Jay McClure runs Office Shed, a company that specialises in providing virtual assistant (VA) services to trade businesses. She says new clients often come to her when they have reached absolute desperation point. She explains they are so overwhelmed by work, their lives quite literally seem to be falling apart.
“Their wives are going to leave them, or they haven’t slept for days or left their house the entire weekend; they are just stuck in a rut of not enough money coming in and spending all their time quoting,” she says. “Then they don’t have time to follow up on quotes because their phone doesn’t stop ringing.”

She says this is particularly the case in family-run businesses where the ‘tradie’ works on the tools and the life partner does the office and administration work. McClure says that system has always been flawed with mum trying to do all the work during school hours but then leaving after-school hours unstaffed.

“What happens in those before- and after-school hours when no-one’s there or when they’re sick, and what happens if they go on holidays?” she says.

“In this economic climate too, mums are being forced back into the mainstream workforce to full-time jobs to pay the mortgage and can’t help with the business anymore. This is when a service like ours really comes into its own.”

Virtual assistants are individuals or companies who take calls, book appointments and do other essential administrative tasks to keep trades people focused on their primary role of providing a trade service.

A Google search shows there are many VA services available from sole operators to bigger companies offering everything from appointment scheduling to website design.
However, the concept of a VA is not new. It had its beginnings in the 1990s when technological advancement paved the way with applications like video calls and a host of other organisational and communication tools, which liberated the assistant from a bricks-and-mortar office and enabled them to work remotely.

The popularity of VAs has grown since COVID which forced many employees to work from home, a significant number of whom to this day have chosen to stick with that arrangement. The pandemic also saw many reassess their work-life balance, quit their office jobs and choose careers that allow them to work remotely.

According to the research, a virtual assistant is much more cost-effective than employing a new staff member, even a casual one. Admin Army, for example, estimates that a virtual assistant could save a business up to 78 per cent in operating costs over a year.
Other advantages are that VA arrangements are flexible, they offer specialised skills and expertise across a range of trade specific software, and they increase business productivity and efficiency.

HIA says Australia is facing one of the most acute skills shortages of trades people in decades. Work is abundant and pay rates are increasing, well positioning ‘tradies’ to reap the benefits of the boom if their businesses can cope with the demand.

McClure explains the majority of Office Shed’s clients are ‘maintenance tradies’; plumbers, electricians, roofers, pest control experts—all those trades doing multiple jobs a day.
“We don’t really do project work. Our service doesn’t really suit that. It’s more people that are on the tools, driving from job to job who can’t really be on the phone taking calls and scheduling. They are mostly established businesses striving to reach the next level in growth. They have maybe three to five trucks on the road and find they are losing money on advertising because they’re not getting to their calls.

“The cost of a lead for a plumber or an electrician is really high; it can be sixty to a hundred dollars, but these tradies are stuck not being able to do the work because they’re so focused on answering the calls—they’re feeling bombarded by it. A lot of our clients also work with business coaches, and they really are striving to get to the next level.

“They don’t have an office as such, so they don’t have an office person. And then that’s when the conversation sort of starts as, ‘How can I get someone else to do this administrative work for me?’”

Many VA services are based overseas however McClure says ‘tradies’ risk losing those customers if they “go cheap and go overseas” because many people prefer dealing with Australia-based companies.

She says Office Shed started as a husband-and-wife team and has grown to 17 staff and is looking to expand into New Zealand. The service is based around job management systems, and they partner with six to eight major software companies.

“Every client will have their own job management system, which will attach to their accounting system,” she explains.

“The job management system has the capability of scheduling, quoting, invoicing, managing costs and managing staff members’ time. I call it the job life cycle and it is managed within that system. When the invoice is created, that closes the job and it sinks through to Xero, MYOB and QuickBooks or something similar where it becomes bookkeeping, which is a separate service.”

