The Latest from Kristy-Lee

Hello and welcome to Episode 344 of The People Powered Business Podcast.

If you walked away from your business tomorrow for a whole month, with no phone, no email and no checking in, what would you come back to? For a lot of business owners with a solid team, the honest answer is "a mess", or "I'd never even try". You've hired good people, you've got roles and an org chart, and yet the business still leans on you for almost everything.

Here's the thing: hiring a team doesn't automatically give you freedom from your business. Freedom is one of my own values, and it's what I want for every business owner I work with. But so often we build teams and structures that still depend on us completely. Most of us have had the week-long break where we work flat out beforehand to get ready, the team hangs on until we're back, and we return to a pile of questions, decisions and unfinished work. The business didn't run without us that week. It just waited. That's why a month is the real test. It's...

Most Australian small business owners already know who on their team needs to go long before they do anything about it. The decision has been on their mind for weeks, sometimes months, while the excuses pile up and the performance never actually improves. By the time the call finally gets made, what should have been a straightforward exit has usually turned into a far harder legal process, and the rest of the team has already worked out exactly what you're prepared to tolerate. Here is why business owners drag their feet on firing decisions, what the delay is actually costing the business in the meantime, and the legal groundwork worth checking before you make the call.

What actually happens when you sit on a firing decision too long?

The longer a firing decision stays unmade, the more it costs you on every front. Waiting past the probationary period without documented warnings makes an exit far harder to execute cleanly, and it does nothing to protect the business from an unfair dis...

From the first full pay period on or after 1 October 2026, the pay and classification structure for health professionals under the Health Professionals and Support Services Award 2020 changes completely.

If you employ health professionals including occupational therapists, physiotherapists, psychologists, dietitians, podiatrists, medical imaging technologists or other allied health professionals, this is not a straight forward wage adjustment. It is a full reclassification exercise, and it is built on qualifications and years of experience rather than the old flat pay points.

Practices that have never paid much attention to award compliance, because salaries have traditionally sat well above the minimum, are the ones most exposed right now.

What Actually Changes Under the New Structure

Every health professional employee covered by the Health Professionals and Support Services (HPSS) Award needs to be reassessed against the new structure before 1 October 2026. That reassessment i...

Every business owner has had the same conversation: you vent about a staff member to your partner, your mum, or your best mate, and they say exactly what you want to hear. Sack them. You deserve better. How dare they treat you like that. It feels supportive in the moment, and for Australian small business owners it's often the only outlet available, since venting to the team about the team clearly isn't an option.

The problem is that this advice, however well meant, is rarely the advice your business actually needs.

Why is advice from the people closest to me not the right advice for my business?

Because the people closest to you are invested in your feelings, not in your business. Their advice is built to make you feel better in the moment, not to solve the actual problem, and they're working from a tiny slice of context rather than the full picture. That combination can feel like support while actually keeping you stuck exactly where you are.

If you've ever hung up the phone from...

Most business owners set boundaries with their team at some point, a standard around attendance, quality, communication, behaviour.

Far fewer actually hold them. Australian small business owners tend to be good at the first part and quietly slip on the second, and that gap is where most ongoing team frustration actually comes from. Once you see why boundaries erode and what it takes to protect one, the whole pattern becomes much easier to interrupt.

What actually causes a boundary to break down over time?

A boundary breaks down when tolerance goes unaddressed, because your silence reads as permission, not patience. Every time a small slip goes unmentioned, the person on the other side of it reasonably assumes the behaviour is fine, since nothing was said to suggest otherwise.

The boundary doesn't disappear in one moment, it erodes one small unaddressed incident at a time.

If you've got a team member who isn't performing, isn't showing up the way you need them to, or is behaving in...

The bigger your team gets, the lonelier the job usually feels, and almost nobody tells business owners this is coming.

Growing headcount is supposed to mean more support, more hands, more people to lean on.

Instead, a lot of Australian small business owners find the opposite happens: the more people they hire, the more isolated they become as the person carrying the final call on everything. This isn't a personal failing or a sign you're managing your team badly. It's one of the most predictable, least talked about parts of scaling a business, and once you understand why it happens, there's a clear way through it.

Why does having more staff make you feel lonelier instead of less alone?

Because a bigger team increases the number of decisions only you can make, not fewer, and it increases how much responsibility you feel for other people's jobs and income. At the same time, no team member, however loyal, will ever carry the same psychological investment in your business as you do.

T...

Most Australian small business owners genuinely want their team to feel good at work, and most have tried something in the name of wellbeing: a morning tea, a wellness day, maybe a gym membership perk.

The problem is that most of these efforts treat the symptom, not the cause, and that's why they rarely move the needle.

Workplace wellbeing expert Amy Green, author of The Wellness Paradox, shared her expertise over on The People Powered Business podcast recently to help me unpack what actually drives wellbeing at work, and why the free coffee and the yoga mats were never really the answer.

Here's an overview of the key points of our discussion.

Why do most workplace wellbeing initiatives fail to make a difference?

Because they focus on quick, feel-good fixes instead of the underlying conditions that make people want to do good work.

Amy describes this as the difference between hedonic wellbeing, the instant, feel-good stuff like morning teas and massages, and eudaimonic wellbeing,...

A lot of Australian small business owners undermine their own authority without realising it, not through anything dramatic, but through the small habit of over-explaining, apologising, or adding a disclaimer before giving a perfectly reasonable instruction.

It feels considerate in the moment.

What it actually signals to a team is that decisions are up for negotiation, and that erodes trust faster than almost anything else a leader does. If you've ever caught yourself justifying a decision before you've even finished making it, this is worth an honest look.

What is actually happening when you over-explain a decision to your team?

Over-explaining tells your team, whether you mean it to or not, that your decisions are open for discussion. It replaces clarity with noise, and your team ends up more confused about what's actually expected of them, not less.

The fix isn't to stop explaining altogether, it's to separate giving context from asking for permission, because only one of those...

Most Australian small business owners have at least one team member whose behaviour, attendance, or performance isn't where you want it to be, and most put off doing anything about it.

The instinct to wait it out feels reasonable in the moment: maybe it's a bad week, maybe raising it will come across as picking on someone over something small. But staying quiet doesn't buy you time, it costs you authority, and the longer it goes on, the harder the eventual conversation becomes.

What actually happens when you let bad behaviour slide?

Silence doesn't read as patience to your employee, it reads as permission.

Every day you don't address a problem confirms, in their eyes, that what they're doing is acceptable, so there's no reason for them to change it. The behaviour doesn't stay the same size either. Left unaddressed, it tends to expand, because nothing is stopping it from doing so.

If you're running a team, you've probably felt this exact tension.

You notice something isn't right, ...

Halfway through the year is when a lot of Australian small business owners have to admit that the first six months didn't go the way they'd hoped.

Rising costs, ongoing compliance changes, and the daily challenge of running a team can leave you staring down the back half of the year wondering how to get everyone refocused, without turning it into an awkward, formal performance conversation.

The answer sits somewhere you might not expect: professional sport.

The best coaches in the world reset an underperforming team in about fifteen minutes at half time, and the same approach works just as well in a small business as it does in a locker room.

What does a mid-year team reset actually involve?

A mid-year reset can be a short, honest conversation, it doesn't need to be a formal review and not a full day locked away in a planning session. It follows the same shape a good sports coach uses at half time: name the score honestly, pick one or two things to change, reconnect the team to wh...