EMA aims for a profitable, innovative organisation post-Covid

EMA chief executive John Fraser-Mackenzie.

Four months into his new role, Employers and Manufacturers Association (EMA) chief executive John Fraser-Mackenzie is intent on changing the culture and making the organisation more commercial and profitable.

An accountant with an entrepreneurial bent, Fraser-Mackenzie wants to generate a surplus and reinvest the money into improved services that meet the needs of its 7500 members, based north of Taupō.

“During the Covid period, the EMA had a sugar rush doing a lot of work for the Government, and when the dust settled it had to reset to the new normal and stand on its own feet. We have to make sure we build our business to be financially sustainable.

“At present, we are breaking even and that’s okay,” he said. “But we have to be innovative and make sure we are providing value.

“We may be an incorporated society but we need to be as good as our nearest competitors such as a law firm or training organisation.”

Fraser-Mackenzie said the EMA built an overhead structure providing services for the Government during Covid and that needed to change.

“The EMA has been around for 140 years and it picked up some niche relationships that we can’t service well. It was providing services that didn’t deliver sufficient margin, and we have reset on the good ones.”

He said the employment relations consultancy and learning courses for health and safety, leadership, front-line management and others were going well.

“Because of the state of the economy, we are spending time advising and helping businesses on restructuring and redundancies.”

On the national front, Fraser-Mackenzie is keen to see the Government improve the regulatory framework and tidy up the Holidays Act.

“The accrual settings for leave and pro-rating of sick pay are too complicated and the calculations need to be simplified. Many businesses get it wrong.

“In the first 12 months of employment, you can’t take leave but you accrue it. I don’t understand the benefit of that. None of us work for 12 months on the trot and most businesses shut down at Christmas.

“You spend the rest of the time forcing people to take leave. There’s the five weeks on top of the two weeks of public holidays — I’m not sure about the logic of setting up the act the way it is.”

Fraser-Mackenzie said a lot of bureaucracy was imposed on businesses by councils on top of what they have to do for central Government.

“There are inconsistencies in interpreting and implementing regulations — from the RMA where a local council sets a higher bar, to health and safety where there is regional variation.

“What is acceptable in Auckland may not be the case in Hamilton because someone applies the regulation differently.

“We need to look at the long-term impact of regulations but that’s tricky because of the political landscape — politicians are motivated by immediate results.”

On education, Fraser-Mackenzie said the content taught at schools should be contemporary — “the world is changing faster than the (education) system”.

“Students on a Gateway programme are arriving at a trade with no digital training at all but they’ve done sociology or whatever.

“The education system should be more externally focused and integrated with the needs of business and the community — instead it is wrapped up in its own pedagogy.”

On immigration, Fraser-Mackenzie said skilled migrants should be targeted to specific jobs.

“They may not have a degree but they have technical skills to operate a particular machine. Technology changes so quickly and we need these skills to lift productivity.

“That doesn’t mean we buy skills all the time — business needs to train more people locally. I don’t think there’s a broad labour shortage, but it’s the specific skills shortage as technology changes in manufacturing.”

Fraser-Mackenzie, brought up in Zimbabwe, moved to New Zealand in 2006 as a skilled migrant.

He followed his parents, brother and sister, whose 4000-hectare cattle and tobacco farm was compulsorily acquired by the Mugabe Government in 2001.

Fraser-Mackenzie was in London at the time working as an accountant with HJ Heinz (he finished up as head of finance — Eastern Europe).

“The farm had been in the family since 1903 and we almost got to 100 years. My parents weren’t paid anything for it and the final straw was being threatened with jail for at least two years if they didn’t leave the farm.

“There are guys back in Zimbabwe still toiling to get people paid for their farms.

“My parents decided they weren’t going to take their dignity away and moved to New Zealand in 2003.

“The tragedy was that the livelihood of 200 people working on the farm was all gone.”

Fraser-Mackenzie was finance director for Goodman Fielder NZ and interim chief executive and chief finance officer for Metro Performance Glass.

He became a business coach and with his wife Hayley bought North Shore-based Pacific Harvest five years ago. The company processes edible seaweed into a health supplement, packing the product in flake, powder and leaf form and selling to retail outlets in Australia and New Zealand.