The Canberra Business Podcast
A podcast about all things Canberra Business.
The Canberra Business Podcast
The Art of Employee Engagement with Sarah Rajic
A thriving workplace isn't just about attractive salaries – it's about nurturing employee engagement that drives productivity, innovation, and business growth. Sarah Rajic, Managing Director of Capital Recruit, reveals that engaged employees can be 200-300% more productive than their disengaged counterparts, directly impacting your bottom line.
Drawing from her dual perspectives as both a successful business leader and recruitment specialist, Sarah shares practical wisdom on creating meaningful engagement. Rather than aiming for unrealistic "perfect 10" engagement scores, she advocates for sustainable approaches that maintain healthy 7-8/10 levels while addressing areas of disengagement through clear expectations and supportive conversations.
Being compliant with the law, and understanding the impacts of the "Closing Loopholes" changes to the Fair Work Act are a key part of this, and productive teams drive great outcomes for business.
This episode is supported by the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and funded by the Productivity, Education and Training Fund.
Subscribe to the Canberra Business Podcast for more expert insights to help your business thrive, and remember that Canberra Business Chamber members can access free workplace relations support through our employer assist hotline.
Hello and welcome to the Canberra Business Podcast. I'm Greg Harford, your host from the Canberra Business Chamber, and today I'm talking about employee engagement with Sarah Rajic, the Managing Director of Capital Recruit from you guessed it right here in the nation's capital, sarah. Welcome back to the podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Craig, look, it's great having you back. We're having this conversation today because employees sit at the heart of every successful business, and I know you have an interesting view of employee engagement, not only because you run a successful business with a moderate-sized team, but also because you're in the recruitment business and you see firsthand the struggles that employers might have, and you also get a sense of what candidates are looking for if they want to be engaged and productive. So why do you think employee engagement matters?
Speaker 2:Oh, it's so important. Employee engagement matters to business because a happy workplace will be a better performing workplace, a higher performing workplace. Their engagement will flow to their lives, to their client engagement and their thinking, their innovation, their delivery and their outcomes.
Speaker 1:How much more productive do you think an engaged employee is over a disengaged one? 100% more active, more higher, performing 100%, double, triple, three times five times and how do you kind of see that flow through? What does that mean in a practical sense?
Speaker 2:We see a higher engagement with each other, with their colleagues, and that team morale and that driving forward together improves productivity. Then their engagement with their clients they're more positive and happy and able to have real conversations with their clients and they feel trusted and valued from their clients and their colleagues and that drives performance.
Speaker 1:In some big corporates and in government they're often measuring employee engagement. They're using big surveys international surveys in some cases to test the engagement levels of a team. How do you do it in your firm?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we have an employee engagement survey that we look at every six months and we had a HR consulting company that helped us deliver that and we thought about what the questions were going to be and we tried to keep them the same so we could then measure it six monthly and see how we've progressed and what's going up and what's going down. Employee engagement you don't. It's really difficult to have someone that's 10 out of 10 and typically you don't want someone that's 10 out of 10. They've got other things going on.
Speaker 2:Work and life integrates, but what's going on with someone personally can impact their performance at work or their engagement at work. So you kind of want them to be around that 7 and 8 because it's more manageable and more sustainable than someone that's at a 10. And likewise, if you've got too many people at the bottom end, you want to work on how can we get those people up and how we can get them at that 6, 7, 8 level mark. So we do that on a six-monthly basis and then track it over many years and we look at what's going on in the environment, what's going on in the industry and what could be impactful and what can we do, and recognising that we can't do everything for everyone. It's about doing providing them with opportunities to be engaged in the environment, but recognising that they're people and there's stuff that goes on in people's lives and that it can impact on their engagement at work.
Speaker 1:Yeah and a six-monthly survey sounds like a big commitment from a management point of view. How big is your team?
Speaker 2:At the moment it's 10, but we've been up to as big as 24. No, it's not at all onerous. There's platforms and there's consulting firms that can help you with it as well, but it's a survey that takes five to ten minutes, and then the platforms consolidate that for you. Now you're going to ask me what the platform is well, no, I was going to say to you.
Speaker 1:Is that something you would recommend other firms be doing?
Speaker 2:um, it's a temperature check um, you know, it's a temperature check and I'm big on no surprises. You should be speaking with and engaged with your staff, um, every day, every week, every, every month, consistently, so that they shouldn't be surprised. But it's about giving them another avenue to express themselves and let you know how they're feeling.
