Tagged with Keith Townsend

‘We are very focussed on the muffins’: product trumps employment matters in franchises

Centre for Work Organisation and Wellbeing
Published AuthorCentre Manager
A 2012 report from The Franchise Council of Australia highlights around 700 000 people to be employed by franchises nationally. Interestingly though, only one third of franchisors employed human resources (HR) or industrial relations (IR) professionals, or provided access to such advice for franchisees; nor did they conduct internal audits into how franchisees executed employment […]

The role of leadership in building innovation and productivity

Centre for Work Organisation and Wellbeing
Published AuthorCentre Manager
Centre for Work, Organisation and Wellbeing(WOW) and Griffith Business School (GBS) researchers have been awarded funding by the Centre for Workplace Leadership(CWL)–a Federal government initiative based at the University of Melbourne–dedicated to increasing workplace productivity by assessing and building the capacity of small and medium enterprise through frontline leadership, performance and job quality. Associate Professors […]

Hospital accreditation and HRM: a likely pair?

Centre for Work Organisation and Wellbeing
Published AuthorCentre Manager
In 2013, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) reported more than one quarter of a million full-time equivalent persons to be employed in Australia’s public hospitals. As the most resource-intensive element of the healthcare system (with about 62 per cent of recurrent expenditure), the sector is under constant pressure to implement organisational change […]

Redistributing economic and social power: what the IR, HR research says

Centre for Work Organisation and Wellbeing
Published AuthorCentre Manager
Members of the Centre for Work, Orgnaisation and Wellbeing (WOW) travelled to Melbourne in early February for three days of collaboration and presentations at the 28th Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia and New Zealand (AIRAANZ) conference. Focusing this year on ‘Work, employment and human resources: the redistribution of economic and social power?’, six […]

Workplace partnership, collaboration and mutual gains

Centre for Work Organisation and Wellbeing
Published AuthorCentre Manager
An Australian Research Council Linkage Project team who, with Queensland government partner agency, the Department of Employment and Industrial Relations (now the Department of Education, Training and Employment), have spent the past five years investigating the internal dynamics of collaborative union and non-union relationships with managers in Australian workplaces, hosted a day-long symposium on 10 […]

Is enterprise bargaining still a better way of working?

Negotiation
Centre for Work Organisation and Wellbeing
Published AuthorCentre Manager
In 1989, the Business Council of Australia produced a blueprint for change entitled ‘Enterprise Based Bargaining Units: a Better Way of Working’. To a great extent, this document and the corresponding shifts in business, government and union approaches to wage and conditions determination meant Australia shifted from a centralised to a workplace system of bargaining. […]

Where lies the innovation in employment relations?

Centre for Work Organisation and Wellbeing
Published AuthorCentre Manager
Small, fast-growing firms are often considered incubators of innovation–but are they incubators of innovation in employment relations?That’s one of the questions driving a major Australian Research Council Discovery project underway across Australia.The project, headed by three WOW members, Professor David Peetz, Professor Adrian Wilkinson, and Senior Research Fellow Dr Keith Townsend, has used a mixed […]