Late last year there were a flurry of changes implemented around employment conditions and modern awards. We’ve already covered Family and Domestic Leave updates and Casual Loading Offsets. Now, we bring you all the details around the updates to Flexible Work Arrangements and Modern Awards.
If you’re like most businesses, your initial job application process probably hasn’t been reviewed in many years. It’s possibly a list of questions that you ‘borrowed’ from someone else. Maybe you fly by the seat of your pants every time someone applies for a job. Either way, it’s important to understand that there are anti-discrimination obligations regarding job applications, even if you don’t decide to hire anyone for the role.
The statistics on domestic violence in Australia are staggering. WhiteRibbon.org.au reports that an average of one woman a week is murdered by their current or former partner. With thousands of people (including men, women and children) across the country experiencing domestic and family violence in their homes, recent changes to the Fair Work Act 2009 are intended to help provide certainty about requesting time off from work whilst managing these challenging situations.
The Workpac v Skene [2018] FCAFC 131 decision from early this year was challenging for many employers of casual staff. In this decision, it was effectively found that an employee who had been paid and classified as a casual, should have been classified as a permanent employee, and was then awarded paid leave entitlements.
If your business is in retail or hospitality, chances are this time of year is especially busy for you and your team! Your team are the face of your business and our bet is you’d like your employees to be enthusiastic, positive and helpful in their role through this crazy time. We’ve put together some of our top tips to help you support your team through this time of the year and the good news is, you can implement them all straight away!
December is a great time for both preparing for the year ahead and reviewing what we’ve achieved in the year past. You might be familiar with completing an annual employee review, but do you perform an annual business review? Reflecting on what you thought you would do, vs. what you did, especially for your employee practices, provides you with a valuable starting point for improving in 2019.
Open plan workplaces have been on trend for many years, whilst closed plan or cubicle style work is often seen to be outdated. There’s research out there to support whichever argument you want to win, so rather than tell you which solution for your business is ‘best’, we thought we’d share some of the pros and cons we’ve experienced!