Using Work/Life Balance Strategies to Address Regional Skills Shortages

While organisations in regional Australia face the difficulty of attracting skilled labour, an increasing number of individuals are considering amenity-lifestyle changes, commonly known as 'sea-change' or 'tree-change' decisions. As such, there is an interesting and complex nexus to be considered: how do regional organisations use their work/life balance (WLB) policies to attract skilled labour, and secondly how does this promotion of WLB appeal to individuals' mobility and decision making-processes? This dual-perspective issue will be examined using an analysis of both organisations and individuals drawn from the Goulburn-Murray region. Proposed findings will be twofold: firstly, organisational findings will focus on developing human resource strategies that better match the needs of regional organisations with the motivations and intentions of skilled migratory labour; secondly, individual findings will focus on the motivations and intentions of skilled migratory labour. Synthesizing these findings will provide a framework by which we can better understand how organisations can take advantage of wider population trends in order to address the issue of persistent skills shortages.