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Our Management Consulting team successfully completed a range of projects for the Australian Red Cross. Lloyd Doddridge, Chief of Future Directions – The Australian Red Cross explains how our team delivered proven expertise to help the organisation resolve its many challenges in a personalised experience that aligned to their cultural values.
The Australian Red Cross is a not-for-profit organisation providing crisis-relief and care to vulnerable people.
Red Cross faced a significant challenge with a wage underpayment issue involving over 20 modern industrial awards and Enterprise Agreements (EA) that affected ~10,000 people over a period of ten years.
With less than 50 per cent of the necessary data, the organisation had to reconstruct a decade's worth of payroll data by person, by day, and by award, while simultaneously developing and implementing internal controls to ensure ongoing compliance.
The final stages of the remediation program, which spanned 4+ years, involved calculating individual remediation amounts, verifying their accuracy through testing, communicating with approximately 10,000 current and former employees, and the processing of payments to those impacted. The mandated timeframes by the Fair Work Ombudsman’s Enforceable Undertaking (FWO EU) imposed significant time pressures, which the client lacked the internal capacity and capability to meet.
The project was a complex advisory piece with high risk, requiring a high level of trust and expertise.
Grant Thornton delivered comprehensive technical support for the remediation calculations, offered strategic oversight to ensure compliance with legal requirements, and provided program management leadership to help achieve the successful completion of the program.
Grant Thornton mobilised an engagement team of up to eight resources between Sept 2021 – July 2023. This included Associate to Director level team members with both technical and non-technical skillsets. The team quickly and seamlessly embedded themselves in the client’s project team and helped to alleviate program bottlenecks to ensure that critical tasks were delivered on time and to a high level of quality.
This strengthened the client’s existing team, provided further expertise, and maintained the program intensity the project’s stakeholder’s required.
Specific activities that Grant Thornton supported included the testing of remuneration calculations, liaising with external consulting firms on behalf of the client, managing payments and communications to current and former employees, assisting in the FWO’s mandated external assessment, and producing a detailed post project playbook.
The benefits Grant Thornton’s team delivered to Red Cross included:
Chris is a Senior Executive with over 20 years’ experience in Corporate Finance and Strategic Consulting. He has worked with top tier professional services firms in Investment Banking and Corporate Advisory. He now works as a specialist finance and transformation consultant helping clients of all sizes and across industries to successfully execute their strategic plans.
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