A senior administrator at an accounting firm had been with the business for seven years. Twelve months ago her performance started declining — missed deadlines, errors, inconsistent output. Her manager avoided the conversation for six months, partly out of genuine care for the relationship, partly out of reluctance to deal with the difficulty.

When the conversation finally happened, the employee was devastated — not because she was being told about performance issues, but because nobody had told her earlier. “I didn’t know it had gotten to this point,” she said. “Why didn’t someone say something sooner?”

Addressing underperformance is one of the areas where business owners and managers most often get it wrong — and usually in two directions. Some avoid it entirely until the situation is serious enough to require formal action, which creates the worst possible dynamic: the employee has been given the impression everything is fine, and then suddenly it isn’t. Others go straight to formal process, turning a manageable performance issue into an adversarial legal exercise.

 

Why early conversations is the kindest conversations

The employee in the story above captured something important. Delayed performance feedback isn’t kindness — it’s a disservice. People can’t correct a course they don’t know they’re off. When a performance issue is allowed to compound over months without honest feedback, you end up with an employee who’s surprised, a manager who’s frustrated, and a relationship that’s damaged by the absence of honesty rather than by the conversation itself.

Early, direct, specific feedback — framed as caring about the person’s success rather than criticism of them as a person — is both kinder and more effective than waiting until a problem is undeniable.

 

The Fair Work Framework

Under the Fair Work Act, an employer dismissing someone for underperformance is legally required to have followed a fair process — which includes giving the employee clear notice of performance concerns, a genuine opportunity to respond and improve, and reasonable support to do so. Skipping these steps doesn’t just damage the relationship; it creates unfair dismissal exposure.

The practical implication is that early conversation isn’t just the humane option. It’s also what the legal framework requires. A documented history of honest, specific feedback, reasonable improvement timeframes, and genuine support is both good management and good protection.

 

What the conversation actually looks like

Underperformance conversations go wrong most often because they’re vague, personal, or delivered as a verdict rather than an opening for dialogue. “Your work hasn’t been great lately” is not useful feedback. “Over the past six weeks, three reports have been submitted late and two contained significant errors — can you help me understand what’s happening?” is a different conversation.

The goal in the early stages is understanding. Something in the person’s circumstances, workload, capability, or motivation has changed. Sometimes the issue is fixable with support, training, or workload adjustment. Sometimes it’s more fundamental. You can’t know which it is without honest dialogue.

Managing underperformance well requires both the courage to have the conversation and the care to have it in a way that preserves the person’s dignity and the possibility of a genuine resolution.

Ready to build a better workplace? Book your free 30-minute consultation at Blue Kite HR Consulting 

 

There’s a version of the diversity conversation that gets tuned out by the time-poor business owner managing payroll and client deadlines. It sounds like compliance, or politics, or a large-company initiative with no obvious connection to whether a six-person civil engineering firm in Canberra survives its next growth phase. 

The commercial argument is different, and it’s been made with enough rigour now to take seriously.

McKinsey has been tracking the relationship between diversity and business performance since 2015. Their most recent research, covering hundreds of companies across multiple countries, finds that organisations in the top quartile for gender diversity are 25% more likely to achieve above-average profitability than those in the bottom quartile. For ethnic and cultural diversity, the premium is 36%. The relationship is not incidental — it strengthens over time.

 

Why diversity improves performance

Diverse teams make better decisions. This is one of the best-supported findings in organisational psychology. Groups that include people with different backgrounds, experiences, and cognitive styles challenge each other’s assumptions, identify risks that homogeneous groups miss, and generate a wider range of solutions. The process is sometimes less comfortable. The outcomes are measurably better.

Access to a broader talent pool is a direct commercial advantage in tight labour markets. Businesses that deliberately attract candidates from diverse backgrounds — including people returning to work, people with non-traditional career paths, and people from underrepresented communities — access a larger pool. Businesses that narrow their criteria, consciously or not, compete for the same people as everyone else.

Customer and client alignment is increasingly relevant. If your clients are diverse, a team that reflects their backgrounds and experiences is better positioned to understand their needs, communicate effectively, and build lasting relationships. This is particularly material in industries like healthcare, education, professional services, and retail.

 

Where small businesses often unconsciously limit diversity 

The problem in small businesses is rarely explicit discrimination. It’s typically a series of design choices that produce consistent results without anyone naming them as diversity issues.

Hiring through personal networks. Valuing specific educational credentials or career paths that are more accessible to some groups than others. Informal culture that’s welcoming to some personality types and alienating to others. Lack of flexibility that disadvantages people with caring responsibilities. These are structural, not intentional — and they’re all changeable.

The starting point is honest examination. Who’s in your team, and where did they all come from? If the answer to both questions looks remarkably similar, that’s information worth acting on.