Speaker 1:On an individual level. You know, as a leader of people, you must get a sense as to sort of whether people are engaged or disengaged in your firm. How do you know if an employee is disengaged and what should you be doing about it as a leader?
Speaker 2:We don't need to know everything that's going on for every individual in your organisation. It's not possible for us to do that. So it's about creating an environment where they feel you can engage, they can share and be vulnerable with you, but we don't have the expectation that they have to share everything. We don't want them. We're not ask. I don't ask them questions specifically and say did you stub your toe on the way to work this morning Because you're in a bad mood? It's more about how are you and what are your plans for this week and what are your plans longer term, but not drilling them down and asking them to share every detail with you. You don't need them to.
Speaker 2:We're all going to have good days and bad days, but it's about how do we bring our best self to the office, and you do that by not feeling like you're going to be attacked. You feel like you can just be yourself in the office and drive your team performance forward. So how do I do it? I keep the conversation flowing. I share, I'm vulnerable. Greg, when I came in and met with you this morning, I shared that I was involved in a little prank yesterday and that was still buzzing in my mood today. So me being vulnerable and sharing a little bit helps others to share back with me as well.
Speaker 1:And if you've got someone in your team who's really not engaged, perhaps over time, is consistently kind of present but not really there in the workplace. What are your tips for managing those sorts of situations?
Speaker 2:Meet with them regularly, have clear expectations and have conversations about how they're going to achieve that, how they're going with achieving those expectations and what are some of the barriers that you could help them to pull down. But yeah, it's clear. But some people are disengaged but they just continue and drive forward, but it becomes really tiresome. And then you ask I ask them questions about well, what does the next month look like, what does the next quarter look like, or the next six months look like, and what are their longer-term goals as well? So we have performance reviews in my business too, and that sort of thing can be addressed in that. But once again, it's that no surprises. Let's keep the conversations going rather than just looking from a distance and judging. It's about engaging.
Speaker 1:Do you think a disengaged employee can ever perform as well as an engaged employee?
Speaker 2:Yeah, they can for a short period, so they can fake it for a while and just get on with the job. But longer term it would be it's in my view it would be almost impossible.
Speaker 1:So what are your key tips for driving an engaged team culture?
Speaker 2:Yeah, thinking about the values of your organisation and ensuring that your team has value alignment, having clear expectations and giving recognition and helping to drive that forward. Giving examples of high performance and what it looks like and helping people to get to that way and conversations, talking and being involved.
Speaker 1:Now you and your team in fact deal with candidates for roles every day. What are you hearing that employers sorry that employees are looking for from employers in 2025?
Speaker 2:employers are sorry that employees are looking for from employers in 2025. Yeah, um, they're thinking about um, what's the role and who are they going to be working with? Is the role going to be satisfying to them? Is it the type of work that they want to be doing? Um, some of them not all will be looking for career progression and keeping up with the trends and what's moving forward.
Speaker 2:For example, how we're using data in hr and how can we drive that and do that better. Or how are we? You know, data analytics in financial management or data analytics in project management. So, what are the trends and will this role help them keep across those trends? Flexibility also that you know they can schedule for their car to be serviced and it's okay to to take some days off to do personal admin and maybe work from home one day a week as well. That seems to be quite popular. Um, and then, when they are in the office, having that collaboration and having, uh, the opportunity to work with the team. Also, what else has been big for people? I'd say that's it. It's who they're going to be working with. What are they going to be doing and where can this, this role, progress them to?
Speaker 1:and you talked a little bit about values alignment earlier. You know, making sure you've got values for your organisation, making sure that your team's aligned with those values. To what extent do you think the values are driven by the team and vice versa? Do you think that the Is it the job of managers to set that culture, or do you need to kind of reflect what your team is doing?
Speaker 2:I think it needs to be driven from the top, but then employees are brought on board and explained what the values look like and giving examples of how that is delivered each day, or each client interaction or colleague interaction. So it does need to be set from the top, but everyone needs to be on board, otherwise it won't work. For Capital Recruit, as we were growing, we realised that we needed to articulate what our values are and why are they important. And then, as we grew again, a few years went by and we decided to go back and look at our values but involve the whole team and ask them to explain are we living the values? Are the values still right as we continue to grow? Do we need to tweak a few things? And really, what was really interesting? I think it was like 80 percent of what we already had in place. They agreed that that's what's important moving forward, and we just tweaked a few other things and there was one value in there that wasn't quite clear. So we went well, if it's not clear, are we living it, can we get rid of it and replace it with something else or just keep it simple? So we didn't have a long list of values of seven, seven values or ten values it was more three or four and then when we celebrate and recognise our achievements, we bring it back to those values.
