AHRI Quarterly Australian Work Outlook - December 2024
December 2023
This report is the third instalment in AHRI’s Quarterly Work Outlook series and draws on responses from 600+ senior business and HR decision-makers.
Like the previous quarter’s Work Outlook, this report examines recruitment intentions and challenges, employee turnover, redundancy intentions and pay intentions. This report finds a sharp rise in redundancy intentions among employers in the December quarter and another modest fall in wage expectations. The report warns that 2024 will be a more challenging year for employers due to falling productivity growth and rising unit wage costs. This will put further pressure on employers to contain wage costs, either by raising productivity or keeping an even tighter lid on pay rises.
For this quarter’s focus topic, we’ve gathered sentiment around absence and the right to disconnect in Australian workplaces. Key questions include the average number of working days lost to unscheduled absence, the key causes of absence, the most effective interventions that help reduce absence levels and employer attitudes towards a right to disconnect policy.
The report provides useful data for HR professionals, executives and boards to help inform key business decisions, and will act as a helpful tool for policy development and decision-making for federal and state government departments and other agencies
Key Insights
1
The AHRI Net Employment Intentions Index, which measures the difference between the proportion of employers that expect to increase staff levels and those that expect to decrease staff levels in the December quarter of 2023, remains in positive territory (+41). This is unchanged compared to the previous quarter.
2
45% of organisations plan to increase staff levels in the quarter, compared with just 4% that plan to reduce the size of their workforce over the same period.
3
Redundancy intentions have risen sharply to 31% in the December 2023 quarter from 17% in the September 2023 quarter. At the same time, recruitment intentions have risen from 61% to 71% over the same period.
4
The 12-month average employee turnover rate to the end of October 2023 is 14%, unchanged compared with the previous quarter. The employee turnover rate is highest among (private sector) manufacturing and production firms (18%) and lowest among public sector (12%) and not-for-profit organisations (12%).
5
The share of employers who have experienced recruitment difficulties in the past three months is 47%, around the same level as the previous quarter’s data.
6
Employers reported that the mean basic pay increase in their organisation (excluding bonuses) is expected to be 2.6% in the 12 months to October 2024, down from 2.8% in the 12 months to July 2024 reported in the previous report.
7
Unscheduled workplace absences averaged six working days per employee per year in the past financial year.
8
Employers report that absence levels in their organisation have increased (40%) rather than decreased (19%) over the past financial year.
9
The most effective measures to improve absence are making or simplifying processes for obtaining reasonable adjustments (36%), investigating and reviewing job quality (35%) and investing in leadership management and capability (31%).
10
The three most common causes of unscheduled absence are home responsibilities (77%), minor illnesses (72%) and COVID-19 (65%), according to survey respondents.
11
The biggest drivers of stress for employees are considered to be cost-of-living pressures (51%), poor work-life balance (40%) and excessive workload (38%).
12
Almost two-thirds (64%) of employers believe that a law or policy that gives employees the right to disconnect from work-related communications outside of working hours would have a positive impact on employees in terms of them being able to perform work flexibly.
For media enquiries, please contact:
Julie McNamara
Media Specialist, Mahlab
[email protected]
0419 595 688