Australia’s cultural complacency around how physical and psychological health and welbeing are prioritised in the workplace has been challenged in recent months. With psychosocial risks increasingly becoming an area of focus for safe work regulators, high-profile entities including Court Services Victoria and the Department of Defence have found themselves on the wrong side of the law for alleged failures to manage these types of hazards. This follows a tightening of regulations under the Commonwealth’s Work Health and Safety Act, where almost all states and territories have recently developed a code of practice to sit alongside the relevant legislation offering guidance on how employers manage exposure to psychosocial hazards and risks to psychological and physical health and safety at work.

While the definition of these types of hazards differs between jurisdictions, common issues raised in recent prosecutions include workplace interactions that have exposed employees to inappropriate workplace behaviours and intrusive workplace surveillance, or occupational violence and poor role clarity.

Prolonged exposure to these types of risks can result in sustained psychological and/or physical harm. Statistics from Safe Work Australia show that while the fatality rate in Australian workplaces is decreasing, down 57 per cent from its 2007 peak, the incidence rate for serious claims from the construction sector remains well above the industry average.

The data for 2020/21 shows the construction industry had the third highest fatality rate for the period, recording 24 deaths, behind 52 for the transport, postal and warehousing industry, and 33 for agriculture, forestry and fishing. By occupation, machinery operators and drivers had a much higher rate of work fatalities, followed by labourers. There were more than 16,000 serious injury claims for the construction industry over the same period.

Of equal concern, according to industry-backed suicide prevention group Mates in Construction (MIC), is the fact Australian construction workers are six times more likely to die from suicide than from an accident at work, with 190 construction workers taking their lives every year.

MIC blames this on several factors including a competitive and male-dominated workplace culture; stigma around the subjects of mental health and suicide; failure by management to accept or apportion responsibility; higher levels of substance and alcohol misuse; disparate workplaces and high incidence of FIFO and DIDO work; and, inconsistent/intermittent work.

But it’s not just the danger to employees causing concern. In terms of lost productivity, the construction services sector lost 152,000 FTEs during the same period in absenteeism, presenteeism and reduced employment as a consequence of employees dealing with these types of workplace hazards.

Workplace safety and health expert Catherine Dunlop, of legal firm Maddocks, says legislation around psychosocial risk is a developing area, with increased debate about “both the nature of the hazards and the best practice ways to address them”.

Dunlop says there are several other actions employers can take when considering control measures to address identified psychosocial hazards on the work site. These include applying a safety lens to workplace disputes, complaints and inappropriate behaviour as well as regularly consulting and reviewing records to understand the psychosocial hazards arising in workplaces under their control.

It’s important for employers to recognise these relate to workers engaged by them as well as contractors, she says.
Dunlop adds close consideration should also be given to job design and job crafting while leaders should also plan for future risks so that they can be addressed proactively. Employers also need to support their managers to address potential hazards.

“Not all psychosocial hazards result in harm to workers, and good leaders have a significant preventative role in ensuring an appropriate workplace culture, supporting workers during times of peak demand, and considering new ways of working or addressing hazards.
“An attitude that the responsibility for addressing psychosocial hazards sites with the health and safety team can be entirely outsourced to consultants to advise on has no place in workplaces in 2024.”

As a result of growing interest in this area, an increasing number of employers are now turning their attention to surveillance systems designed to monitor workplace psychosocial risk factors.

One such predictive safety system tool is SaferMe, a mobile safety platform developed with funding from the New Zealand government’s insurance claims provider. The software, which is used in 30 countries, enables organisations to mobilise critical safety data in real time.
SaferMe CEO Jessica Knapp says the software has been developed specifically to address gaps in employee workplace safety and as such, looks at 15 psychosocial factors featured in the Australian code of practice.

Because data about employees’ current physiological and psychological states as well as the social component of their work is collected via a QR code on a daily or weekly basis, Knapp says the software attracts an 80 per cent participation rate—significantly more than typical response rates.
“What these insights can offer employers is visibility on the elevated areas of risk and the recommended areas of action while also allowing construction clients to see where they are sitting against the industry average. What we know about psychosocial risk is that psychosocial hazards generally go unnoticed and therefore unmeasured and unmonitored. What happens then is they become really big business problems.”