Speaker 2:So then everyone can highlight when someone's doing something great and how that links into our values. We keep bringing it back to that. It's also involved in our performance discussions and our position descriptions and, course, our recruitment processes. So it's it started from the top, but then it it became everyone. It's everyone's thing and I'd say there's times where people might find a value not quite hitting the mark. So we'll have some conversations about it or we'll we'll talk about the fact that that behaviour doesn't align to how we do things at Capital Recruit. So how do we help, support you to change that behaviour and align better? And that worked. That was a no-surprises approach to it.
Speaker 1:Now you recruit across both the public and private sectors. Do you see a difference in how private businesses approach Employee engagement compared to the public sector?
Speaker 2:Yes, little things like the private sector provide teabags. We've got some government departments that still don't do that.
Speaker 1:Really no teabags in government departments.
Speaker 2:No, no. So you know in the public service if there's a Christmas party they use the social club to fund it and have some fundraisers through the year and then they use that money to fund a Christmas party, whereas in the private sector I don't see that. It's just provided so and you know there might be a retreat in the private sector. I don't see that in government at all, um, but government's got some really great initiatives. Just recently I was um in one department and they had a chess club um and they had a puzzle table and they have um other great social initiatives um that you could say ticks the box of um to help that staff morale and engagement from them In business. There's all sorts. It's vast and very different.
Speaker 1:That's really interesting and I'm horrified to hear that there are employers out there who aren't providing teabags. Yet at the same time, the public service, public sector, is still a really, or is perceived to be a really, attractive place for employees. Is that because money trumps everything else at the end of the day, do you think?
Speaker 2:for some people, yeah, I think so. Maybe it's different for different people. I don't think teabags are a reason to take a job or not take a job, but money does come into it, of course. But you can earn good money in business as well. It's not just about you have to work for government, otherwise you don't get a good salary. Business provides very good salaries in Canberra.
Speaker 1:Now, over the last couple of years we've seen a lot of change in industrial relations law. There have been multiple amendments to the Fair Work Act through the government's Closing Loopholes legislation. That's posed quite a few challenges for employers to keep up with. How important do you think it is for employers to make sure they're meeting all their legal obligations?
Speaker 2:It's very important. So, being involved with people, like with the Canberra Business Chamber, we keep abreast of what's going on. What are the things that we need to maybe tweak and change? So the right to disconnect in in business. I see a lot of businesses will provide a mobile phone. So sending a text message to someone if they, they can turn that business phone off and just deal with it when they get into the office or deal with it when they're clocking on for the day, and so that right to disconnect is there. It can happen and it's good at it. But what I find it's up to the individual as well. An individual saying oh, I got this email at seven o'clock last night and I responded Stop making that decision to respond to that. That can wait till the next day. That doesn't. That's not that urgent. So it's employees also being taken on the journey too. So businesses letting their team know what are some of the workplace relations, what does it mean for them, and how is that going?
Speaker 1:to change the way business is done, and setting expectations is important as a leader, right, because I imagine that you are often dealing with admin stuff in the evenings and you might be flicking a few emails out to your team. But it's important to be clear, right, that you're not necessarily expecting a response. Just because you'll send an email at seven o'clock, 10 o'clock or midnight, you're not necessarily expecting a response that day.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And just because you call someone doesn't mean you expect them to answer the phone. I'm talking about during the day, but one of the things that I do, I'll be thinking about stuff and I'll go oh, I'll just give so-and-so a quick call about that, and then they go. Sorry, I didn't take your call. I was in a meeting. I'm like you don't need to explain why you didn't take my call. It's fine, I know you're just getting on with, because I was running in transit between this meeting and the next and I was getting in the car and the like. So it's about setting the expectations that just because you sent an email, just because you made a call, doesn't mean that it's urgent Now legal compliance is a hassle for people mainly because it keeps changing.
Speaker 1:How do you personally go about keeping on top of the various changes to the law and pay rates and things and what you need to know?
