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Centre for Workforce Futures

Mission

  • Professor Ray Markey - Director of the Centre for Workforce FuturesEstablish scholarly cross-disciplinary collaborations to undertake problem-focused research relating to the workforce and workplace.
  • Conduct research on emerging issues for the workforce and workplace.
  • Promote the results of the research undertaken to industry, governments, the not-for-profit sector and national and international scholarly communities.

Scope

The research activities of the Centre fall under three pillars:

1: Workforce planning

The Centre meets a growing demand for research and methodologies that inform workforce planning from corporate to national levels. Our research includes such dimensions as demographic trends and life cycles, immigration policies and settlement patterns, skilled and student migration, changes in labour supply and demand and their implications for major industries, and the implications of environmental change for sustainability planning. Discipline areas include demography, human resource management and labour economics.

2: Diversity, employment and organisations

Research on diversity in the workplace addresses issues of how diversity can be encouraged and managed to the benefit of staff, the organisation and the community. Areas of research include inter-cultural relations in the workplace and cross-cultural management, employee behaviour and misbehaviour, and related industrial and legal issues such as bullying, discrimination and occupational health and safety. We also include employment practices currently affecting many industries, such as precarious employment, outsourcing and contracting chains.

3: Management strategy

Critical dimensions of management strategies, such as decision making, communication flows within the organisation, and employee voice are major areas of research for the Centre. We also focus on corporate reputation and such practices as 'employer branding' and 'internal marketing', while an emerging area relates to values, ethics, performance and sustainability in the interaction of organisations and their people.
In addition, members of the Centre pursue research synergies across all three pillars, combining, for example, the more traditional focus on expectations of workers and households, with workforce planning and profiling from the perspective of organisations.

One of the distinct advantages of the Centre is our research capacity in Demography, in which Macquarie University has the only program in New South Wales.

Current Research Projects

Topic:

Supply Chains and Aviation Safety

Topic:

Australian Management Practices

  • Project Name: Australian Management Practices Extension 
  • Who are we working with:
  • Research goal: The aim of this project is to identify the impact of management practices on firm performance and estimate the impact of the differences in management practices to find the most effective practices on firm performance and ultimately increasing national productivity.
  • How are we doing this: This research builds upon the research survey "Australian Management Practices" by Macquarie University and UTS which benchmarked management practices in Australian manufacturing firms against the global best. It will undertake a series of in-depth interviews in a random set of Australian firms, evaluating their performance against a control group based on key criteria found in the above survey.
  • Macquarie University research team:
  • Funded by:
    • Macquarie University Enterprise Partnership Research Grant
    • Cochlear Ltd.
    • ResMed Ltd.
  • Year: 2011

Topic:

Employee Voice and Organisational Performance

  • Project Name: Employee voice in Australia: The impact of employee participation arrangements on organisational performance, employee engagement, and employee well-being.
  • Who are we working with:
  • Research goal: The aim of this project is to provide practical guidance for employers in the establishment of employee voice arrangements, by identifying the consequences and effectiveness of recent changes to the existing legislative industrial relations framework. It will also identify how employers develop voice strategies, and the factors that lead to their success or failure.
  • How are we doing this: This project will adopt a broad quantitative investigation (3 waves of large scale longitudinal surveys) across major Australian industries, and conduct a deeper qualitative study (2 waves of longitudinal case studies using in-depth interviews) within the selected industries with low or diminishing union influence.
  • Macquarie University research team:
  • Funded by:
    • ARC Linkage Grant
    • Voice Project Pty Ltd
    • Griffith University
  • Years: 2011 - 2015

Topic:

Australia's Demographic Transition and Its Impacts on the Residential Property Markets.

Topic:

Population Challenges for the Local Court of New South Wales: The Next 25 Years

  • Project Name: Population Challenges for the Local Court of New South Wales: The Next 25 Years
  • Research goal: This research study aims to identify and analyse the impact of population change on the Local Court as a basis for informing future decisions about the Court.The key research questions to be addressed are as follows:
    • How has the population of NSW changed in the past, and how is it likely to change over the next 25 years in terms of its size, spatial distribution, components of change, and composition?
    • How will these changes impact on the Local Court in terms of its case workload and need for personnel?
    • What are the historic patterns of appointment and termination, Court size, and age/sex
      distribution of NSW magistrates since 1985; what trends are likely in the future; and what impact will this have on turnover, length of service, and other attributes of the Court?
  • How are we doing this: The methodologies include:
    • Analysis of past data on population size, composition, past change and future projections for NSW and its constituent statistical subregions.
    • Analysis of data on people convicted by the local Court for these regions by their demographic characteristics.
    • Preparation of projections of future convictions combining NSW Department of Planning population projections and extrapolated trends in conviction rates.
    • Analysis of data on judicial appointments and terminations (resignation, retirement, removal, and death in office) over the period 1985-2010, with particular regard to age, sex, turnover and length of service.
  • Macquarie University research team:
  • Year: 2011

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