Reduce risk, avoid headaches and drive culture during the silly season

By Jevita Nilson

Christmas is just around the corner and most businesses are feeling the urge to loosen their ties and let their hair out in preparation for the ‘silly season’ celebrations. Although Christmas parties are a great way to reward your employees and collectively celebrate the year’s achievements, poorly planned and executed Christmas parties can lead to sticky situations that may undermine strong organisational cultures and potentially lead to legal issues.

Rebuilding Cambodia

Checkside Adviser, Kristy Campbell recently joined representatives from Azure Capital on a charity expedition to Cambodia on a mission to build houses for Cambodian families exposed to extreme poverty. Below is an overview of Kristy’s journey.

More Pressure on Workers

Checkside’s Managing Director, Chris Bates was quoted recently in The West Australian in an article outlining some of the key trends developing in the employment market.

See the following link to read the article: More Pressure on Workers.

We’re interested to hear your thoughts. Do you agree with Chris’ comments? Have recent stock market volatility and uncertainty over foreign markets made you cautious and cooled your demand for new employees?

Six steps to successful work from home arrangements

By Jevita Nilson

An ever increasing desire for workplace flexibility, coupled with increased travel times and rapidly advancing technology are changing the nature of Australian workplaces. These factors are the key drivers to the recent increase in working from home requests. In Australia, more than two million people are on flexible work arrangements and the number is on the increase.

We have received a number of queries over the past few months from clients who have received working from home requests from their staff. We are finding that employers are cautious about entering into a work from home arrangement for a variety of reasons including concerns about health and safety regulations, fears about decreasing productivity or due to trust issues.

Legal Secretaries…where are they?

‘Where are all the legal secretaries?’ This is a regular question from Perth law firms. Often they wonder if they have done something wrong – Do they have a bad reputation with secretaries? Are the lawyers scaring them off? Are they not paying enough? They all want to know why it is so hard to find a legal secretary! 

Now is the time for firms to look at the real reasons that good legal secretaries have disappeared and address it before the shortage becomes worse.