Speaker 2:Being a member of the Canberra Business Chamber Tick. So one of the things was the super increases. We planned for that. We knew that was coming and we continued that on. I don't pay many people at the minimum wage. I don't think I pay anyone the minimum wage. I don't think I pay anyone on awards and the likes. It's all paid above that. But keeping a top of the news and being part of an organisation like the Canberra Business Chamber, making sure you've got the knowledge coming in and actioning that.
Speaker 1:Now you mentioned the fact that you don't necessarily pay people in your business at minimum wage, but of course there'll be people listening to this perhaps in other parts of the employment market who do kind of recruit in volume and at the more junior end of the employment market. For those sorts of businesses, do you think it's important in the current environment that employment conditions are above and beyond the legal minimum and and how do you see that playing out in practice across canberra?
Speaker 2:no, um, you're right, it's really challenging and there's so many awards and there's so much detail that needs to be included in that.
Speaker 2:Um, I find my clients that do pay that rate, um, their team are happy to be paid or they're content to be paid on the minimum wage and they appreciate the penalty rates and the other things that are in there.
Speaker 2:So what's really important for my clients that are in that market is they've got to get their pay right. They've got to make sure that that's an investment of time to get that right and making sure it's accurate to build trust with their employees so that they don't need to question or query their pay often or when there's a change, because they'll know about the minimum wage going up or they'll know about different changes to the legislation or some of them. I should say so I think the business owners need to invest the time and energy to make sure they're getting it right, just to show their employees that they value the work that they're doing. It's important. It's up to the the leaders to make sure they've got that right. But let's recognise it is really challenging. But once you're across it, it's easy to run with the little changes here and there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I guess I should put a plug in here for the Chamber's Employer Assist Hotline. So if you are a member of the Chamber, one of the services we offer is an HR support service. So if you need help trying to sort some of these issues out, we can help you out free of charge as part of your membership in many cases. So, sarah, there's been a lot of chatter about AI over the last couple of years and especially what that might mean for the future of employment. Do you think that has the potential to undermine employee engagement and, as a leader, what are you doing about it or what are you thinking about it?
Speaker 2:AI is there. I saw some stats recently of how many students and young people are using chat GPT in their day-to-day AI is not perfect. Ai needs to learn and progress, and the way that it's going to learn is by people using it. I think AI today will be very different to what it's going to be in the future, but what's really key to business is still it's businesses about people, and people are the assets. So it's about being able to tailor things for your clients or your stakeholders and I don't think AI can necessarily do that well or your stakeholders, and I don't think AI can necessarily do that well. It is worrying to see AI in some little areas. The articles even just today was about recruiters using AI and screening applicants out and AI having is discriminating as well, but the AI is discriminating because of how it's been taught discriminating as well, but it's the AI is discriminating because of how it's been taught. So it needs to be a tool that adds value and is part of the process, but not everything in it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Does it have the potential, though, to make employees feel less valued, less important, less relevant to a business? And are you having those conversations?
Speaker 2:with your team or with the people you're recruiting for? No, I'm not seeing people saying I'm going to be devalued. It's more exciting how can I be more efficient? How can I not have to do the boring administration or have to do the data entry and the like? So it's more exciting still they're not seeing it as a threat. And it's more watch this space. I I want to learn. I want to be part of this journey.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Now, sarah, you've been a business owner for many years. You've been a leader of people for many years. What's been your biggest learning as a leader when it comes to keeping teams engaged and productive?
Speaker 2:That's a challenging question. What learning? Um? I think that you've got to individualize it, that everyone is different and you can't put a cookie cutter approach, um, and being agile and adjusting along the way. Um, the pressures of today are different to the pressures of yesterday, so you'll need to evolve and adapt. What you did yesterday will be different to what we're going to be doing in five years' time.
Speaker 1:Good advice there. Sarah Rajic, thank you so much for joining us. This is the Canberra Business Podcast. I'm Greg Harford from the Canberra Business Chamber and I've been joined today by Sarah Rajic, the Managing Director of Capital Recruit. Don't forget that if you need workplace relations advice, most members of the Canberra Business Chamber can reach out free to our employer assist hotline for support. All the details are on our website at canberrabusinesscom, and don't forget to follow us on your favourite podcast platform for future episodes of the Canberra Business Podcast. I'll catch you next time.