You’d be forgiven for missing it, but some pretty important changes happened to a lot of Fair Work Awards at the beginning of March. If you are paying your employees an annual salary and you haven’t updated your HR and payroll processes to match the new Annualised Wages requirements, you might find yourself non-compliant with your Fair Work obligations.
For years businesses have (understandably) been avoiding the complexity of paying people strictly to Fair Work Awards; choosing instead annualise wages; setting them (apparently) high enough to offset overtime, penalties and other entitlements. This system seemed to be working reasonably well, but has come under scrutiny and significant media attention, especially when a certain celebrity chef ran into problems with paying staff a salary that did not cover what they were legally entitled to under the Award.
In response, Fair Work are doing precisely what they were designed to do – trying to make sure employment is fair, by doing things their way – adding new layers of record keeping and paperwork to your HR and payroll processes, all of which took effect from 1 March 2020.
If you want to know how this might impact you (and what to do about it), download our handy guide below.
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