. It’s how someone is spoken to when things go wrong, how effort is recognised (or not), and whether people feel like they matter beyond what they produce. What’s interesting is that this shift presents both a challenge and an opportunity.

For larger organisations, changing culture can feel like turning a ship. For small businesses, it’s more like steering a boat, more immediate, more responsive, but also more exposed. There’s nowhere to hide. If something isn’t working, people feel it quickly. But that also means small businesses are uniquely positioned to get this right.

Employees today aren’t necessarily looking for perfection. They’re looking for fairness, flexibility where possible, and genuine human connection. They want to feel trusted, not managed to exhaustion. They want clarity, but also compassion.

For a small business, this doesn’t always require sweeping change. Often, it’s the quieter shifts that matter most:

• Listening more intentionally
• Being transparent about decisions
• Recognising effort in real time
• Allowing space for life outside of work

There’s also a practical reality: Small businesses operate with tighter margins, fewer resources, and often more pressure. Not every expectation can be met. But how those limitations are communicated can make all the difference. The future of work, as suggested in the article, isn’t about abandoning structure, it’s about rebalancing it. Moving from control to trust. From assumption to conversation.

For small business owners, the question becomes less about “keeping up” with workplace trends, and more about asking:

What kind of place do I want this to be, for the people who help build it every day?

Because in the end, culture in a small business isn’t something you install. It’s something you live, quietly, consistently, and in the details.