Pressure to perform well

It's always the same, says a consultant for a national travel company. "Someone leaves and rather than replace them, they expect us to soak up the extra workload."

Bella Pardoe, national organiser for financial industry union Finsec, says employees at Bank of New Zealand and Westpac Bank have also complained they are understaffed despite both banks making bumper profits.

She cites last year's KPMG Financial Institutions Performance Survey, which records the relative performance of New Zealand's banks.

"The BNZ has 4479 employees and an operating income per employee of $302,000. Its profit for 2004 was $617 million and that's an increase on the previous year, yet they have told us they will not be increasing their numbers of fulltime equivalent [FTE] staff in this year," she says.

Pardoe says Finsec members employed by the two banks say they are expected to work overtime, work when they are sick, are set unrealistic performance targets and have had to work harder to cope with staff cut-backs in branches.

She says one member fell ill with shingles, which she attributed to the stress of poor performance management.

"The bank employees want more staff on board and they want to have better pay. But the big issue is around performance targets.

"Our members tell us the banks keep moving the goalposts. In a worst-case scenario, people could be performance-managed out of a job," says Pardoe.

Interestingly, some of the claims Finsec members make - including being unable to take time off during school holidays or having to return from holidays because their work site is understaffed - are also made by employees of smaller organisations.

Staff at a small Auckland travel retailer were friendly and helpful, but the all-female team was visibly tired. They apologised for delays in processing my travel documents, which they attributed to under-staffing, and said they were upset at having to work through the school holidays when they had leave owing.

The Australian management of the firm denied under-staffing, overwork or stress in the branch and told me that mentioning the branch in a newspaper "would be detrimental to the positions of the people who work there".

What's going on? Are all employers as bad as this Australian example? I asked the BNZ and Westpac to respond to Finsec's claims and invited them to talk about staffing and the management of individual workloads. While the BNZ all but declined to respond - emailing a brief paragraph stating its commitment to being "an employer of choice" - Westpac Bank was more forthcoming.

Andrew MacKenzie, general manager of people and performance for Westpac, says there is not a one-dimensional link between how profitable a bank is and how many people it employs.

"Our business is about balancing the needs of both shareholders and employees as key stakeholders. Westpac has a huge amount of capital, which shareholders expect to see returns on and we have about the right number of people to meet customer and shareholder expectations," says MacKenzie.

However, he says Westpac did identify resourcing issues in parts of its business during meetings with Finsec last year, and admits it can be challenging to recruit staff, particularly in metropolitan areas where demand and competition for skilled finance workers is intense.

MacKenzie says Westpac is trying to speed up its recruitment process by bringing recruitment capacity in-house and tries to cover fulltime vacancies with casual staff in the interim.

"Additionally, our part-time staff increased by more than 200 over the last 12 months, because we asked people if they wanted more part-time work or fulltime work," he says.

MacKenzie acknowledges temporary staff shortages still occur, but says Westpac has not cut back on frontline staff and will employ 40 new frontline staff by the end of the year.

"We respect the right of the union to represent our staff and we view our relationship with them positively. But we have a different perspective to Finsec in terms of how we measure staffing," says MacKenzie.

So how about those performance targets? Are they unrealistic and how does Westpac ensure its people are not under stress trying to reach them?

MacKenzie says the targets can go down as well as up depending on market circumstances and Westpac often asks staff if they have any problems.

"Our staff satisfaction surveys show we have grown staff morale by 10 per cent in the last two years and we measure what our staff are saying," he says.

Megan Rosier, a senior consultant for the New Zealand branch of the global PR business Text100, says listening to staff is vitally important for employers who want to find the right balance between business demands and staff numbers.

"There's no point in hiring for the sake of hiring.

"The key is to get the capacity point right without threatening the values and opportunities that attracted your team to the business in the first place," says Rosier.

Text100 faces recruitment practices possibly more intense than those faced by other industries - some recruiters make a living from bartering off one star PR performer between several firms in the space of a few years.

Rosier says Text100 addresses this type of industry competition and skill shortages by pooling opportunities between itself and its offshore branches and by offering short-term overseas secondments and long-term overseas transfers to attract staff.

"We have also upped our use of capacity planning tools and processes.

"It is so important to ensure that you have the resources to meet the needs of prospective clients before they enter into a contract with you and it's vital to ensure that existing clients won't suffer at the same time. Then you have to ensure your team isn't overburdened by an additional workload," she says.

Like Westpac, Rosier says Text100 is keen on offering flexible working conditions including part-time hours to solve staffing problems.

"The goal is for our people to retain a healthy work/life balance and still meet the performance management needs we have as a publicly listed company," she says.

Finally, who is responsible for what? After all, for various psychological reasons some people deliberately overwork. If they then get sick, is that the employer's fault?

According to the Department of Occupational Safety and Health, employers are responsible for providing a safe, stress-free workplace in which staffing numbers are adequate for individuals to complete agreed work targets while avoiding overwork and stress.

Employees are then responsible for managing their lives in a safe and healthy way - and that includes raising overwork and stress issues with their employer in a timely manner.

David Jones, managing director of recruitment firm Robert Half International, says to attract and retain "Generation Y" staff - who are employment savvy and know what they want - employers need to invest in training and development for managers, placing emphasis on the "soft" skills of performance management and conflict resolution.

"Generation Y is less motivated by money and more by personal fulfilment, employers need to provide reward and recognition programmes rather than solely salary benefits," he says.

They are also probably wise to follow Westpac and Text100's example of being confident enough to discuss staffing and employment issues in an open forum.