 

Ready to build a better workplace? Book your free 30-minute consultation at Blue Kite HR Consulting 

 

In March 2020, a hospitality group operating across three states lost almost all of their revenue within a week. By April, they had retained their core management team on reduced hours, cross-trained staff into new functions, moved reservations to a digital platform that hadn’t existed before, and pivoted two of their venues to wholesale food production. 

When restrictions lifted, they were in a better position than many competitors who had stood everyone down and tried to rebuild from scratch.

Organisational resilience — the capacity to absorb disruption, adapt, and recover — is talked about a lot but built by a few. What distinguishes resilient organisations from fragile ones isn’t primarily financial reserves or industry luck. It’s the quality and flexibility of their people strategy.

 

What resilient people strategies look like

Resilient organisations have workforce flexibility built in — not just through employment type (though that matters), but through cross-skilling, versatile job design, and a culture of learning that means people can adapt their contribution when circumstances change.

In practical terms for a small or medium business, this means not letting every employee become a single-function specialist with no capacity to operate outside their lane. Deliberate cross-training, role rotation, and development that builds breadth as well as depth creates a workforce that can be redeployed when one part of the business is under pressure.

It also means having a management team that can make decisions in uncertainty. One of the clearest predictors of an organisation’s response to a crisis is the quality and confidence of its leadership. Businesses that have invested in their managers — not just technically, but in their judgement, communication, and problem-solving capability — respond faster and more effectively to disruption.

 

The human factor in resilience 

The most underestimated element of organisational resilience is trust. In a crisis, people’s behaviour is shaped by their relationship with the organisation and its leaders. Employees who trust their employer — who have been treated fairly, communicated to honestly, and valued as people — bring more to the table when things are hard. Employees who feel the relationship is purely transactional conserve their energy.

This means that resilience is built during normal times, not when a crisis arrives. It’s the product of consistent, fair, human management over time — not a rapid response plan.

Psychological safety — the confidence that people can raise concerns, contribute ideas, and admit mistakes without negative consequences — is also a resilience factor. Organisations where people share information freely, flag problems early, and contribute ideas without hierarchy filtering everything respond to disruption with dramatically more speed and accuracy.

 

What you can build starting now

Review your critical role dependencies. Are there functions where a single absence would create significant operational risk? Build redundancy. Invest in the development of your second-tier leadership — the supervisors and team leaders who carry the load during disruption. Review your communication practices: can you reach your entire team quickly, honestly, and directly when you need to?

Resilience isn’t built in a crisis. It’s built on a Tuesday afternoon in February when everything is fine.

Ready to build a better workplace? Book your free 30-minute consultation at Blue Kite HR Consulting

 

A general manager of a retail chain sent emails at 11pm on Sunday nights. He didn’t require responses until Monday morning — that was always clear. But within six months, his entire management team was also sending Sunday night emails.

Within a year, his retail supervisors were apologising for not responding to messages while they were on leave. Nobody had asked for any of this. It had simply trickled down.

Workplace boundaries — the limits people set around their time, energy, and availability — are powerfully shaped by what leaders model. Not what they say, but what they actually do. A leader who says “your time outside work is your own” and then messages people on weekends sends a mixed message that most employees will resolve in favour of the observable behaviour.

This matters more now than it did five years ago. The line between work and not-work has blurred significantly for many Australians. The changes to working from home practices accelerated this. And the Fair Work Act’s provisions on the right to disengage — introduced as part of the Closing Loopholes reforms — have created new legal context around what employers can reasonably expect outside of ordinary working hours.

 

 

Why leaders struggle to model boundaries

Most leaders who struggle with this don’t lack self-awareness. They know they work long hours. The challenge is usually a genuine belief, conscious or not, that working intensely is what commitment looks like — and a worry that stepping back will be read as disengagement or signal that the work isn’t important.

The research goes the other way. Leaders who model sustainable working practices tend to run teams with lower burnout rates, lower turnover, and better sustained performance over time. Teams whose leaders consistently work at unsustainable intensity show short-term productivity spikes and longer-term deterioration.

The other challenge is that the urgency is often real. Small business owners in particular are managing genuine complexity and genuine time pressure. The question isn’t whether that pressure exists but whether normalising it as a standard is good for the business long-term.

 

What modelling looks like in practice 

It’s less about proclamations than habits. Turning off notifications after a certain hour. Not responding to non-urgent messages outside working hours, even if you’ve sent them. Taking leave without checking in constantly. Being explicit when you send a late-night email: “No need to respond until tomorrow” — and meaning it.

It also means being honest in conversations about workload. When someone on your team says they’re struggling to manage their hours, the response that matters is the real one, not the performative one. “What’s creating the time pressure and what can we change?” is more useful than “make sure you’re taking care of yourself.”

The right to disconnect legislation creates a floor, not a ceiling. Your obligation as a leader is to know what it requires — and to recognise that a workplace culture where people feel unable to switch off represents both a legal risk and a significant business cost.

 

Ready to build a better workplace? Book your free 30-minute consultation at  Blue Kite HR Consulting