Leading People & Teams

I work in a small Human Resources team within the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at The University of Queensland. The team consists of one Human Resources Manager, two Human Resources Advisor and two Human Resources Officer. The team operating the human resources functions, with each Human Resources Advisor and Human Resources Officer forming a team of two, to provide responsive client service in all aspects of Human Resources administration. This includes operation of the Aurion Human Resource Management System, the provision of first line advice and support to staff and managers on human resources’ policy and procedures, the enterprise bargaining agreement, employment relations as well as coordinating recruitment activities in the professional and academic fields. While the Human Resources Advisors have supervising capacity to the Human Resources Officers, all team members report to the Human Resources Manager in the hierarchy structure. The Human Resources Manager has a qualification in a Bachelor of Arts; one Human Resources Advisor and two Human Resources Officers obtained a qualification in a Bachelor of Business majoring in human resource management; one of the Human Resources Officer is currently studying a Master of Business Administration with nine years’ experience as a human resource professional and is also deaf.

During my time at the University, I have been a Human Resources Officer for four year and have previously experienced an issue that has arisen in the team. The Manager and the Advisors have no understanding of the deaf culture to support the team member. The deaf employee has a profound hearing loss of ninety eight percent and wear two powerful behind the ear hearing aids, relying on lip reading and Auslan (Australian Sign Language) to communicate. The difficulties in lip reading all team members in a team meeting is challenging, with a few talking too quickly or two members at once. Attending large meetings or training is mostly less motivating knowing the situation of not being able to hear anything that is being said. Most of the time the deaf employee misses out on eighty percent of the social interaction between the team members and staff within the university and this has clearly failed to allow the deaf employee to know what is happening in the workplace missing out on valuable information. Diversity in the team is unvalued and is not taken into context of the deaf employee’s effort to deliver