Linda’s expertise has been developed through many years of practical, “in-the-field” experience across the private, public and corporate sectors.
Linda took her knowledge of the Australian workplace relations landscape, garnered as lawyer with leading law firms Blake Dawson Waldron (now Ashurst) and Corrs Chambers Westgarth and applied it to her work as an Employee Relations specialist. Linda worked in-house as a senior employee relations advisor and then manager, handling all types of employee related or human resources issues. These ranged from employee under-performance, absenteeism, redundancies to disciplinary processes and terminations for misconduct, across a range of seniority levels.
Since joining Paterson & Paterson Consulting Linda has assisted a range of organisations with human resources and employee relations issues. Clients, in both private and public sector, have been assisted with strategy and structural issues, investigations, mediations, policy development, training, performance management and recruitment.
Recent examples:
- Undertaking arms-length investigations of sensitive allegations, enabling the resident HR personnel to remain neutral and support all parties.
- Updating policies and developing processes and protocols in response to changes to legislation, including recent changes to the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth).
- Assisting growing organisations to clarify their end-to-end operations and clarifying job roles and goals within that process, reducing confusion over responsibilities, closing gaps that had led to lost revenue and client dissatisfaction and clarifying performance levels for all staff.
- conducting first round interviews of candidates against the client’s role description and putting forward a short list of candidates, saving the senior management time and ensuring a non-discriminatory process was followed.
Linda’s approach to HR issues is to work with the client to develop a pragmatic way forward that considers all aspects of the situation, including any causal issues that may need to be addressed.
Linda’s strongest skills are in the areas of:
- Delivering practical and pragmatic solutions to both straight forward and complex HR/ER issues
- Using her legal background to develop HR strategies that address organisational needs while identifying and balancing risk.
- Quickly establishing credibility and relationships of trust with the client, employees and stakeholders.
Linda has also qualified as a Level 1 Coach with the IECL and undertaken training in mediation.